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NATIONAL BESTSELLER 


DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 

With a foreword by DAVE EGGERS 

Uproarious. ...Infinite Jest shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, 
a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything.” —New York Times 





national be^>ell«r 











INFINITE 

JEST 


DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 


YEAR OF GLAD.6 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.18 

1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD.27 

9 MAY — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.31 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.32 

YEAR OF THE TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR.35 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.38 

OCTOBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.40 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.46 

AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND.51 

3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.55 

AS OF YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.58 

DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.60 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.62 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.77 

30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.79 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.86 

3 NOVEMBER Y.D,A,U.98 


MARIO INCANDENZA'S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR 


108 





















30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


113 


30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.114 

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.121 

WINTER B.S. 1960 — TUCSON AZ.138 

4 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.149 

LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.159 

6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.173 

7 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.191 

5 NOVEMBER —YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.211 

6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.225 

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.260 

7 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.265 

30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.275 

8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.279 

8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.297 

30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.324 

8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR.328 

30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.360 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.381 

VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U.387 

9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.388 

PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY — Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL.404 

PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL.421 

WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA.423 

PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL ..454 

0450H,, 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE 
D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA.457 

EARLY NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.472 


LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT. 


.474 





























WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT. All 

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT:.534 

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.540 

I MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A.549 

13 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.558 

II NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.561 

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.586 

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.589 

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.592 

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.600 

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.615 

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.618 

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.622 

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.649 

17 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.676 

19 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.726 

20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR.731 

20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.827 




















YEAR OF GLAD 


I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously 
congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University 
Administration, wood-walled. Remington-hung, double-windowed against the 
November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at 
which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received. 

I am in here. 

Three faces have resolved into place above summer-weight sportcoats and half- 
Windsors across a polished pine conference table shiny with the spidered light of an 
Arizona noon. These are three Deans — of Admissions, Academic Affairs, Athletic 
Affairs. I do not know which face belongs to whom. 

I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, though I've been coached to err on 
the side of neutrality and not attempt what would feel to me like a pleasant expression 
or smile. 

I have committed to crossing my legs I hope carefully, ankle on knee, hands together 
in the lap of my slacks. My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to 
me, as the letter X. The interview room's other personnel include: the University's 
Director of Composition, its varsity tennis coach, and Academy prorector Mr. A. deLint. 
C.T. is beside me; the others sit, stand and stand, respectively, at the periphery of my 
focus. The tennis coach jingles pocket-change. There is something vaguely digestive 
about the room's odor. The high-traction sole of my complimentary Nike sneaker runs 
parallel to the wobbling loafer of my mother's half-brother, here in his capacity as 
Headmaster, sitting in the chair to what I hope is my immediate right, also facing Deans. 

The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the 
impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a 



personality-type I've come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any 
response from me by relating my side of the story for me, to me. Passed a packet of 
computer-sheets by the shaggy lion of a Dean at center, he is speaking more or less to 
these pages, smiling down. 

'You are Harold Incandenza, eighteen, date of secondary-school graduation 
approximately one month from now, attending the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, 
Massachusetts, a boarding school, where you reside.' His reading glasses are 
rectangular, court-shaped, the sidelines at top and bottom. 'You are, according to Coach 
White and Dean [unintelligible], a regionally, nationally, and continentally ranked junior 
tennis player, a potential O.N.A.N.C.A.A. athlete of substantial promise, recruited by 
Coach White via correspondence with Dr. Tavis here commencing... February of this 
year.' The top page is removed and brought around neatly to the bottom of the sheaf, at 
intervals. 'You have been in residence at the Enfield Tennis Academy since age seven.' 

I am debating whether to risk scratching the right side of my jaw, where there is a 
wen. 

'Coach White informs our offices that he holds the Enfield Tennis Academy's program 
and achievements in high regard, that the University of Arizona tennis squad has 
profited from the prior matriculation of several former E.T.A. alumni, one of whom was 
one Mr. Aubrey F. deLint, who appears also to be with you here today. Coach White and 
his staff have given us —' 

The yellow administrator's usage is on the whole undistinguished, though I have to 
admit he's made himself understood. The Director of Composition seems to have more 
than the normal number of eyebrows. The Dean at right is looking at my face a bit 
strangely. 

Uncle Charles is saying that though he can anticipate that the Deans might be 
predisposed to weigh what he avers as coming from his possible appearance as a kind of 
cheerleader for E.T.A., he can assure the assembled Deans that all this is true, and that 
the Academy has presently in residence no fewer than a third of the continent's top 
thirty juniors, in age brackets all across the board, and that I here, who go by 'Hal,' 
usually, am 'right up there among the very cream.' Right and center Deans smile 
professionally; the heads of deLint and the coach incline as the Dean at left clears his 
throat: 

'— belief that you could well make, even as a freshman, a real contribution to this 
University's varsity tennis program. We are pleased,' he either says or reads, removing a 
page, 'that a competition of some major sort here has brought you down and given us 
the chance to sit down and chat together about your application and potential 
recruitment and matriculation and scholarship.' 

'I've been asked to add that Hal here is seeded third. Boys' 18-and-Under Singles, in 
the prestigious WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational out at the Randolph Tennis 
Center —' says what I infer is Athletic Affairs, his cocked head showing a freckled scalp. 

'Out at Randolph Park, near the outstanding El Con Marriott,' C.T. inserts, 'a venue the 
whole contingent's been vocal about finding absolutely top-hole thus far, which —' 

'Just so. Chuck, and that according to Chuck here Hal has already justified his seed, 
he's reached the semifinals as of this morning's apparently impressive win, and that he'll 



be playing out at the Center again tomorrow, against the winner of a quarterfinal game 
tonight, and so will be playing tomorrow at I believe scheduled for 0830 —' 

'Try to get under way before the godawful heat out there. Though of course a dry 
heat.' 

and has apparently already qualified for this winter's Continental Indoors, up in 
Edmonton, Kirk tells me —' cocking further to look up and left at the varsity coach, 
whose smile's teeth are radiant against a violent sunburn — 'Which is something 
indeed.' He smiles, looking at me. 'Did we get all that right Hal.' 

C.T. has crossed his arms casually; their triceps' flesh is webbed with mottle in the air- 
conditioned sunlight. 'You sure did. Bill.' He smiles. The two halves of his mustache 
never quite match. 'And let me say if I may that Hal's excited, excited to be invited for 
the third year running to the Invitational again, to be back here in a community he has 
real affection for, to visit with your alumni and coaching staff, to have already justified 
his high seed in this week's not unstiff competition, to as they say still be in it without 
the fat woman in the Viking hat having sung, so to speak, but of course most of all to 
have a chance to meet you gentlemen and have a look at the facilities here. Everything 
here is absolutely top-slot, from what he's seen.' 

There is a silence. DeLint shifts his back against the room's panelling and recenters his 
weight. My uncle beams and straightens a straight watchband. 62.5% of the room's 
faces are directed my way, pleasantly expectant. My chest bumps like a dryer with 
shoes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a smile. I turn this way and that, 
slightly, sort of directing the expression to everyone in the room. 

There is a new silence. The yellow Dean's eyebrows go circumflex. The two other 
Deans look to the Director of Composition. The tennis coach has moved to stand at the 
broad window, feeling at the back of his crewcut. Uncle Charles strokes the forearm 
above his watch. Sharp curved palm-shadows move slightly over the pine table's shine, 
the one head's shadow a black moon. 

'Is Hal all right. Chuck?' Athletic Affairs asks. 'Hal just seemed to... well, grimace. Is he 
in pain? Are you in pain, son?' 

'Hal's right as rain,' smiles my uncle, soothing the air with a casual hand. 'Just a bit of a 
let's call it maybe a facial tic, slightly, at all the adrenaline of being here on your 
impressive campus, justifying his seed so far without dropping a set, receiving that 
official written offer of not only waivers but a living allowance from Coach White here, 
on Pac 10 letterhead, being ready in all probability to sign a National Letter of Intent 
right here and now this very day, he's indicated to me.' C.T. looks to me, his look 
horribly mild. I do the safe thing, relaxing every muscle in my face, emptying out all 
expression. I stare carefully into the Kekulean knot of the middle Dean's necktie. 

My silent response to the expectant silence begins to affect the air of the room, the 
bits of dust and sportcoat-lint stirred around by the AC's vents dancing jaggedly in the 
slanted plane of windowlight, the air over the table like the sparkling space just above a 
fresh-poured seltzer. The coach, in a slight accent neither British nor Australian, is telling 
C.T. that the whole application-interface process, while usually just a pleasant formality, 
is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself. Right and 
center Deans have inclined together in soft conference, forming a kind of tepee of skin 



and hair. I presume it's probably facilitate that the tennis coach mistook for accentuate, 
though accelerate, while clunkier than facilitate, is from a phonetic perspective more 
sensible, as a mistake. The Dean with the flat yellow face has leaned forward, his lips 
drawn back from his teeth in what I see as concern. His hands come together on the 
conference table's surface. His own fingers look like they mate as my own four-X series 
dissolves and I hold tight to the sides of my chair. 

We need candidly to chat re potential problems with my application, they and I, he is 
beginning to say. He makes a reference to candor and its value. 

'The issues my office faces with the application materials on file from you, Hal, involve 
some test scores.' He glances down at a colorful sheet of standardized scores in the 
trench his arms have made. 'The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test scores 
from you that are, as I'm sure you know and can explain, are, shall we say... subnormal.' 
I'm to explain. 

It's clear that this really pretty sincere yellow Dean at left is Admissions. And surely the 
little aviarian figure at right is Athletics, then, because the facial creases of the shaggy 
middle Dean are now pursed in a kind of distanced affront, an I'm-eating-something- 
that-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-l'm-drinking-along-with-it 
look that spells professionally Academic reservations. An uncomplicated loyalty to 
standards, then, at center. My uncle looks to Athletics as if puzzled. He shifts slightly in 
his chair. 

The incongruity between Admissions's hand- and face-color is almost wild, '—verbal 
scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we're comfortable with, as against a 
secondary-school transcript from the institution where both your mother and her 
brother are administrators —' reading directly out of the sheaf inside his arms' ellipse — 
'that this past year, yes, has fallen off a bit, but by the word I mean "fallen off" to 
outstanding from three previous years of frankly incredible.' 

'Off the charts.' 

'Most institutions do not even have grades of A with multiple pluses after it,' says the 
Director of Composition, his expression impossible to interpret. 

'This kind of... how shall I put it... incongruity,' Admissions says, his expression frank 
and concerned, 'I've got to tell you sends up a red flag of potential concern during the 
admissions process.' 

'We thus invite you to explain the appearance of incongruity if not outright 
shenanigans.' Students has a tiny piping voice that's absurd coming out of a face this big. 

'Surely by incredible you meant very very very impressive, as opposed to literally 
quote "incredible," surely,' says C.T., seeming to watch the coach at the window 
massaging the back of his neck. The huge window gives out on nothing more than 
dazzling sunlight and cracked earth with heat-shimmers over it. 

'Then there is before us the matter of not the required two but nine separate 
application essays, some of which of nearly monograph-length, each without exception 
being —' different sheet — 'the adjective various evaluators used was quote "stellar" —' 

Dir. of Comp.: 'I made in my assessment deliberate use of lapidary and effete.' 

'— but in areas and with titles. I'm sure you recall quite well, Hal: "Neoclassical 
Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive Grammar," "The Implications of Post-Fourier 



Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema," "The Emergence of Heroic 
Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment" —' 

' "Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality"?' 

' "A Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass"?' 

' "Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica"?' 

Now showing broad expanses of recessed gum. 'Suffice to say that there's some frank 
and candid concern about the recipient of these unfortunate test scores, though 
perhaps explainable test scores, being these essays' sole individual author.' 

'I'm not sure Hal's sure just what's being implied here,' my uncle says. The Dean at 
center is fingering his lapels as he interprets distasteful computed data. 

'What the University is saying here is that from a strictly academic point of view there 
are admission problems that Hal needs to try to help us iron out. A matriculant's first 
role at the University is and must be as a student. We couldn't admit a student we have 
reason to suspect can't cut the mustard, no matter how much of an asset he might be 
on the field.' 

'Dean Sawyer means the court, of course. Chuck,' Athletic Affairs says, head severely 
cocked so he's including the White person behind him in the address somehow. 'Not to 
mention O.N.A.N.C.A.A. regulations and investigators always snuffling around for some 
sort of whiff of the smell of impropriety.' 

The varsity tennis coach looks at his own watch. 

'Assuming these board scores are accurate reflectors of true capacity in this case,' 
Academic Affairs says, his high voice serious and sotto, still looking at the file before him 
as if it were a plate of something bad. Til tell you right now my opinion is it wouldn't be 
fair. It wouldn't be fair to the other applicants. Wouldn't be fair to the University 
community.' He looks at me. 'And it'd be especially unfair to Hal himself. Admitting a 
boy we see as simply an athletic asset would amount to just using that boy. We're under 
myriad scrutiny to make sure we're not using anybody. Your board results, son, indicate 
that we could be accused of using you.' 

Uncle Charles is asking Coach White to ask the Dean of Athletic Affairs whether the 
weather over scores would be as heavy if I were, say, a revenue-raising football prodigy. 
The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds. I 
expend energy on remaining utterly silent in my chair, empty, my eyes two great pale 
zeros. People have promised to get me through this. 

Uncle C.T., though, has the pinched look of the cornered. His voice takes on an odd 
timbre when he's cornered, as if he were shouting as he receded. 'Hal's grades at E.T.A., 
which is I should stress an Academy, not simply a camp or factory, accredited by both 
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the North American Sports Academy 
Association, it's focused on the total needs of the player and student, founded by a tow¬ 
ering intellectual figure whom I hardly need name, here, and based by him on the 
rigorous Oxbridge Quadrivium-Trivium curricular model, a school fully staffed and 
equipped, by a fully certified staff, should show that my nephew here can cut just about 
any Pac 10 mustard that needs cutting, and that —' 

DeLint is moving toward the tennis coach, who is shaking his head. 

'— would be able to see a distinct flavor of minor-sport prejudice about this whole 



thing,' C.T. says, crossing and recrossing his legs as I listen, composed and staring. 

The room's carbonated silence is now hostile. 'I think it's time to let the actual 
applicant himself speak out on his own behalf,' Academic Affairs says very quietly. 'This 
seems somehow impossible with you here, sir.' 

Athletics smiles tiredly under a hand that massages the bridge of his nose. 'Maybe 
you'd excuse us for a moment and wait outside. Chuck.' 

'Coach White could accompany Mr. Tavis and his associate out to reception,' the 
yellow Dean says, smiling into my unfocused eyes. 

'— led to believe this had all been ironed out in advance, from the —' C.T. is saying as 
he and deLint are shown to the door. The tennis coach extends a hypertrophied arm. 
Athletics says 'We're all friends and colleagues here.' 

This is not working out. It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of 
Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES. I would yield to the urge to bolt for the door 
ahead of them if I could know that bolting for the door is what the men in this room 
would see. DeLint is murmuring something to the tennis coach. Sounds of keyboards, 
phone consoles as the door is briefly opened, then firmly shut. I am alone among 
administrative heads. 

'— offense intended to anyone,' Athletic Affairs is saying, his sportcoat tan and his 
necktie insigniated in tiny print — 'beyond just physical abilities out there in play, which 
believe me we respect, wont, believe me.' 

'— question about it we wouldn't be so anxious to chat with you directly, see?' 

'— that we've known in processing several prior applications through Coach White's 
office that the Enfield School is operated, however impressively, by close relations of 
first your brother, who I can still remember the way White's predecessor Maury Klamkin 
wooed that kid, so that grades' objectivity can be all too easily called into question —' 

'By whomsoever's calling — N.A.A.U.P., ill-willed Pac 10 programs, O.N.A.N.C.A.A. —' 
The essays are old ones, yes, but they are mine; de moi. But they are, yes, old, not 
quite on the application's instructed subject of Most Meaningful Educational Experience 
Ever. If I'd done you one from the last year, it would look to you like some sort of 
infant's random stabs on a keyboard, and to you, who use whomsoever as a subject. And 
in this new smaller company, the Director of Composition seems abruptly to have 
actuated, emerged as both the Alpha of the pack here and way more effeminate than 
he'd seemed at first, standing hip-shot with a hand on his waist, walking with a roll to 
his shoulders, jingling change as he pulls up his pants as he slides into the chair still 
warm from C.T.'s bottom, crossing his legs in a way that inclines him well into my 
personal space, so that I can see multiple eyebrow-tics and capillary webs in the oysters 
below his eyes and smell fabric-softener and the remains of a breath-mint turned sour. 

'...a bright, solid, but very shy boy, we know about your being very shy, Kirk White's 
told us what your athletically built if rather stand-offish younger instructor told him,' the 
Director says softly, cupping what I feel to be a hand over my sportcoat's biceps (surely 
not), 'who simply needs to swallow hard and trust and tell his side of the story to these 
gentlemen who bear no maliciousness none at all but are doing our jobs and trying to 
look out for everyone's interests at the same time.' 

I can picture deLint and White sitting with their elbows on their knees in the 



defecatory posture of all athletes at rest, deLint staring at his huge thumbs, while C.T. in 
the reception area paces in a tight ellipse, speaking into his portable phone. I have been 
coached for this like a Don before a RICO hearing. A neutral and affectless silence. The 
sort of all-defensive game Schtitt used to have me play: the best defense: let everything 
bounce off you; do nothing. I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made 
could be what you hear. 

Athletics with his head out from under his wing: to avoid admission procedures 

that could be seen as primarily athletics-oriented. It could be a mess, son.' 

'Bill means the appearance, not necessarily the real true facts of the matter, which 
you alone can fill in,' says the Director of Composition. 

'— the appearance of the high athletic ranking, the subnormal scores, the over¬ 
academic essays, the incredible grades vortexing out of what could be seen as a 
nepotistic situation.' 

The yellow Dean has leaned so far forward that his tie is going to have a horizontal 
dent from the table-edge, his face sallow and kindly and no-shit-whatever: 

'Look here, Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we couldn't be accused 
of using you, son. Why nobody could come and say to us, why, look here. University of 
Arizona, here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn he won't 
speak up for himself, a jock with doctored marks and a store-bought application.' 

The Brewster's-Angle light of the tabletop appears as a rose flush behind my closed 
lids. I cannot make myself understood. 'I am not just a jock,' I say slowly. Distinctly. 'My 
transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was to get me 
over a rough spot. The grades prior to that are de moi.' My eyes are closed; the room is 
silent. 'I cannot make myself understood, now.' I am speaking slowly and distinctly. 'Call 
it something I ate.' 

It's funny what you don't recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I 
barely remember — my eldest brother Orin says he can remember being in the home's 
backyard with our mother in the early spring, helping the Moms till some sort of garden 
out of the cold yard. March or early April. The garden's area was a rough rectangle laid 
out with Popsicle sticks and twine. Orin was removing rocks and hard clods from the 
Moms's path as she worked the rented Rototiller, a wheelbarrow-shaped, gas-driven 
thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the 
Moms rather than vice versa, the Moms very tall and having to stoop painfully to hold 
on, her feet leaving drunken prints in the tilled earth. He remembers that in the middle 
of the tilling I came tear-assing out the door and into the backyard wearing some sort of 
fuzzy red Pooh-wear, crying, holding out something he said was really unpleasant- 
looking in my upturned palm. He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in 
the cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn't make it out until 
our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what I 
was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold — Orin posits from 
some dark corner of the Weston home's basement, which was warm from the furnace 
and flooded every spring. The patch itself he describes as horrific: darkly green, glossy, 
vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red. Worse, they 



could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and some of the 
nauseous stuff was smeared around my open mouth. 'I ate this,' was what I was saying. I 
held the patch out to the Moms, who had her contacts out for the dirty work, and at 
first, bending way down, saw only her crying child, hand out, proffering; and in that 
most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and 
filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out — as in how many used heavy 
Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports, 
backseats, tournament lounges? 0. stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing 
with the Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me, hand 
reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped, froze, 
beginning to I.D. what it was I held out, countenancing evidence of oral contact with 
same. He remembers her face as past describing. Her outstretched hand, still 
Rototrembling, hung in the air before mine. 

'I ate this,' I said. 

'Pardon me?' 

0. says he can only remember (sic) saying something caustic as he limboed a crick out 
of his back. He says he must have felt a terrible impending anxiety. The Moms refused 
ever even to go into the damp basement. I had stopped crying, he remembers, and 
simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, 
holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of some kind of audit. 

0. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety. In his first 
memory, the Moms's path around the yard is a broad circle of hysteria: 

'God!' she calls out. 

'Help! My son ate this!' she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection, 
yelling it over and over, holding the speckled patch aloft in a pincer of fingers, running 
around and around the garden's rectangle while 0. gaped at his first real sight of adult 
hysteria. Suburban neighbors' heads appeared in windows and over the fences, looking. 
0. remembers me tripping over the garden's laid-out twine, getting up dirty, crying, 
trying to follow. 

'God! Help! My son ate this! Help!' she kept yelling, running a tight pattern just inside 
the square of string; and my brother Orin remembers noting how even in hysterical 
trauma her flight-lines were plumb, her footprints Native-American-straight, her turns, 
inside the ideogram of string, crisp and martial, crying 'My son ate this! Help!' and 
lapping me twice before the memory recedes. 

'My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red 
cave that opens out before closed eyes. 'I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an 
intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex. 

'I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I 
haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a 
taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics 
are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. 

'But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. 
Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about 



anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe 
Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau 
in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface 
you guys right under the table,' I say. Tm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, 
bred for a function.' 

I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care.' 

I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, 
eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below 
me. 

'Sweet mother of Christ,' the Director says. 

Tm fine,' I tell them, standing. From the yellow Dean's expression, there's a brutal 
wind blowing from my direction. Academics' face has gone instantly old. Eight eyes have 
become blank discs that stare at whatever they see. 

'Good God,' whispers Athletics. 

'Please don't worry,' I say. 'I can explain.' I soothe the air with a casual hand. 

Both my arms are pinioned from behind by the Director of Comp., who wrestles me 
roughly down, on me with all his weight. I taste floor. 

'What's wrong?' 

I say 'Nothing is wrong.' 

'It's all right! I'm here!' the Director is calling into my ear. 

'Get help!' cries a Dean. 

My forehead is pressed into parquet I never knew could be so cold. I am arrested. I try 
to be perceived as limp and pliable. My face is mashed flat; Comp.'s weight makes it 
hard to breathe. 

'Try to listen,' I say very slowly, muffled by the floor. 

'What in God's name are those...,' one Dean cries shrilly, '...those sounds?' 

There are clicks of a phone console's buttons, shoes' heels moving, pivoting, a sheaf of 
flimsy pages falling. 

'God!' 

'Help!' 

The door's base opens at the left periphery: a wedge of halogen hall-light, white 
sneakers and a scuffed Nunn Bush. 'Let him up!' That's deLint. 

'There is nothing wrong,' I say slowly to the floor. Tm in here.' 

I'm raised by the crutches of my underarms, shaken toward what he must see as calm 
by a purple-faced Director: 'Get a grip, son!' 

DeLint at the big man's arm: 'Stop it!' 

'I am not what you see and hear.' 

Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds 
her palm against her mouth, looking. 

Tm not,' I say. 

You have to love old-fashioned men's rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant disks in the 
long porcelain trough; the stalls with wooden doors in frames of cool marble; these thin 
sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing; mirrors over 
metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless trickle, inflated by 



echo against wet porcelain and a cold tile floor whose mosaic pattern looks almost 
Islamic at this close range. 

The disorder I've caused revolves all around. I've been half-dragged, still pinioned, 
through a loose mob of Administrative people by the Comp. Director — who appears to 
have thought variously that I am having a seizure (prying open my mouth to check for a 
throat clear of tongue), that I am somehow choking (a textbook Heimlich that left me 
whooping), that I am psychotically out of control (various postures and grips designed to 
transfer that control to him) — while about us roil deLint, trying to restrain the 
Director's restraint of me, the varsity tennis coach restraining deLint, my mother's half- 
brother speaking in rapid combinations of polysyllables to the trio of Deans, who 
variously gasp, wring hands, loosen neckties, waggle digits in C.T.'s face, and make poses 
with sheafs of now-pretty-clearly-superfluous application forms. 

I am rolled over supine on the geometric tile. I am concentrating docilely on the 
question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the 
place to regain control. My head is cradled in a knelt Director's lap, which is soft, my 
face being swabbed with dusty-brown institutional paper towels he received from some 
hand out of the crowd overhead, staring with all the blankness I can summon into his 
jowls' small pocks, worst at the blurred jawline, of scarring from long-ago acne. Uncle 
Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of same, trying to 
mollify men who seem way more in need of a good brow-mopping than I. 

'He's fine,' he keeps saying. 'Look at him, calm as can be, lying there.' 

'You didn't see what happened in there,' a hunched Dean responds through a face 
webbed with fingers. 

'Excited, is all he gets, sometimes, an excitable kid, impressed with —' 

'But the sounds he made.' 

'Undescribable.' 

'Like an animal.' 

'Subanimalistic noises and sounds.' 

'Nor let's not forget the gestures.' 

'Have you ever gotten help for this boy Dr. Tavis?' 

'Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.' 

'This boy is damaged.' 

'Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.' 

'A writhing animal with a knife in its eye.' 

'What were you possibly about, trying to enroll this —' 

'And his arms.' 

'You didn't see it, Tavis. His arms were —' 

'Flailing. This sort of awful reaching drumming wriggle. Waggling,' the group looking 
briefly at someone outside my sight trying to demonstrate something. 

'Like a time-lapse, a flutter of some sort of awful... growth.' 

'Sounded most of all like a drowning goat. A goat, drowning in something viscous.' 

'This strangled series of bleats and —' 

'Yes they waggled.' 

'So suddenly a bit of excited waggling's a crime, now?' 



'You, sir, are in trouble. You are in trouble.' 

'His face. As if he was strangling. Burning. I believe I've seen a vision of hell.' 

'He has some trouble communicating, he's communicatively challenged, no one's 
denying that.' 

'The boy needs care.' 

'Instead of caring for the boy you send him here to enroll, compete?' 

'Hal?' 

'You have not in your most dreadful fantasies dreamt of the amount of trouble you 
have bought yourself. Dr. so-called Headmaster, educator.' 

'...were given to understand this was all just a formality. You took him aback, is all. Shy 

_i 

'And you. White. You sought to recruit him!' 

'— and terribly impressed and excited, in there, without us, his support system, whom 
you asked to leave, which if you'd —' 

'I'd only seen him play. On court he's gorgeous. Possibly a genius. We had no idea. The 
brother's in the bloody NFL for God's sake. Here's a top player, we thought, with 
Southwest roots. His stats were off the chart. We watched him through the whole 
WhataBurger last fall. Not a waggle or a noise. We were watching ballet out there, a 
mate remarked, after.' 

'Damn right you were watching ballet out there. White. This boy is a balletic athlete, a 
player.' 

'Some kind of athletic savant then. Balletic compensation for deep problems which 
you sir choose to disguise by muzzling the boy in there.' An expensive pair of Brazilian 
espadrilles goes by on the left and enters a stall, and the espadrilles come around and 
face me. The urinal trickles behind the voices' small echoes. 

'— haps we'll just be on our way,' C.T. is saying. 

'The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.' 

'— think you could pass off a damaged applicant, fabricate credentials and shunt him 
through a kangaroo-interview and inject him into all the rigors of college life?' 

'Hal here functions, you ass. Given a supportive situation. He's fine when he's by 
himself. Yes he has some trouble with excitability in conversation. Did you once hear 
him try to deny that?' 

'We witnessed something only marginally mammalian in there, sir.' 

'Like hell. Have a look. How's the excitable little guy doing down there, Aubrey, does it 
look to you?' 

'You, sir, are quite possibly ill. This affair is not concluded.' 

'What ambulance? Don't you guys listen? I'm telling you there's —' 

'Hal? Hal?' 

'Dope him up, seek to act as his mouthpiece, muzzling, and now he lies there 
catatonic, staring.' 

The crackle of deLint's knees. 'Hal?' 

'— inflate this publicly in any distorted way. The Academy has distinguished alumni, 
litigators at counsel. Hal here is provably competent. Credentials out the bazoo. Bill. The 
boy reads like a vacuum. Digests things.' 



I simply lie there, listening, smelling the paper towel, watching an espadrille pivot. 

'There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.' 

And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet? 

Not for nothing did Orin say that people outdoors down here just scuttle in vectors 
from air conditioning to air conditioning. The sun is a hammer. I can feel one side of my 
face start to cook. The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri sheared to 
blown strands like hair at the rims. The traffic is nothing like Boston. The stretcher is the 
special type, with restraining straps at the extremities. The same Aubrey deLint I'd 
dismissed for years as a 2-D martinet knelt gurneyside to squeeze my restrained hand 
and say 'Just hang in there, Buckaroo,' before moving back into the administrative fray 
at the ambulance's doors. It is a special ambulance, dispatched from I'd rather not dwell 
on where, with not only paramedics but some kind of psychiatric M.D. on board. The 
medics lift gently and are handy with straps. The M.D., his back up against the 
ambulance's side, has both hands up in dispassionate mediation between the Deans and 
C.T., who keeps stabbing skyward with his cellular's antenna as if it were a sabre, 
outraged that I'm being needlessly ambulanced off to some Emergency Room against 
my will and interests. The issue whether the damaged even have interested wills is 
shallowly hashed out as some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices 
the sky from south to north. The M.D. has both hands up and is patting the air to signify 
dispassion. He has a big blue jaw. At the only other emergency room I have ever been in, 
almost exactly one year back, the psychiatric stretcher was wheeled in and then parked 
beside the waiting-room chairs. These chairs were molded orange plastic; three of them 
down the row were occupied by different people all of whom were holding empty 
prescription bottles and perspiring freely. This would have been bad enough, but in the 
end chair, right up next to the strap-secured head of my stretcher, was a T-shirted 
woman with barnwood skin and a trucker's cap and a bad starboard list who began to 
tell me, lying there restrained and immobile, about how she had seemingly overnight 
suffered a sudden and anomalous gigantism in her right breast, which she referred to as 
a titty; she had an almost parodic Quebecois accent and described the 'titty's' present¬ 
ing history and possible diagnoses for almost twenty minutes before I was rolled away. 
The jet's movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were 
exposed and widening in the wake of the blade. I once saw the word KNIFE finger- 
written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom. I have become an infantophile. 
I am forced to roll my closed eyes either up or to the side to keep the red cave from 
bursting into flames from the sunlight. The street's passing traffic is constant and seems 
to go 'Hush, hush, hush.' The sun, if your fluttering eye catches it even slightly, gives you 
the blue and red floaters a flashbulb gives you. 'Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, 
if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?' C.T.'s voice, receding with outrage. 
Only the gallant stabs of his antenna are now visible, just inside my sight's right frame. I 
will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long 
as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be 
sedated; so it will be inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I'll make the 
journey first, then depart. I think very briefly of the late Cosgrove Watt. I think of the 
hypophalangial Grief-Therapist. I think of the Moms, alphabetizing cans of soup in the 



cabinet over the microwave. Of Himself's umbrella hung by its handle from the edge of 
the mail table just inside the Headmaster's House's foyer. The bad ankle hasn't ached 
once this whole year. I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's 
WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head. 
There's very little doubt that Wayne would have won. And Venus Williams owns a ranch 
outside Green Valley; she may well attend the 18's Boys' and Girls' finals. I will be out in 
plenty of time for tomorrow's semi; I trust Uncle Charles. Tonight's winner is almost sure 
to be Dymphna, sixteen but with a birthday two weeks under the 15 April deadline; and 
Dymphna will still be tired tomorrow at 0830, while I, sedated, will have slept like a 
graven image. I have never before faced Dymphna in tournament play, nor played with 
the sonic balls the blind require, but I watched him barely dispatch Petropolis Kahn in 
the Round of 16, and I know he is mine. It will start in the E.R., at the intake desk if C.T.'s 
late in following the ambulance, or in the green-tiled room after the room with the 
invasive-digital machines; or, given this special M.D.-supplied ambulance, maybe on the 
ride itself: some blue-jawed M.D. scrubbed to an antiseptic glow with his name sewn in 
cursive on his white coat's breast pocket and a quality desk-set pen, wanting gurneyside 
Q&A, etiology and diagnosis by Socratic method, ordered and point-by-point. There are, 
by the O.E.D. Vi's count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine 
are Latinate and four Saxonic. I will play either Stice or Polep in Sunday's final. Maybe in 
front of Venus Williams. It will be someone blue-collar and unlicensed, though, 
inevitably — a nurse's aide with quick-bit nails, a hospital security guy, a tired Cuban 
orderly who addresses me as jou — who will, looking down in the middle of some kind 
of bustled task, catch what he sees as my eye and ask So yo then man what's your story? 


YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


Where was the woman who said she'd come. She said she would come. Erdedy 
thought she'd have come by now. He sat and thought. He was in the living room. When 
he started waiting one window was full of yellow light and cast a shadow of light across 
the floor and he was still sitting waiting as that shadow began to fade and was 
intersected by a brightening shadow from a different wall's window. There was an insect 
on one of the steel shelves that held his audio equipment. The insect kept going in and 
out of one of the holes on the girders that the shelves fit into. The insect was dark and 
had a shiny case. He kept looking over at it. Once or twice he started to get up to go 
over closer to look at it, but he was afraid that if he came closer and saw it closer he 
would kill it, and he was afraid to kill it. He did not use the phone to call the woman 



who'd promised to come because if he tied up the line and if it happened to be the time 
when maybe she was trying to call him he was afraid she would hear the busy signal and 
think him disinterested and get angry and maybe take what she'd promised him 
somewhere else. 

She had promised to get him a fifth of a kilogram of marijuana, 200 grams of unusually 
good marijuana, for $1250 U.S. He had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 
times before. Before this woman knew him. She did not know he had tried to stop. He 
always lasted a week, or two weeks, or maybe two days, and then he'd think and decide 
to have some in his home one more last time. One last final time he'd search out 
someone new, someone he hadn't already told that he had to stop smoking dope and 
please under no circumstances should they procure him any dope. It had to be a third 
party, because he'd told every dealer he knew to cut him off. And the third party had to 
be someone all-new, because each time he got some he knew this time had to be the 
last time, and so told them, asked them, as a favor, never to get him any more, ever. 
And he never asked a person again once he'd told them this, because he was proud, and 
also kind, and wouldn't put anyone in that kind of contradictory position. Also he 
considered himself creepy when it came to dope, and he was afraid that others would 
see that he was creepy about it as well. He sat and thought and waited in an uneven X 
of light through two different windows. Once or twice he looked at the phone. The 
insect had disappeared back into the hole in the steel girder a shelf fit into. 

She'd promised to come at one certain time, and it was past that time. Finally he gave 
in and called her number, using just audio, and it rang several times, and he was afraid 
of how much time he was taking tying up the line and he got her audio answering 
device, the message had a snatch of ironic pop music and her voice and a male voice 
together saying we'll call you back, and the 'we' made them sound like a couple, the 
man was a handsome black man who was in law school, she designed sets, and he didn't 
leave a message because he didn't want her to know how much now he felt like he 
needed it. He had been very casual about the whole thing. She said she knew a guy just 
over the river in Allston who sold high-resin dope in moderate bulk, and he'd yawned 
and said well, maybe, well, hey, why not, sure, special occasion, I haven't bought any in I 
don't know how long. She said he lived in a trailer and had a harelip and kept snakes and 
had no phone, and was basically just not what you'd call a pleasant or attractive person 
at all, but the guy in Allston frequently sold dope to theater people in Cambridge, and 
had a devoted following. He said he was trying to even remember when was the last 
time he'd bought any, it had been so long. He said he guessed he'd have her get a 
decent amount, he said he'd had some friends call him in the recent past and ask if he 
could get them some. He had this thing where he'd frequently say he was getting dope 
mostly for friends. Then if the woman didn't have it when she said she'd have it for him 
and he became anxious about it he could tell the woman that it was his friends who 
were becoming anxious, and he was sorry to bother the woman about something so 
casual but his friends were anxious and bothering him about it and he just wanted to 
know what he could maybe tell them. He was caught in the middle, is how he would 
represent it. He could say his friends had given him their money and were now anxious 
and exerting pressure, calling and bothering him. This tactic was not possible with this 



woman who'd said she'd come with it because he hadn't yet given her the $1250. She 
would not let him. She was well off. Her family was well off, she'd said to explain how 
her condominium was as nice as it was when she worked designing sets for a Cambridge 
theater company that seemed to do only German plays, dark smeary sets. She didn't 
care much about the money, she said she'd cover the cost herself when she got out to 
the Allston Spur to see whether the guy was at home in the trailer as she was certain he 
would be this particular afternoon, and he could just reimburse her when she brought it 
to him. This arrangement, very casual, made him anxious, so he'd been even more 
casual and said sure, fine, whatever. Thinking back, he was sure he'd said whatever, 
which in retrospect worried him because it might have sounded as if he didn't care at 
all, not at all, so little that it wouldn't matter if she forgot to get it or call, and once he'd 
made the decision to have marijuana in his home one more time it mattered a lot. It 
mattered a lot. He'd been too casual with the woman, he should have made her take 
$1250 from him up front, claiming politeness, claiming he didn't want to inconvenience 
her financially over something so trivial and casual. Money created a sense of obligation, 
and he should have wanted the woman to feel obliged to do what she'd said, once what 
she'd said she'd do had set him off inside. Once he'd been set off inside, it mattered so 
much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered. Once he had asked 
her to get it, he was committed to several courses of action. The insect on the shelf was 
back. It didn't seem to do anything. It just came out of the hole in the girder onto the 
edge of the steel shelf and sat there. After a while it would disappear back into the hole 
in the girder, and he was pretty sure it didn't do anything in there either. He felt similar 
to the insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure just how he 
was similar. Once he'd decided to own marijuana one more last time, he was committed 
to several courses of action. He had to modem in to the agency and say that there was 
an emergency and that he was posting an e-note on a colleague's TP asking her to cover 
his calls for the rest of the week because he'd be out of contact for several days due to 
this emergency. He had to put an audio message on his answering device saying that 
starting that afternoon he was going to be unreachable for several days. He had to clean 
his bedroom, because once he had dope he would not leave his bedroom except to go 
to the refrigerator and the bathroom, and even then the trips would be very quick. He 
had to throw out all his beer and liquor, because if he drank alcohol and smoked dope at 
the same time he would get dizzy and ill, and if he had alcohol in the house he could not 
be relied on not to drink it once he started smoking dope. He'd had to do some 
shopping. He'd had to lay in supplies. Now just one of the insect's antennae was pro¬ 
truding from the hole in the girder. It protruded, but it did not move. He had had to buy 
soda, Oreos, bread, sandwich meat, mayonnaise, tomatoes, M&M's, Almost Home 
cookies, ice cream, a Pepperidge Farm frozen chocolate cake, and four cans of canned 
chocolate frosting to be eaten with a large spoon. He'd had to log an order to rent film 
cartridges from the InterLace entertainment outlet. He'd had to buy antacids for the 
discomfort that eating all he would eat would cause him late at night. He'd had to buy a 
new bong, because each time he finished what simply had to be his last bulk-quantity of 
marijuana he decided that that was it, he was through, he didn't even like it anymore, 
this was it, no more hiding, no more imposing on his colleagues and putting different 



messages on his answering device and moving his car away from his condominium and 
closing his windows and curtains and blinds and living in quick vectors between his 
bedroom's InterLace teleputer's films and his refrigerator and his toilet, and he would 
take the bong he'd used and throw it away wrapped in several plastic shopping bags. His 
refrigerator made its own ice in little cloudy crescent blocks and he loved it, when he 
had dope in his home he always drank a great deal of cold soda and ice water. His 
tongue almost swelled at just the thought. He looked at the phone and the clock. He 
looked at the windows but not at the foliage and blacktop driveway beyond the 
windows. He had already vacuumed his Venetian blinds and curtains, everything was 
ready to be shut down. Once the woman who said she'd come had come, he would shut 
the whole system down. It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a 
girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the 
thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that 
would be required to explore the question. It was now almost three hours past the time 
when the woman had said she would come. A counselor, Randi, with an i, with a 
mustache like a Mountie, had told him in the outpatient treatment program he'd gone 
through two years ago that he seemed insufficiently committed to the course of action 
that would be required to remove substances from his lifestyle. He'd had to buy a new 
bong at Bogart's in Porter Square, Cambridge because whenever he finished the last of 
the substances on hand he always threw out all his bongs and pipes, screens and tubes 
and rolling papers and roach clips, lighters and Visine and Pepto-Bismol and cookies and 
frosting, to eliminate all future temptation. He always felt a sense of optimism and firm 
resolve after he'd discarded the materials. He'd bought the new bong and laid in fresh 
supplies this morning, getting back home with everything well before the woman had 
said she would come. He thought of the new bong and new little packet of round brass 
screens in the Bogart's bag on his kitchen table in the sunlit kitchen and could not 
remember what color this new bong was. The last one had been orange, the one before 
that a dusky rose color that had turned muddy at the bottom from resin in just four 
days. He could not remember the color of this new last and final bong. He considered 
getting up to check the color of the bong he'd be using but decided that obsessive 
checking and convulsive movements could compromise the atmosphere of casual calm 
he needed to maintain while he waited, protruding but not moving, for the woman he'd 
met at a design session for his agency's small campaign for her small theater company's 
new Wedekind festival, while he waited for this woman, with whom he'd had 
intercourse twice, to honor her casual promise. He tried to decide whether the woman 
was pretty. Another thing he laid in when he'd committed himself to one last marijuana 
vacation was petroleum jelly. When he smoked marijuana he tended to masturbate a 
great deal, whether or not there were opportunities for intercourse, opting when he 
smoked for masturbation over intercourse, and the petroleum jelly kept him from 
returning to normal function all tender and sore. He was also hesitant to get up and 
check the color of his bong because he would have to pass right by the telephone 
console to get to the kitchen, and he didn't want to be tempted to call the woman 
who'd said she would come again because he felt creepy about bothering her about 
something he'd represented as so casual, and was afraid that several audio hang-ups on 



her answering device would look even creepier, and also he felt anxious about maybe 
tying up the line at just the moment when she called, as she certainly would. He decided 
to get Call Waiting added to his audio phone service for a nominal extra charge, then 
remembered that since this was positively the last time he would or even could indulge 
what Randi, with an /, had called an addiction every bit as rapacious as pure alcoholism, 
there would be no real need for Call Waiting, since a situation like the present one could 
never arise again. This line of thinking almost caused him to become angry. To ensure 
the composure with which he sat waiting in light in his chair he focused his senses on his 
surroundings. No part of the insect he'd seen was now visible. The clicks of his portable 
clock were really composed of three smaller clicks, signifying he supposed preparation, 
movement, and readjustment. He began to grow disgusted with himself for waiting so 
anxiously for the promised arrival of something that had stopped being fun anyway. He 
didn't even know why he liked it anymore. It made his mouth dry and his eyes dry and 
red and his face sag, and he hated it when his face sagged, it was as if all the integrity of 
all the muscles in his face was eroded by marijuana, and he got terribly self-conscious 
about the fact that his face was sagging, and had long ago forbidden himself to smoke 
dope around anyone else. He didn't even know what its draw was anymore. He couldn't 
even be around anyone else if he'd smoked marijuana that same day, it made him so 
self-conscious. And the dope often gave him a painful case of pleurisy if he smoked it for 
more than two straight days of heavy continuous smoking in front of the InterLace 
viewer in his bedroom. It made his thoughts jut out crazily in jagged directions and 
made him stare raptly like an unbright child at entertainment cartridges — when he laid 
in film cartridges for a vacation with marijuana, he favored cartridges in which a lot of 
things blew up and crashed into each other, which he was sure an unpleasant-fact 
specialist like Randi would point out had implications that were not good. He pulled his 
necktie down smooth while he gathered his intellect, will, self-knowledge, and 
conviction and determined that when this latest woman came as she surely would this 
would simply be his very last marijuana debauch. He'd simply smoke so much so fast 
that it would be so unpleasant and the memory of it so repulsive that once he'd 
consumed it and gotten it out of his home and his life as quickly as possible he would 
never want to do it again. He would make it his business to create a really bad set of 
debauched associations with the stuff in his memory. The dope scared him. It made him 
afraid. It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of 
everything else. It had long since stopped being a release or relief or fun. This last time, 
he would smoke the whole 200 grams —120 grams cleaned, destemmed — in four 
days, over an ounce a day, all in tight heavy economical one-hitters off a quality virgin 
bong, an incredible, insane amount per day, he'd make it a mission, treating it like a 
penance and behavior-modification regimen all at once, he'd smoke his way through 
thirty high-grade grams a day, starting the moment he woke up and used ice water to 
detach his tongue from the roof of his mouth and took an antacid — averaging out to 
200 or 300 heavy bong-hits per day, an insane and deliberately unpleasant amount, and 
he'd make it a mission to smoke it continuously, even though if the marijuana was as 
good as the woman claimed he'd do five hits and then not want to take the trouble to 
load and one-hit any more for at least an hour. But he would force himself to do it 



anyway. He would smoke it all even if he didn't want it. Even if it started to make him 
dizzy and ill. He would use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole 
experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior 
would be henceforward modified, he'd never even want to do it again because the 
memory of the insane four days to come would be so firmly, terribly emblazoned in his 
memory. He'd cure himself by excess. He predicted that the woman, when she came, 
might want to smoke some of the 200 grams with him, hang out, hole up, listen to some 
of his impressive collection of Tito Puente recordings, and probably have intercourse. He 
had never once had actual intercourse on marijuana. Frankly, the idea repelled him. Two 
dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his selfconscious thoughts twisting 
around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above 
her, his swollen eyes red and his face sagging so that its slack folds maybe touched, 
limply, the folds of her own loose sagging face is it sloshed back and forth on his pillow, 
its mouth working dryly. The thought was repellent. He decided he'd have her toss him 
what she'd promised to bring, and then would from a distance toss back to her the 
$1250 U.S. in large bills and tell her not to let the door hit her on the butt on the way 
out. He'd say ass instead of butt. He'd be so rude and unpleasant to her that the 
memory of his lack of basic decency and of her tight offended face would be a further 
disincentive ever, in the future, to risk calling her and repeating the course of action he 
had now committed himself to. 

He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see. He 
remembered clearly the last woman he'd involved in his trying just one more vacation 
with dope and drawn blinds. The last woman had been something called an 
appropriation artist, which seemed to mean that she copied and embellished other art 
and then sold it through a prestigious Marlborough Street gallery. She had an artistic 
manifesto that involved radical feminist themes. He'd let her give him one of her smaller 
paintings, which covered half the wall over his bed and was of a famous film actress 
whose name he always had a hard time recalling and a less famous film actor, the two of 
them entwined in a scene from a well-known old film, a romantic scene, an embrace, 
copied from a film history textbook and much enlarged and made stilted, and with 
obscenities scrawled all over it in bright red letters. The last woman had been sexy but 
not pretty, as the woman he now didn't want to see but was waiting anxiously for was 
pretty in a faded withered Cambridge way that made her seem pretty but not sexy. The 
appropriation artist had been led to believe that he was a former speed addict, 
intravenous addiction to methamphetamine hydrochloride 1 is what he remembered 
telling that one, he had even described the awful taste of hydrochloride in the addict's 
mouth immediately after injection, he had researched the subject carefully. She had 
been further led to believe that marijuana kept him from using the drug with which he 
really had a problem, and so that if he seemed anxious to get some once she'd offered 
to get him some it was only because he was heroically holding out against much darker 
deeper more addictive urges and he needed her to help him. He couldn't quite 
remember when or how she'd been given all these impressions. He had not sat down 
and outright bold-faced lied to her, it had been more of an impression he'd conveyed 
and nurtured and allowed to gather its own life and force. The insect was now entirely 



visible. It was on the shelf that held his digital equalizer. The insect might never actually 
have retreated all the way back into the hole in the shelf's girder. What looked like its 
reemergence might just have been a change in his attention or the two windows' light 
or the visual context of his surroundings. The girder protruded from the wall and was a 
triangle of dull steel with holes for shelves to fit into. The metal shelves that held his 
audio equipment were painted a dark industrial green and were originally made for 
holding canned goods. They were designed to be extra kitchen shelves. The insect sat 
inside its dark shiny case with an immobility that seemed like the gathering of a force, it 
sat like the hull of a vehicle from which the engine had been for the moment removed. 
It was dark and had a shiny case and antennae that protruded but did not move. He had 
to use the bathroom. His last piece of contact from the appropriation artist, with whom 
he had had intercourse, and who during intercourse had sprayed some sort of perfume 
up into the air from a mister she held in her left hand as she lay beneath him making a 
wide variety of sounds and spraying perfume up into the air, so that he felt the cold mist 
of it settling on his back and shoulders and was chilled and repelled, his last piece of 
contact after he'd gone into hiding with the marijuana she'd gotten for him had been a 
card she'd mailed that was a pastiche photo of a doormat of coarse green plastic grass 
with WELCOME on it and next to it a flattering publicity photo of the appropriation artist 
from her Back Bay gallery, and between them an unequal sign, which was an equal sign 
with a diagonal slash across it, and also an obscenity he had assumed was directed at 
him magisculed in red grease pencil along the bottom, with multiple exclamation points. 
She had been offended because he had seen her every day for ten days, then when 
she'd finally obtained 50 grams of genetically enhanced hydroponic marijuana for him 
he had said that she'd saved his life and he was grateful and the friends for whom he'd 
promised to get some were grateful and she had to go right now because he had an 
appointment and had to take off, but that he would doubtless be calling her later that 
day, and they had shared a moist kiss, and she had said she could feel his heart 
pounding right through his suit coat, and she had driven away in her rusty unmuffled 
car, and he had gone and moved his own car to an underground garage several blocks 
away, and had run back and drawn the clean blinds and curtains, and changed the audio 
message on his answering device to one that described an emergency departure from 
town, and had drawn and locked his bedroom blinds, and had taken the new rose- 
colored bong out of its Bogart's bag, and was not seen for three days, and ignored over 
two dozen audio messages and protocols and e-notes expressing concern over his 
message's emergency, and had never contacted her again. He had hoped she would 
assume he had succumbed again to methamphetamine hydrochloride and was sparing 
her the agony of his descent back into the hell of chemical dependence. What it really 
was was that he had again decided those 50 grams of resin-soaked dope, which had 
been so potent that on the second day it had given him an anxiety attack so paralyzing 
that he had gone to the bathroom in a Tufts University commemorative ceramic stein to 
avoid leaving his bedroom, represented his very last debauch ever with dope, and that 
he had to cut himself off from all possible future sources of temptation and supply, and 
this surely included the appropriation artist, who had come with the stuff at precisely 
the time she'd promised, he recalled. From the street outside came the sound of a 



dumpster being emptied into an E.W.D. land barge. His shame at what she might on the 
other hand perceive as his slimy phallocentric conduct toward her made it easier for him 
to avoid her, as well. Though not shame, really. More like being uncomfortable at the 
thought of it. He had had to launder his bedding twice to get the smell of the perfume 
out. He went into the bathroom to use the bathroom, making it a point to look neither 
at the insect visible on the shelf to his left nor at the telephone console on its lacquer 
workstation to the right. He was committed to touching neither. Where was the woman 
who had said she'd come. The new bong in the Bogart's bag was orange, meaning he 
might have misremembered the bong before it as orange. It was a rich autumnal orange 
that lightened to more of a citrus orange when its plastic cylinder was held up to the 
late-afternoon light of the window over the kitchen sink. The metal of its stem and bowl 
was rough stainless steel, the kind with a grain, unpretty and all business. The bong was 
half a meter tall and had a weighted base covered in soft false suede. Its orange plastic 
was thick and the carb on the side opposite the stem had been raggedly cut so that 
rough shards of plastic protruded from the little hole and might well hurt his thumb 
when he smoked, which he decided to consider just part of the penance he would 
undertake after the woman had come and gone. He left the door to the bathroom open 
so that he would be sure to hear the telephone when it sounded or the buzzer to the 
front doors of his condominium complex when it sounded. In the bathroom his throat 
suddenly closed and he wept hard for two or three seconds before the weeping stopped 
abruptly and he could not get it to start again. It was now over four hours since the time 
the woman had casually committed to come. Was he in the bathroom or in his chair 
near the window and near his telephone console and the insect and the window that 
had admitted a straight rectangular bar of light when he began to wait. The light 
through this window was coming at an angle more and more oblique. Its shadow had 
become a parallelogram. The light through the southwest window was straight and 
reddening. He had thought he needed to use the bathroom but was unable to. He tried 
putting a whole stack of film cartridges into the dock of the disc-drive and then turning 
on the huge teleputer in his bedroom. He could see the piece of appropriation art in the 
mirror above the TP. He lowered the volume all the way and pointed the remote device 
at the TP like some sort of weapon. He sat on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his 
knees and scanned the stack of cartridges. Each cartridge in the dock dropped on 
command and began to engage the drive with an insectile click and whir, and he 
scanned it. But he was unable to distract himself with the TP because he was unable to 
stay with any one entertainment cartridge for more than a few seconds. The moment he 
recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there 
was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially 
missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and 
realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made 
no sense. The viewer hung on the wall, half again as large as the piece of feminist art. He 
scanned cartridges for some time. The telephone console sounded during this interval of 
anxious scanning. He was up and moving back out toward it before the first ring was 
completed, flooded with either excitement or relief, the TP's remote device still in his 
hand, but it was only a friend and colleague calling, and when he heard the voice that 



was not the woman who had promised to bring what he'd committed the next several 
days to banishing from his life forever he was almost sick with disappointment, with a 
great deal of mistaken adrenaline now shining and ringing in his system, and he got off 
the line with the colleague to clear the line and keep it available for the woman so fast 
that he was sure his colleague perceived him as either angry with him or just plain rude. 
He was further upset at the thought that his answering the telephone this late in the 
day did not jibe with the emergency message about being unreachable that would be on 
his answering device if the colleague called back after the woman had come and gone 
and he'd shut the whole system of his life down, and he was standing over the 
telephone console trying to decide whether the risk of the colleague or someone else 
from the agency calling back was sufficient to justify changing the audio message on the 
answering device to describe an emergency departure this evening instead of this 
afternoon, but he decided he felt that since the woman had definitely committed to 
coming, his leaving the message unchanged would be a gesture of fidelity to her 
commitment, and might somehow in some oblique way strengthen that commitment. 
The E.W.D. land barge was emptying dumpsters all up and down the street. He returned 
to his chair near the window. The disk drive and TP viewer were still on in his bedroom 
and he could see through the angle of the bedroom's doorway the lights from the high- 
definition screen blink and shift from one primary color to another in the dim room, and 
for a while he killed time casually by trying to imagine what entertaining scenes on the 
unwatched viewer the changing colors and intensities might signify. The chair faced the 
room instead of the window. Reading while waiting for marijuana was out of the 
question. He considered masturbating but did not. He didn't reject the idea so much as 
not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and 
ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of 
expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and felt on some level that this had 
something to do with him and his circumstances and what, if this grueling final debauch 
he'd committed himself to didn't somehow resolve the problem, would surely have to 
be called his problem, but he could not even begin to try to see how the image of 
desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the insect, which had 
retreated back into its hole in the angled girder, because at this precise time his tele¬ 
phone and his intercom to the front door's buzzer both sounded at the same time, both 
loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked through a very small hole into the 
great balloon of colored silence he sat in, waiting, and he moved first toward the 
telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back 
toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once, 
finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something's been flung, 
splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head. 



1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD 


'All I know is my dad said to come here.' 

'Come right in. You'll see a chair to your immediate left.' 

'So I'm here.' 

'That's just fine. Seven-Up? Maybe some lemon soda?' 

'I guess not, thanks. I'm just here, is all, and I'm kind of wondering why my dad sent 
me down, you know. Your door there doesn't have anything on it, and I was just at the 
dentist last week, and so I'm wondering why I'm here, exactly, is all. That's why I'm not 
sitting down yet.' 

'You're how old, Hal, fourteen?' 

'I'll be eleven in June. Are you a dentist? Is this like a dental consult?' 

'You're here to converse.' 

'Converse?' 

'Yes. Pardon me while I key in this age-correction. Your father had listed you as 
fourteen, for some reason.' 

'Converse as in with you?' 

'You're here to converse with me, Hal, yes. I'm almost going to have to implore you to 
have a lemon soda. Your mouth is making those dry sticky inadequate-saliva sounds.' 

'Dr. Zegarelli says that's one reason for all the caries, is that I have low salivary output.' 

'Those dry sticky salivaless sounds which can be death to a good conversation.' 

'But I rode my bike all the way up here against the wind just to converse with you? Is 
the conversation supposed to start with me asking why?' 

'I'll begin by asking if you know the meaning of implore, Hal.' 

'Probably I'll go ahead and take a Seven-Up, then, if you're going to implore.' 

'I'll ask you again whether you know implore, young sir.' 

'Young sir?' 

'You're wearing that bow tie, after all. Isn't that rather an invitation to a young sir?' 

'Implore's a regular verb, transitive: to call upon, or for, in supplication; to pray to, or 
for, earnestly; to beseech; to entreat. Weak synonym: urge. Strong synonym: beg. 
Etymology unmixed: from Latin implorare, im meaning in, plorare meaning in this 
context to cry aloud. O.E.D. Condensed Volume Six page 1387 column twelve and a little 
bit of thirteen.' 

'Good lord she didn't exaggerate did she?' 

'I tend to get beat up, sometimes, at the Academy, for stuff like that. Does this bear on 
why I'm here? That I'm a continentally ranked junior tennis player who can also recite 
great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will, and tends to get beat up, and wears a 
bow tie? Are you like a specialist for gifted kids? Does this mean they think I'm gifted?' 

SPFFFT. 'Here you are. Drink up.' 

'Thanks. SHULGSHULGSPAHHH... Whew. Ah.' 



'You were thirsty. 1 

'So then if I sit down you'll fill me in?' 

'...professional conversationalist knows his mucous membranes, after all.' 

'I might have to burp a little bit in a second, from the soda. I'm alerting you ahead of 
time.' 

'Hal, you are here because I am a professional conversationalist, and your father has 
made an appointment with me, for you, to converse.' 

'MYURP. Excuse me.' 

Tap tap tap tap. 

'SHULGSPAHHH.' 

Tap tap tap tap. 

'You're a professional conversationalist?' 

'I am, yes, as I believe I just stated, a professional conversationalist.' 

'Don't start looking at your watch, as if I'm taking up valuable time of yours. If Himself 
made the appointment and paid for it the time's supposed to be mine, right? Not yours. 
And then but what's that supposed to mean, "professional conversationalist"? A 
conversationalist is just one who converses much. You actually charge a fee to converse 
much?' 

'A conversationalist is also one who. I'm sure you'll recall, "excels in conversation.'" 

'That's Webster's Seventh. That's not the O.E.D.' 

Tap tap. 

'I'm an O.E.D. man. Doctor. If that's what you are. Are you a doctor? Do you have a 
doctorate? Most people like to put their diplomas up, I notice, if they have credentials. 
And Webster's Seventh isn't even up-to-date. Webster's Eighth amends to "one who 
converses with much enthusiasm.'" 

'Another Seven-Up?' 

'Is Himself still having this hallucination I never speak? Is that why he put the Moms up 
to having me bike up here? Himself is my dad. We call him Himself. As in quote "the 
man Himself." As it were. We call my mother the Moms. My brother coined the term. I 
understand this isn't unusual. I understand most more or less normal families address 
each other internally by means of pet names and terms and monikers. Don't even think 
about asking me what my little internal moniker is.' 

Tap tap tap. 

'But Himself hallucinates, sometimes, lately, you ought to be apprised, was the thrust. 
I'm wondering why the Moms let him send me pedalling up here uphill against the wind 
when I've got a challenge match at 3:00 to converse with an enthusiast with a blank 
door and no diplomas anywhere in view.' 

'I, in my small way, would like to think it had as much to do with me as with you. That 
my reputation preceded me.' 

'Isn't that usually a pejorative clause?' 

'I am wonderful fun to talk to. I'm a consummate professional. People leave my parlor 
in states. You are here. It's conversation-time. Shall we discuss Byzantine erotica?' 

'How did you know I was interested in Byzantine erotica?' 

'You seem persistently to confuse me with someone who merely hangs out a shingle 



with the word Conversationalist on it, and this operation with a fly-by-night one strung 
together with chewing gum and twine. You think I have no support staff? Researchers at 
my beck? You think we don't delve full-bore into the psyches of those for whom we've 
made appointments to converse? You don't think this fully accredited limited 
partnership would have an interest in obtaining data on what informs and stimulates 
our conversees?' 

'I know only one person who'd ever us e full-bore in casual conversation.' 

'There is nothing casual about a professional conversationalist and staff. We delve. We 
obtain, and then some. Young sir.' 

'Okay, Alexandrian or Constantinian?' 

'You think we haven't thoroughly researched your own connection with the whole 
current intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec?' 

'What intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec? I thought you wanted to talk racy 
mosaics.' 

'This is an upscale district of a vital North American metropolis, Hal. Standards here 
are upscale, and high. A professional conversationalist flat-out full-bore delves. Do you 
for one moment think that a professional plier of the trade of conversation would fail to 
probe beak-deep into your family's sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance's 
notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum- 
operative, Luria P—?' 

'Listen, are you okay?' 

'Do you?' 

'I'm ten for Pete's sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar's squares got 
juggled. I'm the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom's a 
continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose 
dad's a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly 
founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 A.M. and 
pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days 
presents with delusions about people's mouths moving but nothing coming out. I'm not 
even up to/yet, in the condensed O.E.D., much less Quebec or malevolent Lurias.' 

'...of the fact that photos of the aforementioned... liaison being leaked to Der Spiegel 
resulted in the bizarre deaths of both an Ottawan paparazzo and a Bavarian 
international-affairs editor, of an alpenstock through the abdomen and an ill-swallowed 
cocktail onion, respectively?' 

'I just finished jew's-ear. I'm just starting on jew's-harp and the general theory of oral 
lyres. I've never even skied.' 

'That you could dare to imagine we'd fail conversationally to countenance certain 
weekly shall we say maternal ... assignations with a certain unnamed bisexual 
bassoonist in the Albertan Secret Guard's tactical-bands unit?' 

'Gee, is that the exit over there I see?' 

'...that your blithe inattention to your own dear grammatical mother's cavortings with 
not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attaches...?' 

'Would it be rude to tell you your mustache is askew?' 

'...that her introduction of esoteric mnemonic steroids, stereo-chemically not 



dissimilar to your father's own daily hypodermic "mega-vitamin" supplement derived 
from a certain organic testosterone-regeneration compound distilled by the Jivaro 
shamen of the South-Central L.A. basin, into your innocent-looking bowl of morning 
Ralston...' 

'As a matter of fact I'll go ahead and tell you your whole face is kind of running, sort of, 
if you want to check. Your nose is pointing at your lap.' 

'That your quote-unquote "complimentary" Dunlop widebody tennis racquets' super¬ 
secret-formulaic composition materials of high-modulus-graphite-reinforced 
polycarbonate polybutylene resin are organochemically identical I say again identical to 
the gyroscopic balance sensor and mise-en-scene appropriation card and priapistic- 
entertainment cartridge implanted in your very own towering father's anaplastic 
cerebrum after his cruel series of detoxifications and convolution-smoothings and 
gastrectomy and prostatectomy and pancreatectomy and phalluctomy...' 

Tap tap. 'SHULGSPAHH.' 

'...could possibly escape the combined investigative attention of... ?' 

'And it strikes me I've definitely seen that argyle sweater-vest before. That's Himself's 
special Interdependence-Day-celebratory-dinner argyle sweater-vest, that he makes a 
point of never having cleaned. I know those stains. I was there for that clot of veal 
marsala right there. Is this whole appointment a date-connected thing? Is this April 
Fools, Dad, or do I need to call the Moms and C.T.?' 

'...who requires only daily evidence that you speak? That you recognize the occasional 
vista beyond your own generous Mondragonoid nose's fleshy tip?' 

'You rented a whole office and face for this, but leave your old unmistakable sweater- 
vest on? And how'd you even get down here before me, with the Mercury up on blocks 
after you... did you fool C.T. into giving you the keys to a functional car?' 

'Who used to pray daily for the day his own dear late father would sit, cough, open 
that bloody issue of the Tucson Citizen, and not turn that newspaper into the room's 
fifth wall? And who after all this light and noise has apparently spawned the same 
silence?' 

l l 

'Who's lived his whole ruddy bloody cruddy life in five-walled rooms?' 'Dad, I've got a 
duly scheduled challenge match with Schacht in like twelve minutes, wind at my 
downhill back or no. I've got this oral-lyrologist who's going to be outside Brighton Best 
Savings wearing a predesignated necktie at straight-up five. I have to mow his lawn for a 
month for this interview. I can't just sit here watching you think I'm mute while your 
fake nose points at the floor. And are you hearing me talking. Dad? It speaks. It accepts 
soda and defines implore and converses with you.' 

'Praying for just one conversation, amateur or no, that does not end in terror? That 
does not end like all the others: you staring, me swallowing?' 

l l 

'Son?' 


'Son?' 



9 MAY — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in 
puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as 
their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive. 

Because he left his dormitory room before 0600 for dawn drills and often didn't get 
back there until after supper, packing his book bag and knapsack and gear bag for the 
whole day, together with selecting his best-strung racquets — it all took Hal some time. 
Plus he usually collected and packed and selected in the dark, and with stealth, because 
his brother Mario was usually still asleep in the other bed. Mario didn't drill and couldn't 
play, and needed all the sleep he could get. 

Hal held his complimentary gear bag and was putting different pairs of sweats to his 
face, trying to find the cleanest pair by smell, when the telephone console sounded. 
Mario thrashed and sat up in bed, a small hunched shape with a big head against the 
gray light of the window. Hal got to the console on the second ring and had the 
transparent phone's antenna out by the third. 

His way of answering the phone sounded like 'Mmmyellow.' 

'I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.' 

Hal held three pairs of E.T.A. sweatpants in the hand that didn't hold the phone. He 
saw his older brother succumb to gravity and fall back limp against the pillows. Mario 
often sat up and fell back still asleep. 

'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.' 

'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut. It had been Orin. 

'Hey Hal?' 

The light in the room was a creepy gray, a kind of nonlight. Hal could hear Brandt 
laughing at something Kenkle had said, off down the hall, and the clank of their janitorial 
buckets. The person on the phone had been 0. 

'Hey Hal?' Mario was awake. It took four pillows to support Mario's oversized skull. His 
voice came from the tangled bedding. 'Is it still dark out, or is it me?' 

'Go back to sleep. It isn't even six.' Hal put the good leg into the sweatpants first. 

'Who was it?' 

Shoving three coverless Dunlop widebodies into the gear bag and zipping the bag 
partway up so the handles had room to stick out. Carrying all three bags back over to 
the console to deactivate the ringer on the phone. He said, 'No one you know, I don't 
think.' 



YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


Though only one-half ethnic Arab and a Canadian by birth and residence, the medical 
attache is nevertheless once again under Saudi diplomatic immunity, this time as special 
ear-nose-throat consultant to the personal physician of Prince Q—, the Saudi Minister of 
Home Entertainment, here on northeastern U.S.A. soil with his legation to cut another 
mammoth deal with InterLace TelEntertainment. The medical attache turns thirty-seven 
tomorrow, Thursday, 2 April in the North American lunar Y.D.A.U. The legation finds the 
promotional subsidy of the North American calendar hilariously vulgar. To say nothing of 
the arresting image of the idolatrous West's most famous and self-congratulating idol, 
the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some type of enormous adult-design diaper, a 
hilariously apposite image popular in the news photos of so many international journals. 

The attache's medical practice being normally divided between Montreal and the Rub' 
al Khali, it is his first trip back to U.S.A. soil since completing his residency eight years 
ago. His duties here involve migrating with the Prince and his retinue between 
InterLace's two hubs of manufacture and dissemination in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. and 
Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A., respectively, offering expert E.N.T. assistance to the 
personal physician of Prince Q—. The medical attache's particular expertise is the 
maxillofacial consequences of imbalances in intestinal flora. Prince Q— (as would 
anyone who refuses to eat pretty much anything but Toblerone) suffers chronically from 
Candida albicans, with attendant susceptibilities to monilial sinusitis and thrush, the 
yeasty sores and sinal impactions of which require almost daily drainage in the cold and 
damp of early-spring Boston, U.S.A. A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness nonpareil 
with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attache is known among the 
shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of maxillofacial yeast, his 
staggering fee-scale as wholly ad valorem. 

Saudi consulting fees, in particular, are somewhere just past obscene, but the medical 
attache's duties on this trip are personally draining and sort of nauseous, and when he 
arrives back at the sumptuous apartments he had his wife sublet in districts far from the 
legation's normal Back Bay and Scottsdale digs, at the day's end, he needs unwinding in 
the very worst way. A more than averagely devout follower of the North American 
sufism promulgated in his childhood by Pir Valayat, the medical attache partakes of nei¬ 
ther kif nor distilled spirits, and must unwind without chemical aid. When he arrives 
home after evening prayers, he wants to look upon a spicy and 100% shari'a-halal 
dinner piping hot and arranged and steaming pleasantly on its attachable tray, he wants 
his bib ironed and laid out by the tray at the ready, and he wants the living room's 



teleputer booted and warmed up and the evening's entertainment cartridges already 
selected and arranged and lined up in dock ready for remote insertion into the viewer's 
drive. He reclines before the viewer in his special electronic recliner, and his black- 
veiled, ethnically Arab wife wordlessly attends him, loosening any constrictive clothing, 
adjusting the room's lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner tray over his head so 
that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below his chin, 
that he may enjoy his hot dinner without having to remove his eyes from whatever 
entertainment is up and playing. He has a narrow imperial-style beard which his wife 
also attends and keeps free of detritus from the tray just below. The medical attache sits 
and watches and eats and watches, unwinding by visible degrees, until the angles of his 
body in the chair and his head on his neck indicate that he has passed into sleep, at 
which point his special electronic recliner can be made automatically to recline to full 
horizontal, and luxuriant silk-analog bedding emerges flowingly from long slots in the 
appliance's sides; and, unless his wife is inconsiderate and clumsy with the recliner's 
remote hand-held controls, the medical attache is permitted to ease effortlessly from 
unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night's sleep, still right there in the recumbent 
recliner, the TP set to run a recursive loop of low-volume surf and light rain on broad 
green leaves. 

Except, that is, for Wednesday nights, which in Boston are permitted to be his wife's 
Arab Women's Advanced League tennis night with the other legation wives and 
companions at the plush Mount Auburn Club in West Watertown, on which nights she is 
not around wordlessly to attend him, since Wednesday is the U.S.A. weekday on which 
fresh Toblerone hits Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.'s Newbury Street's import- 
confectioners' shelves, and the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment's inability to con¬ 
trol his appetites for Wednesday Toblerone often requires the medical attache to 
remain in personal attendance all evening on the bulk-rented fourteenth floor of the 
Back Bay Hilton, juggling tongue-depressors and cotton swabs, nystatin and ibuprofen 
and stiptics and antibiotic thrush salves, rehabilitating the mucous membranes of the 
dyspeptic and distressed and often (but not always) penitent and appreciative Saudi 
Prince Q—. 

So on 1 April, Y.D.A.U., when the medical attache is (it is alleged) insufficiently deft 
with a Q-Tip on an ulcerated sinal necrosis and is subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of 
febrile thrushive pique from the florally imbalanced Minister of Home Entertainment, 
and is by high-volume fiat replaced at the royal bedside by the Prince's personal 
physician, who's summoned by beeper from the Hilton's sauna, and when the damp 
personal physician pats the medical attache on the shoulder and tells him to pay the 
pique no mind, that it's just the yeast talking, but to just head on home and unwind and 
for once make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the 
attache does get home, at like 1840h., his spacious Boston apartments are empty, the 
living room lights undimmed, dinner unheated and the attachable tray still in the 
dishwasher and — worst — of course no entertainment cartridges have been obtained 
from the Boylston St. InterLace outlet where the medical attache's wife, like all the 
veiled wives and companions of the Prince's legatees, has a complimentary goodwill 
account. And even if he weren't far too exhausted and tightly wound to venture back 



into the damp urban night to pick up entertainment cartridges, the medical attache 
realizes that his wife has, as always on Wednesdays, taken the car with the diplomatic- 
immunity license plates, without which your thinking alien wouldn't even dream of 
trying to park publicly at night in Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A. 

The medical attache's unwinding-options are thus severely constricted. The living 
room's lavish TP receives also the spontaneous disseminations of the InterLace 
Subscription Pulse-Matrix, but the procedures for ordering specific spontaneous pulses 
from the service are so technologically and cryptographically complex that the attache 
has always left the whole business to his wife. On this Wednesday night, trying buttons 
and abbreviations almost at random, the attache is able to summon up only live U.S.A. 
professional sports — which he has always found brutish and repellent — Texaco Oil 
Company-sponsored opera — which the attache has seen today more than enough of 
the human uvula thank you very much — a redisseminated episode of the popular 
afternoon InterLace children's program 'Mr. Bouncety-Bounce' — which the attache 
thinks for a moment might be a documentary on bipolar mood disorders until he 
catches on and thumbs the selection-panel hastily — and a redisseminated session of 
the scantily clad variable-impact early-A.M. 'Fit Forever' home-aerobics series of the 
InterLace aerobics-guru Ms. Tawni Kondo, the scantily clad and splay-limbed immodesty 
of which threatens the devout medical attache with the possibility of impure thoughts. 

The only entertainment cartridges anywhere in the apartment, a foul-tempered 
search reveals, are those which have arrived in Wednesday's U.S.A. postal delivery, left 
on the sideboard in the living room along with personal and professional faxes and mail 
the medical attache declines to read until it's been pre-scanned by his wife for relevant 
interest to himself. 

The sideboard is against the wall opposite the room's electronic recliner under a 
triptych of high-quality Byzantine erotica. The padded cartridge-mailers with their 
distinctive rectangular bulge are mixed haphazardly in with the less entertaining mail. 
Searching for something to unwind with, the medical attache tears the different padded 
mailers open along their designated perforations. There is an O.N.A.N.M.A. Specialty 
Service film on actinomycete-class antibiotics and irritable bowel syndrome. There is 1 
April Y.D. A.U.'s CBC/PATHE North American News Summary 40-minute cartridge, 
available daily by a wife's auto-subscription and either transmitted to TP by 
unrecordable InterLace pulse or express-posted on a single-play ROM self-erasing disk. 
There is the Arabic-language video edition of April's Self magazine for the attache's wife, 
Nass's cover's model chastely swathed and veiled. There is a plain brown and irritatingly 
untitled cartridge-case in a featureless white three-day standard U.S.A. First Class 
padded cartridge-mailer. The padded mailer is postmarked suburban Phoenix area in 
Arizona U.S.A., and the return-address box has only the term 'HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!,’ 
with a small drawn crude face, smiling, in ballpoint ink, instead of a return address or 
incorporated logo. Though by birth and residence a native of Quebec, where the 
language of discourse is not English, the medical attache knows quite well that the 
English word anniversary does not mean the same as birthday. And the medical attache 
and his veiled wife were united in the eyes of God and Prophet not in April but in 
October, four years prior, in the Rub'al Khali. Adding to the padded mailer's confusion is 



the fact that anything from Prince Q—'s legation in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. would carry 
a diplomatic seal instead of routine O.N.A.N. postage. The medical attache, in sum, feels 
tightly wound and badly underappreciated and is prepared in advance to be irritated by 
the item inside, which is merely a standard black entertainment cartridge, but is wholly 
unlabelled and not in any sort of colorful or informative or inviting cartridge-case, and 
has only another of these vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads embossed upon it 
where the registration- and duration-codes are supposed to be embossed. The medical 
attache is puzzled by the cryptic mailer and face and case and unlabelled entertainment, 
and preliminarily irritated by the amount of time he's had to spend upright at the 
sideboard attending to mail, which is not his task. The sole reason he does not throw 
the unlabelled cartridge in the wastecan or put it aside for his wife to preview for 
relevance is because there are such woefully slim entertainment-pickings on his wife's 
irritating Americanized tennis-league evening away from her place at home. The attache 
will pop the cartridge in and scan just enough of its contents to determine whether it is 
irritating or of an irrelevant nature and not entertaining or engaging in any way. He will 
heat the prepared halal lamb and spicy halal garnish in the microwave oven until piping- 
hot, arrange it attractively on his tray, preview the first few moments of the puzzling 
and/or irritating or possibly mysteriously blank entertainment cartridge first, then 
unwind with the news summary, then perhaps have a quick unlibidinous look at Nass's 
spring line of sexless black devout-women's-wear, then will insert the recursive surf- 
and-rain cartridge and make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, hoping only 
that his wife will not return from her tennis league in her perspiration-dampened black 
ankle-length tennis ensemble and remove his dinner tray from his sleeping neck in a 
clumsy or undeft fashion that will awaken him, potentially. 

When he settles in with the tray and cartridge, the TP's viewer's digital display reads 
1927h. 


YEAR OF THE TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR 


Wardine say her momma aint treat her right. Reginald he come round to my blacktop 
at my building where me and Delores Epps jump double dutch and he say, Clenette, 
Wardine be down at my crib cry say her momma aint treat her right, and I go on with 
Reginald to his building where he live at, and Wardine be sit deep far back in a closet in 
Reginald crib, and she be cry. Reginald gone lift Wardine out the closet and me with him 
crying and I be rub on the wet all over Wardine face and Reginald be so careful when he 
take off all her shirts she got on, tell Wardine to let me see. Wardine back all beat up 



and cut up. Big stripes of cut all up and down Wardine back, pink stripes and around the 
stripes the skin like the skin on folks lips be like. Sick down in my insides to look at it. 
Wardine be cry. Reginald say Wardine say her momma aint treat her right. Say her 
momma beat Wardine with a hanger. Say Wardine momma man Roy Tony be want to 
lie down with Wardine. Be give Wardine candy and 5s. Be stand in her way in Wardine 
face and he aint let her pass without he all the time touching her. Reginald say Wardine 
say Roy Tony at night when Wardine momma at work he come in to the mattresses 
where Wardine and William and Shantell and Roy the baby sleep at, and he stand there 
in the dark, high, and say quiet things at her, and breathe. Wardine momma say 
Wardine tempt Roy Tony into Sin. Wardine say she say Wardine try to take away Roy 
Tony into Evil and Sin with her young tight self. She beat Wardine back with hangers out 
the closet. My momma say Wardine momma not right in her head. My momma scared 
of Roy Tony. Wardine be cry. Reginald he down and beg for War-dine tell Reginald 
momma how Wardine momma treat Wardine. Reginald say he Love his Wardine. Say he 
Love but aint never before this time could understand why Wardine wont lie down with 
him like girls do their man. Say Wardine aint never let Reginald take off her shirts until 
tonight she come to Reginald crib in his building and be cry, she let Reginald take off her 
shirts to see how Wardine momma beat Wardine because Roy Tony. Reginald Love his 
Wardine. Wardine be like to die of scared. She say no to Reginald beg. She say, if she go 
to Reginald momma, then Reginald momma go to Wardine momma, then Wardine 
momma think Wardine be lie down with Reginald. Wardine say her momma say 
Wardine let a man lie down before she sixteen and she beat Wardine to death. Reginald 
say he aint no way going to let that happen to Wardine. 

Roy Tony kill Dolores Epps brother Columbus Epps at the Brighton Projects four years 
gone. Roy Tony on Parole. Wardine say he show War-dine he got some thing on his 
ankle send radio signals to Parole that he still here in Brighton. Roy Tony cant be leave 
Brighton. Roy Tony brother be Wardine father. He gone. Reginald try to hush Wardine 
but he can not stop Wardine cry. Wardine look like crazy she so scared. She say she kill 
herself if me or Reginald tell our mommas. She say, Clenette, you my half Sister, I am 
beg that you do not tell you momma on my momma and Roy Tony. Reginald tell 
Wardine to hush herself and lie down quiet. He put Shedd Spread out the kitchen on 
Wardine cuts on her back. He run his finger with grease so careful down pink lines of her 
getting beat with a hanger. Wardine say she do not feel nothing in her back ever since 
spring. She lie stomach on Reginald floor and say she aint got no feeling in her skin of 
her back. When Reginald gone to get the water she asks me the truth, how bad is her 
back look when Reginald look at it. Is she still pretty, she cry. 

I aint tell my momma on Wardine and Reginald and Wardine momma and Roy Tony. 
My momma scared of Roy Tony. My momma be the lady Roy Tony kill Columbus Epps 
over, four years gone, in the Brighton Projects, for Love. 

But I know Reginald tell. Reginald say he gone die before Wardine momma beat 
Wardine again. He say he take his self up to Roy Tony and say him to not mess with 
Wardine or breathe by her mattress at night. He say he take his self on down to the 
playground at the Brighton Projects where Roy Tony do business and he go to Roy Tony 
man to man and he make Roy Tony make it all right. 



But I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald if Reginald go. I think Roy Tony gone kill 
Reginald, and then Wardine momma beat Wardine to death with a hanger. And then 
nobody know except me. And I am gone have a child. 


In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a 
classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because 
if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or 
something like that, it was Mildred Bonk. She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile 
wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal 
emitter's dreamscape. Hair that Green had heard described by an overwrought teacher 
as 'flaxen 1 ; a body which the fickle angel of puberty — the same angel who didn't even 
seem to know Bruce Green's zip code — had visited, kissed, and already left, back in 
sixth; legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could make 
unserious. Shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous, amply busted, given to 
diffident movements of hand brushing flaxen hair from front of dear creamy forehead, 
movements which drove Bruce Green up a private tree. A vision in a sundress and silly 
shoes. Mildred L. Bonk. 

And then but by tenth grade, in one of those queer when-did-that-happen 
metamorphoses, Mildred Bonk had become an imposing member of the frightening 
Winchester High School set that smoked full-strength Marlboros in the alley between 
Senior and Junior halls and that left school altogether at lunchtime, driving away in loud 
low-slung cars to drink beer and smoke dope, driving around with sound-systems of 
illegal wattage, using Visine and Clorets, etc. She was one of them. She chewed gum (or 
worse) in the cafeteria, her dear diffident face now a bored mask of Attitude, her flaxen 
locks now teased and gelled into what looked for all the world like the consequence of a 
finger stuck into an electric socket. Bruce Green saved up for a low-slung old car and 
practiced Attitude on the aunt who'd taken him in. He developed a will. 

And, by the year of what would have been graduation, Bruce Green was way more 
bored, imposing, and frightening than even Mildred Bonk, and he and Mildred Bonk and 
tiny incontinent Harriet Bonk-Green lived just off the Allston Spur in a shiny housetrailer 
with another frightening couple and with Tommy Doocey, the infamous harelipped pot- 
and-sundries dealer who kept several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which 
smelled, which Tommy Doocey didn't notice because his upper lip completely covered 
his nostrils and all he could smell was lip. Mildred Bonk got high in the afternoon and 
watched serial-cartridges, and Bruce Green had a steady job at Leisure Time Ice, and for 
a while life was more or less one big party. 



YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


'Hal?' 

l l 

'...Hey Hal?' 

'Yes Mario?' 

'Are you asleep?' 

'Booboo, we've been over this. I can't be asleep if we're talking.' 

'That's what I thought.' 

'Happy to reassure you.' 

'Boy were you on today. Boy did you ever make that guy look sick. When he hit that 
one down the line and you got it and fell down and hit that drop-volley Pemulis said the 
guy looked like he was going to be sick all over the net, he said.' 

'Boo, I kicked a kid's ass is all. End of story. I don't think it's good to rehash it when I've 
kicked somebody's ass. It's like a dignity thing. I think we should just let it sort of lie in 
state, quietly. Speaking of which.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

l l 

'Hey Hal?' 

'It's late, Mario. It's sleepy-time. Close your eyes and think fuzzy thoughts.' 

'That's what the Moms always says, too.' 

'Always worked for me. Boo.' 

'You think I think fuzzy thoughts all the time. You let me room with you because you 
feel sorry for me.' 

'Booboo I'm not even going to dignify that. I'll regard it as like a warning sign. You 
always get petulant when you don't get enough sleep. And here we are seeing 
petulance already on the western horizon, right here.' 

'When I asked if you were asleep I was going to ask if you felt like you believed in God, 
today, out there, when you were so on, making that guy look sick.' 

'This again?' 

l l 

'Really don't think midnight in a totally dark room with me so tired my hair hurts and 
drills in six short hours is the time and place to get into this, Mario.' 

'You ask me this once a week.' 

'You never say, is why.' 

'So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with 
God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy 
about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not 
seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.' 

'You're talking about since Himself passed away.' 



'See? You never say.' 'I do too say. I just did.' 

'I just didn't happen to say what you wanted to hear, Booboo, is all.' 

l l 

'There's a difference.' 

'I don't get how you couldn't feel like you believed, today, out there. It was so right 
there. You moved like you totally believed.' 

l l 

'How do you feel inside, not?' 

'Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other. We countenance each other from 
either side of some unbridgeable difference on this issue. Let's lie very quietly and 
ponder this.' 

'Hal?' 

l l 

'Hey Hal?' 

'I'm going to propose that I tell you a joke. Boo, on the condition that afterward you 
shush and let me sleep.' 

'Is it a good one?' 

'Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a 
dyslexic.' 

'I give.' 

'You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question 
of whether or not there's a dog.' 

'That's a good one!' 

'Shush.' 

'Hey Hal? What's an insomniac?' 

'Somebody who rooms with you, kid, that's for sure.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'How come the Moms never cried when Himself passed away? I cried, and you, even 
C.T. cried. I saw him personally cry.' 

l l 

'You listened to Tosca over and over and cried and said you were sad. We all were.' 

i i 

'Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?' 

l l 

'It seems like she got happier. She seems even taller. She stopped travelling 
everywhere all the time for this and that thing. The corporate-grammar thing. The 
library-protest thing.' 

'Now she never goes anywhere. Boo. Now she's got the Headmaster's House and her 
office and the tunnel in between, and never leaves the grounds. She's a worse 
workaholic than she ever was. And more obsessive-compulsive. When's the last time 
you saw a dust-mote in that house?' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'Now she's just an agoraphobic workaholic and obsessive-compulsive. This strikes you 
as happification?' 



'Her eyes are better. They don't seem as sunk in. They look better. She laughs at C.T. 
way more than she laughed at Himself. She laughs from lower down inside. She laughs 
more. Her jokes she tells are better ones than yours, even, now, a lot of the time.' 

l l 

'How come she never got sad?' 

'She did get sad, Booboo. She just got sad in her way instead of yours and mine. She 
got sad. I'm pretty sure.' 

'Hal?' 

'You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by the portcullis 
here after it happened? Do you remember that? And it goes to half-mast every year at 
Convocation? Remember the flag. Boo?' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'Don't cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are 
two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to 
sleep here in a second. So listen — one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to 
lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can 
raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, 
Mario?' 

'Hal?' 

'She's plenty sad, I bet.' 

At 2010h. on 1 April Y.D.A.U., the medical attache is still watching the unlabelled 
entertainment cartridge. 


OCTOBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


For Orin Incandenza, #71, morning is the soul's night. The day's worst time, 
psychically. He cranks the condo's AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes 
up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you're 
dreading whatever you think of. 

Hal Incandenza's brother Orin wakes up alone at 0730h. amid a damp scent of 
Ambush and on the other side's dented pillow a note with phone # and vital data in a 
loopy schoolgirlish hand. There's also Ambush on the note. His side of the bed is soaked. 

Orin makes honey-toast, standing barefoot at the kitchen counter, wearing briefs and 
an old Academy sweatshirt with the arms cut off, squeezing honey from the head of a 
plastic bear. The floor's so cold it hurts his feet, but the double-pane window over the 
sink is hot to the touch: the beastly metro Phoenix October A.M. heat just outside. 



Home with the team, no matter how high the AC or how thin the sheet, Orin wakes 
with his own impression sweated darkly into the bed beneath him, slowly drying all day 
to a white salty outline just slightly off from the week's other faint dried outlines, so his 
fetal-shaped fossilized image is fanned out across his side of the bed like a deck of cards, 
just overlapping, like an acid trail or timed exposure. 

The heat just past the glass doors tightens his scalp. He takes breakfast out to a white 
iron table by the condo complex's central pool and tries to eat it there, in the heat, the 
coffee not steaming or cooling. He sits there in dumb animal pain. He has a mustache of 
sweat. A bright beach ball floats and bumps against one side of the pool. The sun like a 
sneaky keyhole view of hell. No one else out here. The complex is a ring with the pool 
and deck and Jacuzzi in the center. Heat shimmers off the deck like fumes from fuel. 
There's that mirage thing where the extreme heat makes the dry deck look wet with 
fuel. Orin can hear cartridge-viewers going from behind closed windows, that aerobics 
show every morning, and also someone playing an organ, and the older woman who 
won't ever smile back at him in the apartment next to his doing operatic scales, muffled 
by drapes and sun-curtains and double panes. The Jacuzzi chugs and foams. 

The note from last night's Subject is on violet bond once folded and with a circle of 
darker violet dead-center where the subject's perfume-spritzer had hit it. The only 
interesting thing about the script, but also depressing, is that every single circle — o's, 
d's, p's, the #s 6 and 8 — is darkened in, while the i's are dotted not with circles but with 
tiny little Valentine hearts, which are not darkened in. Orin reads the note while he eats 
toast that's mainly an excuse for the honey. He uses his smaller right arm to eat and 
drink. His oversized left arm and big left leg remain at rest at all times in the morning. 

A breeze sends the beach ball skating all the way across the blue pool to the other 
side, and Orin watches its noiseless glide. The white iron tables have no umbrellas, and 
you can tell where the sun is without looking; you can feel right where it is on your body 
and project from there. The ball moves tentatively back out toward the middle of the 
pool and then stays there, not even bobbing. The same small breezes make the rotted 
palms along the condominium complex's stone walls rustle and click, and a couple of 
fronds detach and spiral down, hitting the deck with a slap. All the plants out here are 
malevolent, heavy and sharp. The parts of the palms above the fronds are tufted in sick 
stuff like coconut-hair. Roaches and other things live in the trees. Rats, maybe. 
Loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds. All the plants either spiny or meaty. Cacti in 
queer tortured shapes. The tops of the palms like Rod Stewart's hair, from days gone by. 

Orin returned with the team from the Chicago game two nights ago, redeye. He knows 
that he and the place-kicker are the only two starters who are not still in terrible pain, 
physically, from the beating. 

The day before they left — so like five days ago — Orin was out by himself in the 
Jacuzzi by the pool late in the day, caring for the leg, sitting in the radiant heat and 
bloody late-day light with the leg in the Jacuzzi, absently squeezing the tennis ball he 
still absently squeezes out of habit. Watching the Jacuzzi funnel and bubble and foam 
around the leg. And out of nowhere a bird had all of a sudden fallen into the Jacuzzi. 
With a flat matter-of-fact plop. Out of nowhere. Out of the wide empty sky. Nothing 
overhung the Jacuzzi but sky. The bird seemed to have just had a coronary or something 



in flight and died and fallen out of the empty sky and landed dead in the Jacuzzi, right by 
the leg. He brought his sunglasses down onto the bridge of his nose with a finger and 
looked at it. It was an undistinguished kind of bird. Not a predator. Like a wren, maybe. 
It seems like no way could it have been a good sign. The dead bird bobbed and barrel- 
rolled in the foam, sucked under one second and reappearing the next, creating an 
illusion of continued flight. Orin had inherited none of the Morris's phobias about dis¬ 
order, hygiene. (Not crazy about bugs though — roaches.) But he'd just sat there 
squeezing the ball, looking at the bird, without a conscious thought in his head. By the 
next morning, waking up, curled and entombed, it seemed like it had to have been a bad 
sign, though. 

Orin now always gets the shower so hot it's to where he can just barely stand it. The 
condo's whole bathroom is done in this kind of minty yellow tile he didn't choose, 
maybe chosen by the free safety who lived here before the Cardinals sent New Orleans 
the free safety, two reserve guards and cash for Orin Incandenza, punter. 

And no matter how many times he has the Terminex people out, there are still the 
enormous roaches that come out of the bathroom drains. Sewer roaches, according to 
Terminex. Blattaria implacablus or something. Really huge roaches. Armored-vehicle- 
type bugs. Totally black, with Kevlar-type cases, the works. And fearless, raised in the 
Hobbesian sewers down there. Boston's and New Orleans's little brown roaches were 
bad enough, but you could at least come in and turn on a light and they'd run for their 
lives. These Southwest sewer roaches you turn on the light and they just look up at you 
from the tile like: 'You got a problem?' Orin stomped on one of them, only once, that 
had come hellishly up out of the drain in the shower when he was in there, showering, 
going out naked and putting shoes on and coming in and trying to conventionally squash 
it, and the result was explosive. There's still material from that one time in the tile¬ 
grouting. It seems unremovable. Roach-innards. Sickening. Throwing the shoes away 
was preferable to looking at the sole to clean it. Now he keeps big glass tumblers in the 
bathroom and when he turns on the light and sees a roach he puts a glass down over it, 
trapping it. After a couple days the glass is all steamed up and the roach has asphyxiated 
messlessly and Orin discards both the roach and the tumbler in separate sealed Ziplocs 
in the dumpster complex by the golf course up the street. 

The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses 
with huge roaches dying inside, stoically, just sitting there, the glasses gradually 
steaming up with roach-dioxide. The whole thing makes Orin sick. Now he figures the 
hotter the shower's water, the less chance any small armored vehicle is going to feel like 
coming out of the drain while he's in there. 

Sometimes they're in the bowl of the toilet first thing in the A.M., dog-paddling, trying 
to get to the side and climb up. He's also not crazy about spiders, though more like 
unconsciously; he's never come anyplace close to the conscious horror Himself had 
somehow developed about the Southwest's black widows and their chaotic webs — the 
widows are all over the place, both here and Tucson, spottable on all but the coldest 
nights, their dusty webs without any kind of pattern, clotting just about any right-angled 
place that's dim or out of the way. Terminex's toxins are more effective on the widows. 
Orin has them out monthly; he's on like a subscription plan over at Terminex. 



Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. 
There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. 
Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a 
spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that 
were small and timid but could fucking//y, and that kept being found swarming on New 
Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, 
and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical- 
mucus — the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at 
your eyes, as an infant — and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the 
ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that 
last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding 
that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray- 
blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban 
Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one 
even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin 
came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers. 
And so to the glass canyons and merciless light of metro Phoenix, in a kind of desiccated 
circle, near the Tucson of his own father's desiccated youth. 

It's the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that it 
takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the grip 
on his soul's throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes 
unalone, if the previous night's Subject is still there, wanting to twitter, or to cuddle and, 
like, spoon, asking what exactly is the story with the foggy inverted tumblers on the 
bathroom floor, commenting on his night-sweats, clattering around in the kitchen, 
making kippers or bacon or something even more hideous and unhoneyed he's sup¬ 
posed to eat with post-coital male gusto, the ones who have this thing about they call it 
Feeding My Man, wanting a man who can barely keep down A.M. honey-toast to eat 
with male gusto, elbows out and shovelling, making little noises. Even when alone, able 
to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these 
darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think about 
how he'll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows 
and merciless light — the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but 
sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like 
falling, again, off something tall and sheer. 

So now his own eye-mucus is secure, in the Desert Southwest; but the bad dreams 
have gotten worse since the trade to this blasted area Himself himself had fled, long 
ago, as an unhappy youngster. 

As a nod to Orin's own unhappy youth, all the dreams seem to open briefly with some 
sort of competitive-tennis situation. Last night's had started with a wide-angle shot of 
Orin on a Har-Tru court, waiting to receive serve from someone vague, some Academy 
person — Ross Reat maybe, or good old M. Bain, or gray-toothed Walt Flechette, now a 
teaching pro in the Carolinas — when the dream's screen tightens on him and abruptly 
dissolves to the blank dark rose color of eyes closed against bright light, and there's the 
ghastly feeling of being submerged and not knowing which way to head for the surface 



and air, and after some interval the dream's Orin struggles up from this kind of visual 
suffocation to find his mother's head, Mrs. Avril M. T. Incandenza's, the Moms's 
disconnected head attached face-to-face to his own fine head, strapped tight to his face 
somehow by a wrap-around system of VS HiPro top-shelf lamb-gut string from his 
Academy racquet's own face. So that no matter how frantically Orin tries to move his 
head or shake it side to side or twist up his face or roll his eyes he's still staring at, into, 
and somehow through his mother's face. As if the Moms's head was some sort of 
overtight helmet Orin can't wrestle his way out of. 2 In the dream, it's understandably 
vital to Orin that he disengage his head from the phylacteryish bind of his mother's 
disembodied head, and he cannot. Last night's Subject's note indicates that at some 
point last night Orin had clutched her head with both hands and tried to sort of stiff-arm 
her, though not in an ungentle or complaining way (the note, not the stiff-arm). The 
apparent amputation of the Moms's head from the rest of the Moms appears in the 
dream to be clean and surgically neat: there is no evidence of a stump or any kind of 
nubbin of neck, even, and it is as if the base of the round pretty head had been sealed, 
and also sort of rounded off, so that her head is a large living ball, a globe with a face, 
attached to his own head's face. 

The Subject after Bain's sister but before the one just before this one, with the 
Ambush scent and the hearts over i's, the previous Subject had been a sallowly pretty 
Arizona State developmental psychology grad student with two kids and outrageous 
alimony and penchants for sharp jewelry, refrigerated chocolate, InterLace educational 
cartridges, and professional athletes who thrashed in their sleep. Not real bright — she 
thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the 
numeral 8, to give you an idea. Their last morning together, right before he'd mailed her 
child an expensive toy and then had his phone number changed, he'd awakened from a 
night of horror-show dreams — woke up with an abrupt fetal spasm, unrefreshed and 
benighted of soul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a 
coroner's chalk outline — he woke to find the Subject up and sitting up against the 
reading pillow, wearing his sleeveless Academy sweatshirt and sipping hazelnut 
espresso and watching, on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the 
bedroom's south wall, something horrific called 'INTERLACE EDUCATIONAL CARTRIDGES 
IN CONJUNCTION WITH CBC EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING MATRIX PRESENTS 
SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?' and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled 
fetal on his own sweat-shadow, and watch on the viewer a pale young guy about Hal's 
age, with copper stubble and a red cowlick and flat blank affectless black doll's eyes, 
stare into space stage-left while a brisk Albertan voiceover explained that Fenton here 
was a dyed-in-the-wool paranoid schizophrenic who believed that radioactive fluids 
were invading his skull and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been 
specially designed and programmed to pursue him without cease until they caught him 
and made brutal sport of him and buried him alive. It was an old late-millennial CBC 
public-interest Canadian news documentary, digitally sharpened and redisseminated 
under the InterLace imprimatur — InterLace could get kind of seedy and low-rent during 
early-morning off-hours, in terms of Spontaneous Disseminations. 

And so but since the old CBC documentary's thesis was turning out pretty clearly to be 



SCHIZOPHRENIA: BODY, the voiceover evinced great clipped good cheer as it explained 
that well, yes, poor old Fenton here was more or less hopeless as an extra-institutional 
functioning unit, but that, on the up-side, science could at least give his existence some 
sort of meaning by studying him very carefully to help learn how schizophrenia 
manifested itself in the human body's brain... that, in other words, with the aid of 
cutting-edge Positron-Emission Topography or 'P.E.T.' technology (since supplanted 
wholly by Invasive Digitals, Orin hears the developmental psychology graduate student 
mutter to herself, watching rapt over her cup, unaware that Orin's paralytically awake), 
they could scan and study how different parts of poor old Fenton's dysfunctional brain 
emitted positrons in a whole different topography than your average hale and hearty 
nondelusional God-fearing Albertan's brain, advancing science by injecting test-subject 
Fenton here with a special blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive dye and then 
sticking him in the rotating body-sized receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner — on the viewer, 
it's an enormous gray-metal machine that looks like something co-designed by James 
Cameron and Fritz Lang, and now have a look at this Fenton fellow's eyes as he starts to 
get the gist of what the voiceover's saying — and in a terse old Public-TV cut they now 
showed subject Fenton in five-point canvas restraints whipping his copper-haired head 
from side to side as guys in mint-green surgical masks and caps inject him with 
radioactive fluids through a turkey-baster-sized syringe, then good old Fenton's eyes 
bugging out in total foreseen horror as he's rolled toward the huge gray P.E.T. device 
and slid like an unrisen loaf into the thing's open maw until only his decay-colored 
sneakers are in view, and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject 
counterclockwise, with brutal speed, so that the old sneakers point up and then left and 
then down and then right and then up, faster and faster, the machine's blurps and 
tweets not even coming close to covering Fenton's entombed howls as his worst 
delusional fears came true in digital stereo and you could hear the last surviving bits of 
his functional dye-permeated mind being screamed out of him for all time as the viewer 
digitally superimposed an image of Fenton's ember-red and neutron-blue brain in the 
lower-right corner, where InterLace's Time/Temp functions usually appear, and the brisk 
voiceover gave capsule histories of first paranoid schizophrenia and then P.E.T. With 
Orin lying there slit-eyed, wet and neuralgic with A.M. dread, wishing the Subject would 
put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and take the rest of her Toblerone out of the 
freezer and go, so he could go to the bathroom and get yesterday's asphyxiated roaches 
into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters all filled for the day, and decide what 
kind of expensive present to mail the Subject's kid. 

And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere. 

And then news of pressure from the AZ Cardinal administration to cooperate with 
some sort of insipid-type personality-profile series of interviews with some profiler from 
Moment magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in some 
blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling 
Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora's box of worms. 

Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving 
upward, with south-to-north strokes, as he was taught. 



YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


Here's Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly 
high in the Enfield Tennis Academy's underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into 
an industrial exhaust fan. It's the sad little interval after afternoon matches and 
conditioning but before the Academy's communal supper. Hal is by himself down here 
and nobody knows where he is or what he's doing. 

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy 
as he is to getting high. 

A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with a 
pinch of good dope, gets hot and is hard on the mouth — the brass ones especially — 
but one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot gets 
inhaled; there's none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl's big 
load, and Hal can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that 
even his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling. 

Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste. 

The Academy's tennis courts' Lung's Pump Room is underground and accessible only 
by tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly, embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design. 

Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let's face it, anything you use to 
smoke high-resin dope with is going to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going to be 
like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bong-water to deal with. Pipes are 
smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party bowl that 
disperses nonutilized smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly 
employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further wrapped and 
sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the 
lighter and eyedrops and mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and it's 
highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert. 

As far as Hal knows, colleagues Michael Pemulis, Jim Struck, Bridget C. Boone, Jim 
Troeltsch, Ted Schacht, Trevor Axford, and possibly Kyle D. Coyle and Tall Paul Shaw, 
and remotely possibly Frannie Unwin, all know Hal gets regularly covertly high. It's also 
not impossible that Bernadette Longley knows, actually; and of course the unpleasant K. 
Freer always has suspicions of all kinds. And Hal's brother Mario knows a thing or two. 
But that's it, in terms of public knowledge. And but even though Pemulis and Struck and 
Boone and Troeltsch and Axford and occasionally (in a sort of medicinal or touristic way) 
Slice and Schacht all are known to get high also, Hal has actually gotten actively high 
only with Pemulis, on the rare occasions he's gotten high with anybody else, as in in 



person, which he avoids. He'd forgot: Ortho ('The Darkness') Slice, of Partridge KS, 
knows; and Hal's oldest brother, Orin, mysteriously, even long-distance, seems to know 
more than he's coming right out and saying, unless Hal's reading more into some of the 
phone-comments than are there. 

Hal's mother, Mrs. Avril Incandenza, and her adoptive brother Dr. Charles Tavis, the 
current E.T.A. Headmaster, both know Hal drinks alcohol sometimes, like on weekend 
nights with Troeltsch or maybe Axford down the hill at clubs on Commonwealth Ave.; 
The Unexamined Life has its notorious Blind Bouncer night every Friday where they card 
you on the Honor System. Mrs. Avril Incandenza isn't crazy about the idea of Hal 
drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk, when alive, and reportedly his 
father's own father before him, in AZ and CA; but Hal's academic precocity, and 
especially his late competitive success on the junior circuit, make it clear that he's able 
to handle whatever modest amounts she's pretty sure he consumes — there's no way 
someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic 
levels, the E.T.A. psych-counselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic 
part — and Avril feels it's important that a concerned but un-smothering single parent 
know when to let go somewhat and let the two high-functioning of her three sons make 
their own possible mistakes and learn from their own valid experience, no matter how 
much the secret worry about mistakes tears her gizzard out, the mother's. And Charles 
supports whatever personal decisions she makes in conscience about her children. And 
God knows she'd rather have Hal having a few glasses of beer every so often than 
absorbing God alone knows what sort of esoteric designer compounds with reptilian 
Michael Pemulis and trail-of-slime-leaving James Struck, both of whom give Avril a 
howling case of the maternal fantods. And ultimately, she's told Drs. Rusk and Tavis, 
she'd rather have Hal abide in the security of the knowledge that his mother trusts him, 
that she's trusting and supportive and doesn't judge or gizzard-tear or wring her fine 
hands over his having for instance a glass of Canadian ale with friends every now and 
again, and so works tremendously hard to hide her maternal dread of his possibly ever 
drinking like James himself or James's father, all so that Hal might enjoy the security of 
feeling that he can be up-front with her about issues like drinking and not feel he has to 
hide anything from her under any circumstances. 

Dr. Tavis and Dolores Rusk have privately discussed the fact that not least among the 
phobic stressors Avril suffers so uncomplainingly with is a black phobic dread of hiding 
or secrecy in all possible forms with respect to her sons. 

Avril and C. T. know nothing about Hal's penchants for high-resin Bob Hope and 
underground absorption, which fact Hal obviously likes a lot, on some level, though he's 
never given much thought to why. To why he likes it so much. 

E.T.A.'s hilltop grounds are traversable by tunnel. Avril I., for example, who never 
leaves the grounds anymore, rarely travels above ground, willing to hunch to take the 
off-tunnels between Headmaster's House and her office next to Charles Tavis's in the 
Community and Administration Bldg., a pink-bricked white-pillared neo-Georgian thing 
that Hal's brother Mario says looks like a cube that has swallowed a ball too big for its 
stomach. 3 Two sets of elevators and one of stairs run between the lobby, reception 
area, and administrative offices on Comm.-Ad.'s first floor and the weight room, sauna. 



and locker/shower areas on the sublevel below it. One large tunnel of elephant-colored 
cement leads from just off the boys' showers to the mammoth laundry room below the 
West Courts, and two smaller tunnels radiate from the sauna area south and east to the 
subbasements of the smaller, spherocubular, proto-Georgian buildings (housing 
classrooms and subdormitories B and D); these two basements and smaller tunnels 
often serve as student storage space and hallways between various prorectors' 4 private 
rooms. Then two even smaller tunnels, navigable by any adult willing to assume a kind 
of knuckle-dragging simian posture, in turn connect each of the subbasements to the 
former optical and film-development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James 
0. Incandenza (now deceased) below and just west of the Headmaster's House (from 
which facilities there's also a fair-diametered tunnel that goes straight to the lowest 
level of the Community and Administration Bldg., but its functions have gradually 
changed over four years, and it's now too full of exposed wiring and hot-water pipes and 
heating ducts to be really passable) and to the offices of the Physical Plant, almost 
directly beneath the center row of E.T.A. outdoor tennis courts, which offices and 
custodial lounge are in turn connected to E.T.A.'s Lung-Storage and -Pump Rooms via a 
pargeted tunnel hastily constructed by the TesTar All-Weather Inflatable Structures 
Corp., which together with the folks over at ATHSCME Industrial Air Displacement De¬ 
vices erects and services the inflatable dendriurethane dome, known as the Lung, that 
covers the middle row of courts for the winter indoor season. The crude little rough¬ 
sided tunnel between Plant and Pump is traversable only via all-fours-type crawling and 
is essentially unknown to staff and Administration, popular only with the Academy's 
smaller kids' Tunnel Club, as well as with certain adolescents with strong secret 
incentive to crawl on all fours. 

The Lung-Storage Room is basically impassable from March through November 
because it's full of intricately folded dendriurethane Lung-material and dismantled 
sections of flexible ducting and fan-blades, etc. The Pump Room is right next to it, 
though you have to crawl back out into the tunnel to get to it. On the engineering 
diagrams the Pump Room's maybe about twenty meters directly beneath the 
centermost courts in the middle row of courts, and looks like a kind of spider hanging 
upside-down — an unfenestrated oval chamber with six man-sized curved ducts 
radiating up and out to exit points on the grounds above. And the Pump Room has six 
radial openings, one for each upcurving duct: three two-meter vents with huge turbine- 
bladed exhaust fans bolted into their grilles and three more 2M's with reversed 
ATHSCME intake fans that allow air from the ground above to be sucked down and 
around the room and up into the three exhaust vents. The Pump Room is essentially like 
a pulmonary organ, or the epicenter of a massive six-vectored wind tunnel, and when 
activated roars like a banshee that's slammed its hand in a door, though the P.R.'s in full 
legit operation only when the Lung is up, usually November-March. The intake fans 
pullground-level winter air down into and around the room and through the three 
exhaust fans and up the outtake ducts into networks of pneumatic tubing in the Lung's 
sides and dome: it's the pressure of the moving air that keeps the fragile Lung inflated. 

When the courts' Lung is down and stored, Hal will descend and walk and then hunch 
his way in to make sure nobody's in the Physical Plant quarters, then he'll hunch and 



crawl to the P.R., gear bag in his teeth, and activate just one of the big exhaust fans and 
get secretly high and exhale palely through its blades into the vent, so that any possible 
odor is blown through an outtake duct and expelled through a grille'd hole on the west 
side of the West Courts, a threaded hole, with a flange, where brisk white-suited 
ATHSCME guys will attach some of the Lung's arterial pneumatic tubing at some point 
soon when Schtitt et al. on Staff decide the real weather has moved past enduring for 
outdoor tennis. 

During winter months, when any expelled odor would get ducted up into the Lung and 
hang there conspicuous, Hal mostly goes into a remote sub-dormitory lavatory and 
climbs onto a toilet in a stall and exhales into the grille of one of the little exhaust fans in 
the ceiling; but this routine lacks a certain intricate subterranean covert drama. It's 
another reason why Hal dreads Interdependence Day and the approach of the 
WhataBurger classic and Thanksgiving and unendurable weather, and the erection of 
the Lung. 

Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe 
because of the unprecedented tensions: post-latency and puberty and angst and 
impending adulthood, etc. To help manage the intra-psychic storms, etc. Since the 
place's inception, there's always been a certain percentage of the high-caliber 
adolescent players at E.T.A. who manage their internal weathers chemically. Much of 
this is good clean temporary fun; but a traditionally smaller and harder-core set tends to 
rely on personal chemistry to manage E.T.A.'s special demands — dexedrine or low-volt 
methedrine 5 before matches and benzodiazapenes 6 to come back down after matches, 
with Mudslides or Blue Flames at some understanding Comm. Ave. nightspot 7 or beers 
and bongs in some discreet Academy corner at night to short-circuit the up-and-down 
cycle, mushrooms or X or something from the Mild Designer class 8 — or maybe 
occasionally a little Black Star, 9 whenever there's a match- and demand-free weekend, 
to basically short out the whole motherboard and blow out all the circuits and slowly 
recover and be almost neurologically reborn and start the gradual cycle all over again... 
this circular routine, if your basic wiring's OK to begin with, can work surprisingly well 
throughout adolescence and sometimes into one's like early twenties, before it starts to 
creep up on you. 

But so some E.T.A.s — not just Hal Incandenza by any means — are involved with 
recreational substances, is the point. Like who isn't, at some life-stage, in the U.S.A. and 
Interdependent regions, in these troubled times, for the most part. Though a decent 
percentage of E.T.A. students aren't at all. I.e. involved. Some persons can give 
themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves- 
away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get 
older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that 
people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. 
Some just prefer to do it in secret. 

An enrolled student-athlete's use of alcohol or illicit chemicals is cause for immediate 
expulsion, according to E.T.A.'s admissions catalogue. But the E.T.A. staff tends to have a 
lot more important stuff on its plate than policing kids who've already given themselves 
away to an ambitious competitive pursuit. The administrative attitude under first James 



Incandenza and then Charles Tavis is, like, why would anybody who wanted to com¬ 
promise his faculties chemically even come here, to E.T.A., where the whole point is to 
stress and stretch your faculties along multiple vectors. 10 And since it's the alumni 
prorectors who have the most direct supervisory contact with the kids, and since most 
of the prorectors themselves are depressed or traumatized about not making it into the 
Show and having to come back to E.T.A. and live in decent but subterranean rooms off 
the tunnels and work as assistant coaches and teach laughable elective classes — which 
is what the eight E.T.A. prorectors do, when they're not off playing Satellite 
tournaments or trying to make it through the qualifying rounds of some serious-money 
event — and so they're morose and low on morale, and feel bad about themselves, 
often, as a rule, and so also not all that surprisingly tend to get high now and then 
themselves, though in a less covert or exuberant fashion than the hardcore students' 
chemical cadre, but so given all this it's not hard to see why internal drug-enforcement 
at E.T.A. tends to be flaccid. The other nice thing about the Pump Room is the way it's 
connected by tunnel to the prorectors' rows of housing units, which means men's 
rooms, which means Hal can crawl, hunch, and tiptoe into an unoccupied men's room 
and brush his teeth with his portable Oral-B and wash his face and apply eyedrops and 
Old Spice and a plug of wintergreen Kodiak and then saunter back to the sauna area and 
ascend to ground level looking and smelling right as rain, because when he gets high he 
develops a powerful obsession with having nobody — not even the neurochemical 
cadre — know he's high. This obsession is almost irresistible in its force. The amount of 
organization and toiletry-lugging he has to do to get secretly high in front of a 
subterranean outtake vent in the pre-supper gap would make a lesser man quail. Hal 
has no idea why this is, or whence, this obsession with the secrecy of it. He broods on it 
abstractly sometimes, when high: this No-One-Must-Know thing. It's not fear per se, 
fear of discovery. Beyond that it all gets too abstract and twined up to lead to anything, 
Hal's brooding. Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less 
about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he 
does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is 
even exceptionally bad, this tendency. 

At 0015h., 2 April, the medical attache's wife is just leaving the Mount Auburn Total 
Fitness Center, having played five six-game pro-sets in her little Mideast-diplomatic- 
wife-tennis-circle's weekly round-robin, then hung around the special Silver-Key- 
Members' Lounge with the other ladies, unwrapping her face and hair and playing 
Narjees 11 and all smoking kif and making extremely delicate and oblique fun of their 
husbands' sexual idiosyncrasies, laughing softly with their hands over their mouths. The 
medical attache, at their apartment, is still viewing the unlabelled cartridge, which he 
has rewound to the beginning several times and then configured for a recursive loop. He 
sits there, attached to a congealed supper, watching, at 0020h., having now wet both 
his pants and the special recliner. 

Eighteen in May, Mario Incandenza's designated function around Enfield Tennis 
Academy is filmic: sometimes during A.M. drills or P.M. matches he'll be assigned by 
Coach Schtitt et al. to set up an old camcorder or whatever video stuff's to hand on a 
tripod and record a certain area of court, videotaping different kids' strokes, footwork. 



certain tics and hitches in serves or running volleys, so the staff can show the tapes to 
the kids instructional^, letting the kids see on the screen exactly what a coach or 
prorector's talking about. The reason being it's a lot easier to fix something if you can 
see it. 


AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN 
HEARTLAND 


Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined 
toward violent crime. Violence requires all different kinds of energy, and most drug 
addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what their 
professional crime lets them afford. Drug addicts are often burglars, therefore. One 
reason why the home of someone whose home has been burglarized feels violated and 
unclean is that there have probably been drug addicts in there. Don Gately was a 
twenty-seven-year-old oral narcotics addict (favoring Demerol and Talwin 12 ), and a 
more or less professional burglar; and he was, himself, unclean and violated. But he was 
a gifted burglar, when he burgled — though the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive 
and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting 
them open and close elevator doors on, he was, at his professional zenith, smart, 
sneaky, quiet, quick, possessed of good taste and reliable transportation — with a kind 
of ferocious jolliness in his attitude toward his livelihood. 

As an active drug addict, Gately was distinguished by his ferocious and jolly elan. He 
kept his big square chin up and his smile wide, but he bowed neither toward nor away 
from any man. He took zero in the way of shit and was a cheery but implacable 
exponent of the Don't-Get-Mad-Get-Even school. Like for instance once, after he'd done 
a really unpleasant three-month bit in Revere Holding on nothing more than a 
remorseless North Shore Assistant District Attorney's circumstantial suspicion, finally 
getting out after 92 days when his P.D. got the charges dismissed on a right-to-speedy 
brief, Gately and a trusted associate 13 paid a semiprofessional visit to the private home 
of this Assistant D.A. whose zeal and warrant had cost Gately a nasty impromptu detox 
on the floor of his little holding-cell. Also a believer in the Revenge-ls-Tastier-Chilled 
dictum, Gately had waited patiently until the 'Eye On People' section of the Globe 
mentioned the A.D.A. and his wife's presence at some celebrity charity sailing thing out 
in Marblehead. Gately and the associate went that night to the A.D.A.'s private home in 
the upscale Wonderland Valley section of Revere, killed the power to the home with a 



straight shunt in the meter's inflow, then clipped just the ground wire on the home's 
pricey HBT alarm, so that the alarm'd sound after ten or so minutes and create the 
impression that the perps had somehow bungled the alarm and been scared off in the 
middle of the act. Later that night, when Revere's and Marblehead's Finest summoned 
them home, the A.D.A. and his wife found themselves minus a coin collection and two 
antique shotguns and nothing more. Quite a few other valuables were stacked on the 
floor of the living room off the foyer like the perps hadn't had time to get them out of 
the house. Everything else in the burglarized home looked undisturbed. The A.D.A. was 
a jaded pro: he walked around touching the brim of his hat 14 and reconstructed 
probable events: the perps looked like they'd bungled disabling the alarm all the way 
and had got scared off by the thing's siren when the alarm's pricey HBT alternate ground 
kicked in at 300 v. The A.D.A. soothed his wife's sense of violation and uncleanliness. He 
calmly insisted on sleeping there in their home that very night; no hotel: it was like 
crucial to get right back on the emotional horse, in cases like this, he insisted. And then 
the next day the A.D.A. worked out the insurance and reported the shotguns to a buddy 
at A.T.F. 15 and his wife calmed down and life went on. 

About a month later, an envelope arrived in the A.D.A.'s home's exquisite wrought- 
iron mailbox. In the envelope were a standard American Dental Association glossy 
brochure on the importance of daily oral hygiene — available at like any dentist's office 
anywhere — and two high-pixel Polaroid snapshots, one of big Don Gately and one of 
his associate, each in a Halloween mask denoting a clown's great good professional 
cheer, each with his pants down and bent over and each with the enhanced-focus 
handle of one of the couple's toothbrushes protruding from his bottom. 

Don Gately had sense enough never to work the North Shore again after that. But he 
ended up in hideous trouble anyway, A.D.A.-wise. It was either bad luck or kismet or so 
forth. It was because of a cold, a plain old human rhinovirus. And not even Don Gately's 
cold, is what made him finally stop and question his kismet. 

The thing started out looking like tit on a tray, burglary-wise. A beautiful neo-Georgian 
home in a wildly upscale part of Brookline was set nicely back from an unlit pseudo-rural 
road, had a chintzy SentryCo alarm system that fed, idiotically enough, on a whole 
separate 330 v AC 90 Hz cable with its own meter, didn't seem to be on anything like a 
regular P.M.-patrol route, and had, at its rear, flimsily tasteful French doors surrounded 
by dense and thorn-free deciduous shrubbery and blocked off from the garage's halogen 
floods by a private E.W.D.-issue upscale dumpster. It was in short a real cock-tease of a 
home, burglary-wise, for a drug addict. And Don Gately straight-shunted the alarm's 
meter and, with an associate, 16 broke and entered and crept around on huge cat feet. 

Except unfortunately the owner of the house turned out to be still home, even though 
both of his cars and the rest of his family were gone. The little guy was asleep sick in bed 
upstairs in acetate pajamas with a hot water bottle on his chest and half a glass of OJ 
and a bottle of NyQuil 17 and a foreign book and copies of International Affairs and 
Interdependent Affairs and a pair of thick specs and an industrial-size box of Kleenex on 
the bedside table and an empty vaporizer barely humming at the foot of the bed, and 
the guy was to say the least nonplussed to wake up and see high-filter flashlights 
crisscrossing over the unlit bedroom walls and bureau and teak chiffonnier as Gately 



and associate scanned for a wall-safe, which surprisingly like 90% of people with wall- 
safes conceal in their master bedroom behind some sort of land- or seascape painting. 
People turned out so identical in certain root domestic particulars it made Gately feel 
strange sometimes, like he was in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which 
no man should be entitled. Gately had a way stickier conscience about the possession of 
some of these large particular facts than he did about making off with other people's 
personal merchandise. But then all of a sudden in mid-silent-search for a safe here's this 
upscale homeowner turning out to be home with a nasty head-cold while his family's 
out on a two-car foliage-tour in what's left of the Berkshires, writhing groggily and 
NyQuilized around on the bed and making honking adenoidal sounds and asking what in 
bloody hell is the meaning of this, except he's saying it in Quebecois French, which 
means to these thuggish U.S. drug addicts in Halloween-clowns' masks exactly nothing, 
he's sitting up in bed, a little and older-type homeowner with a football-shaped head 
and gray van Dyke and eyes you can tell are used to corrective lenses as he switches on 
the bright bedside lamp. Gately could easily have screwed out of there and never looked 
back; but here indeed, in the lamplight, is a seascape over next to the chiffonnier, and 
the associate has a quick peek and reports that the safe behind it is to laugh at, it can be 
opened with harsh language, almost; and oral narcotics addicts tend to operate on an 
extremely rigid physical schedule of need and satisfaction, and Gately is at this moment 
firmly in the need part of the schedule; and so D. W. Gately disastrously decides to go 
ahead and allow a nonviolent burglary to become in effect a robbery — which the 
operative legal difference involves either violence or the coercive threat of same — and 
Gately draws himself up to his full menacing height and shines his flashlight in the little 
homeowner's rheumy eyes and addresses him the way menacing criminals speak in 
popular entertainment — d's for th's, various apocopes, and so on — and takes hold of 
the guy's ear and conducts him down to a kitchen chair and binds his arms and legs to 
the chair with electrical cords neatly clipped from refrigerator and can-opener and M. 
Cafe-brand Automatic Cafe-au-Lait-Maker, binds him just short of gangrenously tight, 
because he's hoping the Berkshire foliage is prime and the guy's going to be soloing in 
this chair for a good stretch of time, and Gately starts looking through the kitchen's 
drawers for the silverware — not the good-silver-for-company silverware; that was in a 
calfskin case underneath some neatly folded old spare Christmas wrapping in a stunning 
hardwood-with-ivory-inlay chest of drawers in the living room, where over 90% of 
upscale people's good silver is always hidden, and has already been promoted and is 
piled 18 just off the foyer — but just the regular old everyday flatware silverware, 
because the vast bulk of homeowners keep their dish towels two drawers below their 
everyday-silverware drawer, and God's made no better call-for-help-stifling gag in the 
world than a good old oily-smelling fake-linen dish towel; and the bound guy in the 
cords on the chair suddenly snaps to the implications of what Gately's looking for and is 
struggling and saying: Do not gag me, I have a terrible cold, my nose she is a brick of the 
snot, I have not the power to breathe through the nose, for the love of God please do 
not gag my mouth; and as a gesture of goodwill the homeowner tells Gately, who's 
rummaging, the combination of the bedroom's seascape safe, except in French 
numbers, which together with the honking adenoidal inflection the guy's grippe gives his 



speech doesn't even sound like human speech to Gately, and but also the guy tells 
Gately there are some antique pre-British-takeover Quebecois gold coins in a calfskin 
purse taped to the back of an undistinguished Impressionist landscape in the living 
room. But everything the Canadian homeowner says means no more to poor old Don 
Gately, whistling a jolly tune and trying to look menacing in his clown's mask, than the 
cries of, say. North Shore gulls or inland grackles; and sure enough the towels are two 
drawers under the spoons, and here comes Gately across the kitchen looking like a sort 
of Bozo from hell, and the Quebecer guy's mouth goes oval with horror, and into that 
mouth goes a balled-up, faintly greasy-smelling kitchen towel, and across the guy's 
cheeks and over the dome of protruding linen goes some fine-quality fibrous strapping 
tape from the drawer under the decommissioned phone — why does everybody keep 
the serious mailing supplies in the drawer nearest the kitchen phone? — and Don Gately 
and associate finish their swift and with-the-best-of-intentions nonviolent business of 
stripping the Brookline home as bare as a post-feral-hamster meadow, and they relock 
the front door and hit the unlit road in Gately's reliable and double-mufflered 4x4. And 
the bound, wheezing, acetate-clad Canadian — the right-hand man to probably the 
most infamous anti-O.N.A.N. organizer north of the Great Concavity, the lieutenant and 
trouble-shooting trusted adviser who selflessly volunteered to move with his family to 
the savagely American area of metro Boston to act as liaison between and general 
leash-holder for the half-dozen or so malevolent and mutually antagonistic groups of 
Quebecer Separatists and Albertan ultra-rightists united only in their fanatical conviction 
that the U.S.A.'s Experialistic 'gift' or 'return' of the so-calledly 'Reconfigured' Great 
Convexity to its northern neighbor and 0.N.A.N. ally constituted an intolerable blow to 
Canadian sovereignty, honor, and hygiene — this homeowner, unquestionably a V.I.P., 
although admittedly rather a covert V.I.P., or probably more accurately a 'P.l.T.,' 19 in 
French, this meek-looking Canadian-terrorism-coordinator — bound to his chair, 
thoroughly gagged, sitting there, alone, under cold fluorescent kitchen lights, 20 the 
rhinovirally afflicted man, gagged with skill and quality materials — the guy, having 
worked so hard to partially clear one clotted nasal passage that he tore intercostal 
ligaments in his ribs, soon found even that pinprick of air blocked off by mucus's 
implacable lava-like flow once again, and so has to tear more ligaments trying to breach 
the other nostril, and so on; and after an hour of struggle and flames in his chest and 
blood on his lips and the white kitchen towel from trying frantically to tongue the towel 
out past the tape, which is quality tape, and after hopes skyrocketing when the doorbell 
rings and then hopes blackly dashed when the person at the door, a young woman with 
a clipboard and chewing gum who's offering promotional coupons good for Happy 
Holidays discounts on memberships of six months or more at a string of Boston non-UV 
tanning salons, shrugs in her parka and makes a mark on the clipboard and blithely 
retreats down the long driveway to the pseudo-rural road, an hour of this or more, 
finally the Quebecois P.I.T., after unspeakable agony — slow suffocation, mucoidal or 
no, being no day at the Montreal Tulip-Fest — at the height of which agony, hearing his 
head's pulse as receding thunder and watching his vision's circle shrink as a red aperture 
around his sight rotates steadily in from the edges, at the height of which he could think 
only, despite the pain and panic, of what a truly dumb and silly way this was, after all 



this time, to die, a thought which the towel and tape denied expression via the rueful 
grin with which the best men meet the dumbest ends — this Guillaume DuPlessis 
passed bluely from this life, and sat there, in the kitchen chair, 250 clicks due east of 
some really spectacular autumn foliage, for almost two nights and days, his posture 
getting more and more military as rigor mortis set in, with his bare feet looking like 
purple loaves of bread, from the lividity; and when Brookline's Finest were finally 
summoned and got him unbound from the coldly lit chair, they had to carry him out as if 
he were still seated, so militarily comme-il-faut had his limbs and spine hardened. And 
poor old Don Gately, whose professional habit of killing power with straight shunts to a 
meter's inflow was pretty much a signature M.O., and who had, of course, a special 
place in the heart of a remorseless Revere A.D.A. with judicial clout throughout Boston's 
three counties and beyond, an of course particularly remorseless A.D.A., as of late, 
whose wife now needed Valium even just to floss, and was patiently awaiting his 
chance, the A.D.A. was, coldly biding his time, being a patient Get-Even and Cold-Dish 
man just like Don Gately, who was, through no will to energy-consuming violence on his 
part, in the sort of a hell of a deep-shit mess that can turn a man's life right around. 

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace Telentertainment, 932/1864 
R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink 2 , post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus 
and icons, pixel-free Internet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, 
Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective 
videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one 
consoles, Yushityu nanoprocessors, laser chromotography. Virtual-capable media-cards, 
fiberoptic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, 
gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. 


3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


Rm. 204, Subdormitory B: Jim Troeltsch, age seventeen, hometown Narberth PA, 
current Enfield Tennis Academy rank in Boys' 18's #8, which puts him at #2 Singles on 
the 18's B-team, has been taken ill. Again. It came on as he was suiting up warmly for 
the B-squad's 0745h. drills. A cartridge of a round-of-16 match from September's U.S. 
Open had been on the small room viewer with the sound all the way down as usual and 
Troeltsch'd been straightening the straps on his jock, idly calling the match's action into 
his fist, when it came on. The illness. It came out of nowhere. His breathing all of a 



sudden started hurting the back of his throat. Then that overfull heat in various cranial 
meatus. Then he sneezed and the stuff he sneezed out was thick and doughy. It came on 
ultra-fast and out of the pre-drill blue. He's back in bed now, supine, watching the 
match's fourth set but not calling the action. The viewer's right under Pemulis's poster 
of the paranoid king 21 that you can't escape looking at if you want to look at the viewer. 
Clotted Kleenex litter the floor around his bed's wastebasket. The bedside table is 
littered with both OTC and prescription expectorants and pertussives and analgesics and 
Vitamin-C megaspansules and one bottle of Benadryl and one of Seldane, 22 only the 
Seldane bottle actually contains several Tenuate 75-mg. capsules Troeltsch has 
incrementally promoted from Pemulis's part of the room and has, rather ingeniously he 
thinks, stashed in bold plain sight in a bedside pill bottle where the Peemster would 
never think to check. Troeltsch is the sort that can feel his own forehead and detect 
fever. It's definitely a rhinovirus, the sudden severe kind. He speculated on if yesterday 
when Graham Rader pretended to sneeze on J. Troeltsch's lunch-tray at the milk- 
dispenser at lunch if Rader might have really sneezed and only pretended to pretend, 
transferring virulent rhinoviri to Troeltsch's delicate mucosa. He feverishly mentally calls 
down various cosmic retributions on Rader. Neither of Troeltsch's roommates is here. 
Ted Schacht is getting the knee's first of several whirlpools for the day. Pemulis has 
geared up and left for 0745 drills. Troeltsch offered Pemulis rights to his breakfast to fill 
up his vaporizer for him and call the first-shift nurse for 'yet more' Seldane nuclear- 
grade antihistamine and a dextromethorphan nebulizer and a written excuse from A.M. 
drills. He lies there sweating freely, watching digitally recorded professional tennis, too 
worried about his throat to feel loquacious enough to call the action. Seldane is not 
supposed to make you drowsy but he feels weak and unpleasantly drowsy. He can 
barely make a fist. He's sweaty. Nausea/vomiting like not an impossibility by any means. 
He cannot believe how fast it came on, the illness. The vaporizer seethes and burps, and 
all four of the room's windows weep against the outside cold. There are the sad tiny 
distant-champagne-cork sounds of scores of balls being hit down at the East Courts. 
Troeltsch drifts at a level just above sleep. Enormous ATHSCME displacement fans far up 
north at the wall and border's distant roar and the outdoor voices and pock of cold balls 
create a kind of sound-carpet below the digestive sounds of the vaporizer and the 
squeak of Troeltsch's bedsprings as he thrashes and twitches in a moist half-sleep. He 
has heavy German eyebrows and big-knuckled hands. It's one of those unpleasant 
opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating 
than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep 
where your mind's still working and you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as 
you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, 
incomplete. 

It's literally 'daydreaming,' sick, the kind of incomplete fugue you awaken from with a 
sort of psychic clunk, struggling up to sit upright, convinced there's someone 
unauthorized in the dorm room with you. Falling back sick on his circle-stained pillow, 
staring straight up into the prolix folds of the Turkish blanketish thing Pemulis and 
Schacht had Krazy-Glued to the ceiling's corners, which billows, hanging, so its folds 
form a terrain, like with valleys and shadows. 



I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be 
felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra¬ 
dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all 
along, even awake: it's just been ...overlooked; and then that horrific interval between 
realizing what you've overlooked and turning your head to look back at what's been 
right there all along, the whole time... Your first nightmare away from home and folks, 
your first night at the Academy, it was there all along: The dream is that you awaken 
from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with 
the sudden feeling that there is a distillation of total evil in this dark strange subdorm 
room with you, that evil's essence and center is right here, in this room, right now. And 
is for you alone. None of the other little boys in the room are awake; the bunk above 
yours sags dead, motionless; no one moves; no one else in the room feels the presence 
of something radically evil; none thrash or sit damply up; no one else cries out: 
whatever it is is not evil for them. The flashlight your mother name-tagged with masking 
tape and packed for you special pans around the institutional room: the drop-ceiling, 
the gray striped mattress and bulged grid of bunksprings above you, the two other 
bunkbeds another matte gray that won't return light, the piles of books and compact 
disks and tapes and tennis gear; your disk of white light trembling like the moon on 
water as it plays over the identical bureaus, the recessions of closet and room's front 
door, door's frame's bolections; the cone of light pans over fixtures, the lumpy jumbles 
of sleeping boys' shadows on the snuff-white walls, the two rag throw-rugs' ovals on the 
hardwood floor, black lines of baseboards' reglets, the cracks in the Venetian blinds that 
ooze the violet nonlight of a night with snow and just a hook of moon; the flashlight 
with your name in maternal cursive plays over every cm. of the walls, the rheostats, CD, 
InterLace poster of Tawni Kondo, phone console, desks' TPs, the face in the floor, 
posters of pros, the onionskin yellow of the desklamps' shades, the ceiling-panels' 
patterns of pinholes, the grid of upper bunk's springs, recession of closet and door, boys 
wrapped in blankets, slight crack like a creek's course in the eastward ceiling discernible 
now, maple reglet border at seam of ceiling and walls north and south no floor has a 
face your flashlight showed but didn't no never did see its eyes' pupils set sideways and 
tapered like a cat's its eyebrows' \ / and horrid toothy smile leering right at your light all 
the time you've been scanning oh mother a face in the floor mother oh and your 
flashlight's beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it overcorrects then 
centers on what you'd felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as you'd so carefully 
panned the light and looked, a face in the//oor there all the time but unfelt by all others 
and unseen by you until you knew just as you felt it didn't belong and was evil: Evil. 

And then its mouth opens at your light. 

And then you wake like that, quivering like a struck drum, lying there awake and 
quivering, summoning courage and spit, roll to the right just as in the dream for the 
nametagged flashlight on the floor by the bed just in case, lie there on your shank and 
side, shining the light all over, just as in the dream. Lie there panning, looking, all ribs 
and elbows and dilated eyes. The awake floor is littered with gear and dirty clothes. 



blond hardwood with sealed seams, two throw-rugs, the bare waxed wood shiny in the 
windows' snowlight, the floor neutral, faceless, you cannot see any face in the floor, 
awake, lying there, faceless, blank, dilated, playing beam over floor again and again, not 
sure all night forever unsure you're not missing something that's right there: you lie 
there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might. 


AS OF YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


The Enfield Tennis Academy has been in accredited operation for three pre-Subsidized 
years and then eight Subsidized years, first under the direction of Dr. James Incandenza 
and then under the administration of his half-brother-in-law Charles Tavis, Ed.D. James 
Orin Incandenza — the only child of a former top U.S. jr. tennis player and then 
promising young pre-Method actor who, during the interval of J. 0. Incandenza's early 
formative years, had become a disrespected and largely unemployable actor, driven 
back to his native Tucson AZ and dividing his remaining energies between stints as a 
tennis pro at ranch-type resorts and then short-run productions at something called the 
Desert Beat Theater Project, the father, a dipsomania-cal tragedian progressively 
crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright and with a 
bitterness of ambiguous origin but consuming intensity toward the Method school of 
professional acting and its more promising exponents, a father who somewhere around 
the nadir of his professional fortunes apparently decided to go down to his Raid-sprayed 
basement workshop and build a promising junior athlete the way other fathers might 
restore vintage autos or build ships inside bottles, or like refinish chairs, etc. — James 
Incandenza proved a withdrawn but compliant student of the game and soon a gifted jr. 
player — tall, bespectacled, domineering at net — who used tennis scholarships to 
finance, on his own, private secondary and then higher education at places just about as 
far away from the U.S. Southwest as one could get without drowning. The United States 
government's prestigious O.N.R. 23 financed his doctorate in optical physics, fulfilling 
something of a childhood dream. His strategic value, during the Federal interval G. Ford- 
early G. Bush, as more or less the top applied-geometrical-optics man in the O.N.R. and 
S.A.C., designing neutron-scattering reflectors for thermo-strategic weapons systems, 
then in the Atomic Energy Commission — where his development of gamma-refractive 
indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels is commonly regarded as one of the big 
half-dozen discoveries that made possible cold annular fusion and approximate energy- 
independence for the U.S. and its various allies and protectorates — his optical acumen 
translated, after an early retirement from the public sector, into a patented fortune in 



rearview mirrors, light-sensitive eyewear, holographic birthday and Xmas greeting 
cartridges, videophonic Tableaux, homolosine-cartography software, nonfluorescent 
public-lighting systems and film-equipment; then, in the optative retirement from hard 
science that building and opening a U.S.T.A.-accredited and pedagogically experimental 
tennis academy apparently represented for him, into 'apres-garde' experimental- and 
conceptual-film work too far either ahead of or behind its time, possibly, to be much 
appreciated at the time of his death in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar — although a 
lot of it (the experimental- and conceptual-film work) was admittedly just plain preten¬ 
tious and unengaging and bad, and probably not helped at all by the man's very gradual 
spiral into the crippling dipsomania of his late father. 24 

The tall, ungainly, socially challenged and hard-drinking Dr. Incandenza's May- 
December 25 marriage to one of the few bona fide bombshell-type females in North 
American academia, the extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and 
gainly and teetotalling and classy Dr. Avril Mondragon, the only female academic ever to 
hold the Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage at the Royal Victoria College of McGill 
University, whom Incandenza'd met at a U. Toronto conference on Reflective vs. 
Reflexive Systems, was rendered even more romantic by the bureaucratic tribulations 
involved in obtaining an Exit- and then an Entrance-Visa, to say nothing of a Green Card, 
for even a U.S.-spoused Professor Mondragon whose involvement, however 
demonstrably nonviolent, with certain members of the Quebecois-Separatist Left while 
in graduate school had placed her name on the R.C.M.P.'s notorious 'Personnes a Qui On 
Doit Surveiller Attentive me nt' List. The birth of the Incandenzas 1 first child, Orin, had 
been at least partly a legal maneuver. 

It is known that, during the last five years of his life. Dr. James 0. Incandenza 
liquidated his assets and patent-licenses, ceded control over most of the Enfield Tennis 
Academy's operations to his wife's half-brother — a former engineer most recently 
employed in Amateur Sports Administration at Throppinghamshire Provincial College, 
New Brunswick, Canada — and devoted his unimpaired hours almost exclusively to the 
production of documentaries, technically recondite art films, and mordantly obscure 
and obsessive dramatic cartridges, leaving behind a substantial (given the late age at 
which he bloomed, creatively) number of completed films and cartridges, some of which 
have earned a small academic following for their technical feck and for a pathos that 
was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same 
time. 

Professor James 0. Incandenza, Jr.'s untimely suicide at fifty-four was held a great loss 
in at least three worlds. President J. Gentle (EC.), acting on behalf of the U.S.D.D.'s 
O.N.R. and O.N.A.N.'s post-annular A.E.C., conferred a posthumous citation and 
conveyed his condolences by classified ARPA-NET Electronic Mail. Incandenza's burial in 
Quebec's L'lslet County was twice delayed by annular hyperfloration cycles. Cornell 
University Press announced plans for a festschrift. Certain leading young quote 'apres- 
garde' and 'anticonfluential' filmmakers employed, in their output for the Year of the 
Trial-Size Dove Bar, certain oblique visual gestures — most involving the chiaroscuro 
lamping and custom-lens effects for which Incandenza's distinctive deep focus was 
known — that paid the sort of deep-insider's elegaic tribute no audience could be 



expected to notice. An interview with Incandenza was posthumously included in a book 
on the genesis of annulation. And those of E.T.A.'s junior players whose hypertrophied 
arms could fit inside them wore black bands on court for almost a year. 


DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


'I hate this!' Orin yells out to whoever glides near. He doesn't loop or spiral like the 
showboats; he sort of tacks, the gliding equivalent of snow-plowing, unspectacular and 
aiming to get it over ASAP and intact. The fake red wings' nylon clatters in an updraft; ill- 
glued feathers keep peeling off and rising. The updraft is the oxides from Mile-High's 
thousands of open mouths. Far and away the loudest stadium anyplace. He feels like a 
dick. The beak makes it hard to breathe and see. Two reserve ends do some kind of 
combined barrel-roll thing. The worst is the moment right before they make the jump 
off the stadium's rim. Hands in the top rows reaching and clutching. People laughing. 
The Interlace cameras panning and tightening; Orin knows too well the light on the side 
that means Zoom. Once they're out over the field the voices melt and merge into oxides 
and updraft. The left guard is soaring up instead of down. A couple beaks and a claw fall 
off somebody and go pinwheeling down toward the green. Orin tacks grimly back and 
forth. He's among those who steadfastly refuse to whistle or squawk. Bonus or no. The 
stadium loudspeaker's a steely gargle. You can never hear it clearly even on the ground. 

The sad old ex-QB who now just holds on place-kicks falls in beside Orin's slow back- 
and-forth about 100 meters over the 40. He's one of the token females, his beak blunter 
and wings' red nongarish. 

'Hate and loathe this with a clusterfucking passion , Clayt!' 

The holder tries to make a resigned wing-gesture and is almost blown into Orin's 
pinfeathers. 'Almost down! Enjoy the ride! Yo — cleavage-check in 22G, just by the —' 
and then lost in the roar as the first player touches down and sheds the red-feathered 
promotional apparatus. You have to scream to even be heard. At some point it starts 
sounding like the crowd's roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like 
something'll blow. One of the Broncos in the rear end of a costume takes a header at 
midfield so it looks like the thing's ass went flying off. Orin has told no Cardinal, not even 
the team's counselor and visualization-therapist, about his morbid fear of heights and 
high-altitude descent. 

'I punt! I'm paid to punt long, high, well, and always! Making me do personal 



interviews on my personal side's bad enough! But this crosses every line! Why do we 
stand for this! I'm an athlete! I'm not a freak-show performer! Nobody mentioned flying 
at the trade-table. In New Orleans it was just robes and halos and once a season a 
zither. But just once a season. This is fucking awful!' 

'Could be worse!' 

Spiralling down toward the line of X's and the bill-capped guys that help strip the 
wings off, runty potbellied volunteer front-office-connected guys who always smirk in a 
way you couldn't quite level the accusation. 

'I'm paid to punt!' 

'It's worse in Philly! ...had fucking water-drops in Seattle for three seaso—' 

'Please Lord, spare the Leg,' Orin whispers each time just before touchdown. 

'...of how you could be an Oiler! You could be a Brown.' 


The organopsychedelic muscimole, an isoxazole-alkaloid derived from Amanita 
muscaria, a.k.a. the fly agaric mushroom — by no means, Michael Pemulis emphasizes, 
to be confused with phalloides or verna or certain other kill-you-dead species of North 
America's Amanita genus, as the little kids sit there Indian-style on the Viewing Room 
floor, glassy-eyed and trying not to yawn — goes by the structural moniker 5- 
aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol, requires about like maybe ten to twenty oral mg. per 
ingestion, making it two to three times as potent as psilocybin, and frequently results in 
the following alterations in consciousness (not reading or referring to notes in any way): 
a kind of semi-sleep-like trance with visions, elation, sensations of physical lightness and 
increased strength, heightened sensual perceptions, synesthesia, and favorable 
distortions in body-image. This is supposed to be a pre-dinner 'Big Buddy' powwow, 
where the littler kids receive general big-brotherly-type support and counsel from an 
upperclass-man. Pemulis sometimes treats his group's powwows like a kind of collo¬ 
quium, sharing personal findings and interests. The viewer's on Read from the room's 
laptop, and the screen's got block-capitaled METHOXYLATED BASES FOR 
PHENYLKYLAMINE MANIPULATION on it, and underneath some stuff that might as well 
be Greek to the Little Buds. Two of the kids squeeze tennis balls; two rock and bob 
Hasidically to stay alert; one has a hat with a pair of fake antennae made of tight-coiled 
spring. More or less revered by the aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Quebec 
and the Great Concavity, Pemulis tells them, the fly agaric 'shroom was both loved and 
hated for its powerful but not always unless carefully titrated pleasant psycho-spiritual 
effects. A boy probes at his own navel with great interest. Another pretends to fall over. 

Some of the more marginal players start in as early as maybe twelve. I'm sorry to say, 
particularly 'drines before matches and then enkephaline 26 after, which can generate a 
whole vicious circle of individual neurochemistry; but I myself, having taken certain 
vows early on concerning fathers and differences, didn't even get downwind of my first 
bit of Bob Hope 27 until fifteen, more like nearly sixteen, when Bridget Boone, in whose 
room a lot of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out, invited me to 
consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me 
sleep, perhaps, finally, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been 



recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was beginning to grind me 
down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance and rank. Low-grade 
synthetic Bob or not, the bongs worked like a charm. 

In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the 
baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I'm in a competitive match, clearly: there are 
spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it 
seems. It's hard to tell. But mainly the court's complex. The lines that bound and define 
play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines 
going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes 
and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles 
deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The 
whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. And it's 
public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court's periphery, dressed in 
summer's citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand 
blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks' flies. High 
overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for ampli¬ 
fication in his tall high-chair, whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and 
attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out 
where in all that mess of lines I'm supposed to direct service. I can make out in the 
stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white 
umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs 
crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support. 

The umpire whispers Please Play. 

We sort of play. But it's all hypothetical, somehow. Even the 'we' is theory: I never get 
quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game. 


YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer 
that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a 
hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of 
gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of 
puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a 
hospital M.D. — who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost 
always smells unusually clean and good — approaches any psych patient under his care 
with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere 



concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard 
facts of the case. 

The doctor who poked his fine head just inside her hot room's open door and knocked 
maybe a little too gently on the metal jamb found Kate Gompert lying on her side on the 
slim hard bed in blue jeans and a sleeveless blouse with her knees drawn up to her 
abdomen and her fingers laced around her knees. Something almost too overt about the 
pathos of the posture: this exact position was illustrated in some melancholic Watteau- 
era print on the frontispiece to Yevtuschenko's Field Guide to Clinical States. Kate 
Gompert wore dark-blue boating sneakers without socks or laces. Half her face 
obscured by the either green or yellow case on the plastic pillow, her hair so long- 
unwashed it had separated into discrete shiny strands, and black bangs lay like a cell's 
glossy bars across the visible half of the forehead. The psych ward smelled faintly of 
disinfectant and the Community Lounge's cigarette smoke, the sour odor of medical 
waste awaiting collection with also that perpetual slight ammoniac tang of urine, and 
there was the double bing of the elevator and the always faraway sound of the intercom 
paging some M.D., and some high-volume cursing from a manic in the pink Quiet Room 
at the other end of the psych-ward hall from the Community Lounge. Kate Gompert's 
room also smelled of singed dust from the heat-vent, also of the over-sweet perfume 
worn by the young mental health staffer who sat in a chair at the foot of the girl's bed, 
chewing blue gum and viewing a soundless ROM cartridge on a ward-issue laptop. Kate 
Gompert was on Specials, which meant Suicide-Watch, which meant that the girl had at 
some point betrayed both Ideation and Intent, which meant she had to be watched 
right up close by a staffer twenty-four hours a day until the supervising M.D. called off 
the Specials. Staffers rotated Specials-duty every hour, ostensibly so that whoever was 
on duty was always fresh and keenly observant, but really because simply sitting there 
at the foot of a bed looking at somebody who was in so much psychic pain she wanted 
to commit suicide was incredibly depressing and boring and unpleasant, so they spread 
the odious duty out as thin as they possibly could, the staffers. They were not 
technically supposed to read, do paperwork, view CD-ROMs, do personal grooming, or 
in any way divert their attention from the patient on Specials, on-duty. The patient Ms. 
Gompert seemed both to be fighting for breath and to be breathing rapidly enough to 
induce hypocapnia; the doctor could not be expected not also to notice that she had 
fairly large breasts that rose and fell rapidly inside the circle of arms with which she 
hugged her knees. The girl's eyes, which were dull, had registered his appearance in the 
doorway, but they didn't seem to track as he came toward the bed. The staffer was also 
employing an emery board. The doctor told the staffer that he was going to need a few 
moments alone with Ms. Gompert. It is a sort of requirement that a doctor whenever 
possible be reading or at least looking down at something on his clipboard when 
addressing a subordinate, so the doctor was looking studiously at the patient's Intake 
and the sheaf of charts and records Med-Netted over from trauma and psych wards in 
some other city hospitals. Gompert, Katherine A., 21, Newton MA. Data-clerical in a 
Wellesley Hills real estate office. Fourth hospitalization in three years, all clinical 
depression, unipolar. One series of electro-convulsive treatments out at Newton- 
Wellesley Hospital two years back. On Prozac for a short time, then Zoloft, most recently 



Parnate with a lithium kicker. Two previous suicide attempts, the second just this past 
summer. Bi-Valium discontinued two years, Xanax discontinued one year — an admitted 
history of abusing prescribed meds. Depressions unipolar, fairly classic, characterized by 
acute dysphoria, anxiety w/panic, diurnal listlessness/agitation patterns. Ideation w/w/o 
Intent. First attempt a CO-episode, garage's automobile had stalled before lethal 
hemotoxicity achieved. Then last year's attempt — no scarring now visible, her wrists' 
vascular nodes obscured by the insides of the knees she held. She continued to stare at 
the doorway where he'd first appeared. This latest attempt a straightforward meds O.D. 
Admitted via the E.R. three nights past. Two days on ventilation after a Pump & Purge. 
Hypertensive crisis on the second day from metabolic retox — she must have taken a 
hell of a lot of meds — the I.C.U. charge nurse had beeped the chaplain, so the retox 
must have been bad. Almost died twice this time, Katherine Ann Gompert. Third day 
spent on 2-West for observation. Librium reluctantly administered for a B.P. that was all 
over the map. Now here on 5, his present arena. B.P. stable as of the last four readings. 
Next vitals at 1300h. 

The attempt had been serious, a real attempt. This girl had not been futzing around. A 
bona fide clinical admit right out of Yevtuschenko or Dretske. Over half the admits to 
psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high- 
school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the 
death of a pet. The cathartic trauma of actually going in somewhere officially Psych-, 
some understanding nods, some bare indication somebody gives half a damn — they 
rally, back out they go. Three determined attempts and a course of shock spelled no 
such case here. The doctor's interior state was somewhere between trepidation and 
excitement, which manifested outwardly as a sort of blandly deep puzzled concern. 

The doctor said Hi and that he wanted to ascertain for sure that she was Katherine 
Gompert, as they hadn't met before up till now. 

'That's me,' in a bit of a bitter singsong. Her voice was oddly lit-up for one who lay 
fetal, dead-eyed, w/o facial affect. 

The doctor said could she tell him a little bit about why she's here with them right 
now? Can she remember back to what happened? 

She took an even deeper breath. She was attempting to communicate boredom or 
irritation. 'I took a hundred-ten Parnate, about thirty Lithonate capsules, some old 
Zoloft. I took everything I had in the world.' 

'You really must have wanted to hurt yourself, then, it seems.' 

'They said downstairs the Parnate made me black out. It did a blood pressure thing. 
My mother heard noises upstairs and found me she said down on my side chewing the 
rug in my room. My room's shag-carpeted. She said I was on the floor flushed red and all 
wet like when I was a newborn; she said she thought at first she hallucinated me as a 
newborn again. On my side all red and wet.' 

'A hypertensive crisis will do that. It means your blood pressure was high enough to 
have killed you. Sertraline in combination with an MAOI 28 will kill you, in enough 
quantities. And with the toxicity of that much lithium besides. I'd say you're pretty lucky 
to be here right now.' 

'My mother sometimes thinks she's hallucinating.' 



'Sertraline, by the way, is the Zoloft you kept instead of discarding as instructed when 
changing medications.' 

'She says I chewed a big hole out of the carpet. But who can say.' 

The doctor chose his second-finest pen from the array in his white coat's breast 
pocket and made some sort of note on Kate Gompert's new chart for this particular 
psych ward. Crowded in among his pocket's pens was the rubber head of a diagnostic 
plexor. He asked Kate if she could tell him why she had wanted to hurt herself. Had she 
been angry at herself. At someone else. Had she ceased to feel as though her life had 
meaning to it. Had she heard anything like voices suggesting that she hurt herself. 

There was no audible response. The girl's breathing had slowed to just rapid. The 
doctor took an early clinical gamble and asked Kate whether it might not be easier if she 
rolled over and sat up so that they could speak with each other more normally, face to 
face. 

'I am sitting up.' 

The doctor's pen was poised. His slow nod was studious, blandly puzzled-seeming. 
'You mean to say you feel right now as if your body is already in a sitting-up position?' 

She rolled an eye up at him for a long moment, sighed meaningfully, and rolled and 
rose. Katherine Ann Gompert probably felt that here was yet another psych-ward M.D. 
with zero sense of humor. This was probably because she did not understand the strict 
methodological limits that dictated how literal he, a doctor, had to be with the admits 
on the psych ward. Nor that jokes and sarcasm were here usually too pregnant and 
fertile with clinical significance not to be taken seriously: sarcasm and jokes were often 
the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for 
someone to care and help them. The doctor — who by the way wasn't an M.D. yet but a 
resident, here on a twelve-week psych rotation — indulged this clinical reverie while the 
patient made an elaborate show of getting the thin pillow out from under her and 
leaning it up the tall way against the bare wall behind the bed and slumping back against 
it, her arms crossed over her breasts. The doctor decided that her open display of 
irritation with him could signify either a positive thing or nothing at all. 

Kate Gompert stared at a point over the man's left shoulder. 'I wasn't trying to hurt 
myself. I was trying to kill myself. There's a difference.' 

The doctor asked whether she could try to explain what she felt the difference was 
between those two things. 

The delay that preceded her reply was only marginally longer than the pause in a 
regular civilian conversation. The doctor had no ideas about what this observation might 
indicate. 

'Do you guys see different kinds of suicides?' 

The resident made no attempt to ask Kate Gompert what she meant. She used one 
finger to remove some material from the corner of her mouth. 

'I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self- 
hating ones. The type of like "I'm shit and the world'd be better off without poor me" 
type that says that but also imagines what everybody'll say at their funeral. I've met 
types like that on wards. Poor-me-l-hate-me-punish-me-come-to-my-funeral. Then they 
show you a 20 X 25 glossy of their dead cat. It's all self-pity bullshit. It's bullshit. I didn't 



have any special grudges. I didn't fail an exam or get dumped by anybody. All these 
types. Hurt themselves.' Still that intriguing, unsettling combination of blank facial 
masking and conventionally animated vocal tone. The doctor's small nods were 
designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called 
Momentumizers. 

'I didn't want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don't hate myself. I just 
wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is all.' 

'Play,' nodding in confirmation, making small quick notes. 

'I wanted to just stop being conscious. I'm a whole different type. I wanted to stop 
feeling this way. If I could have just put myself in a really long coma I would have done 
that. Or given myself shock I would have done that. Instead.' 

The doctor was writing with great industry. 

'The last thing more I'd want is hurt. I just didn't want to feel this way anymore. I 
don't... I didn't believe this feeling would ever go away. I don't. I still don't. I'd rather feel 
nothing than this.' 

The doctor's eyes appeared keenly interested in an abstract way. They looked severely 
magnified behind his attractive but thick glasses, the frames of which were steel. 
Patients on other floors during other rotations had sometimes complained that they 
sometimes felt like something in a jar he was studying intently through all that thick 
glass. He was saying 'This feeling of wanting to stop feeling by dying, then, is —' 

The way she suddenly shook her head was vehement, exasperated. 'The feeling is why 
I want to. The feeling is the reason I want to die. I'm here because I want to die. That's 
why I'm in a room without windows and with cages over the lightbulbs and no lock on 
the toilet door. Why they took my shoelaces and my belt. But I notice they don't take 
away the feeling do they.' 

'Is the feeling you're explaining something you've experienced in your other 
depressions, then, Katherine?' 

The patient didn't respond right away. She slid her foot out of her shoes and touched 
one bare foot with the toes of the other foot. Her eyes tracked this activity. The 
conversation seemed to have helped her focus. Like most clinically depressed patients, 
she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed 
stasis allowed these patients' own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic 
struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus. Most residents found the fifth 
floor a depressing place to do a rotation. 

'What I'm trying to ask, I think, is whether this feeling you're communicating is the 
feeling you associate with your depression.' 

Her gaze moved off. 'That's what you guys want to call it, I guess.' 

The doctor clicked his pen slowly a few times and explained that he's more interested 
here in what she would choose to call the feeling, since it was her feeling. 

The resumed study of the movement of her feet. 'When people call it that I always get 
pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you 
get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying 
around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.' She 
seemed to the doctor decidedly more animated now, even as she seemed unable to 



meet his eyes. Her respiration had sped back up. The doctor recalled classic 
hyperventilatory episodes being characterized by carpopedal spasms, and reminded 
himself to monitor the patient's hands and feet carefully during the interview for any 
signs of tetanic contraction, in which case the prescribed therapy would be I.V. calcium 
in a saline percentage he would need quickly to look up. 

'Well this' — she gestured at herself— 'isn't a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In 
my arms and legs.' 

'That would include your carp—your hands and feet?' 

'All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It's all over everywhere. I don't know 
what I could call it. It's like I can't get enough outside it to call it anything. It's like horror 
more than sadness. It's more like horror. It's like something horrible is about to happen, 
the most horrible thing you can imagine — no, worse than you can imagine because 
there's the feeling that there's something you have to do right away to stop it but you 
don't know what it is you have to do, and then it's happening, too, the whole horrible 
time, it's about to happen and also it's happening, all at the same time.' 

'So you'd say anxiety is a big part of your depressions.' 

It was now not clear whether she was responding to the doctor or not. 'Everything 
gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Carton said lurid\ 
one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh- 
sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell 
bad even after I just got out of the shower. It's like what's the point of washing if 
everything smells like I need another shower.' 

The doctor looked intrigued rather than concerned for a moment as he wrote all this 
down. He preferred handwritten notes to a laptop because he felt M.D.s who typed into 
their laps during clinical interviews gave a cold impression. 

Kate Gompert's face writhed for a moment while the doctor was writing. 'I fear this 
feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain, or my mom dying, or 
environmental toxicity. Anything.' 

'Fear is a major part of anxiety,' the doctor confirmed. 

Katherine Gompert seemed to come out of her dark reverie for a moment. She stared 
full-frontal at the doctor for several seconds, and the doctor, who'd had all discomfort 
at being stared at by patients trained right out of him when he'd rotated through the 
paralysis/-plegia wards upstairs, was able to look directly back at her with a kind of 
bland compassion, the expression of someone who was compassionate but was not, of 
course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings by not 
even trying to pretend that he was. Sharing them. The young woman's expression, in 
turn, revealed that she had decided to take what amounted for her to her own gamble, 
this early in a therapeutic relationship. The abstract resolve on her face now duplicated 
what had been on the doctor's face when he'd taken the gamble of asking her to sit up 
straight. 

'Listen,' she said. 'Have you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were 
going to throw up?' 

The doctor made a gesture like Well sure. 

'But that's just in your stomach,' Kate Gompert said. 'It's a horrible feeling but it's just 



in your stomach. That's why the term is "sick to your stomach." ' She was back to 
looking intently at her lower carpopedals. 'What I told Dr. Garton is OK but imagine if 
you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or 
brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn't, and you 
felt that way all the time, and you're sure, you're positive the feeling will never go away, 
you're going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this.' 

The doctor wrote down something much too brief to correspond directly to what 
she'd said. He was nodding both while he wrote and when he looked up. 'And yet this 
nauseated feeling has come and gone for you in the past, it's passed eventually during 
prior depressions, Katherine, has it not?' 

'But when you're in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it's always been there 
and will always be there, and you forget. It's like this whole filter drops down over the 
whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after —' 

They sat and looked at each other. The doctor felt some combination of intense 
clinical excitement and anxiety about perhaps saying the wrong thing at such a crucial 
juncture and fouling up. His last name was needle-pointed in yellow braid on the left 
breast of the white coat he was required to wear. 'I'm sorry? A couple weeks after— ?' 

He waited for seven breaths. 

'I want shock,' she said finally. 'Isn't part of this whole concerned kindness deal that 
you're supposed to ask me how I think you can be of help? Cause I've been through this 
before. You haven't asked what I want. Isn't it? Well how about either give me ECT 29 
again, or give me my belt back. Because I can't stand feeling like this another second, 
and the seconds keep coming on and on.' 

'Well,' the doctor said slowly, nodding to indicate he had heard the feelings the young 
woman was expressing, 'Well, I'm happy to discuss treatment options with you, 
Katherine. But I have to say right now I'm curious about what you started it sounded like 
to me to maybe start to indicate what might have occurred, something, two weeks ago 
to make you feel these feelings now. Would you be comfortable talking to me about it?' 

'Either ECT or you could just sedate me for a month. You could do that. All I'd need is I 
think a month at the outside. Like a controlled coma. You could do that, if you guys want 
to help.' 

The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see. 

And she gave him back a frightening smile, a smile empty of all affect, as if someone 
had contracted her circumorals with a thigmotactic electrode. The teeth of the smile 
evidenced a clinical depressive's classic inattention to oral hygiene. 

She said 'I was thinking I was about to say you'll think I'm crazy if I tell you. But then I 
remembered where I am.' She made a small sound that was supposed to be laughter; it 
did sound jagged, dentate. 

'I was going to say I've thought sometimes before like the feeling maybe had to do 
with Hope.' 

'Hope. 1 

Her arms had been crossed over her breasts the whole time, and though the room 
was overheated the patient rubbed each palm continually over her upper arms, 
behavior one associates with chill. The position and movement shielded her inner arms 



from view. The doctor's eyebrows had gone synclinal from puzzlement without his 
awareness. 

'Bob.' 

'Bob.' The doctor was anxious that his failure to have any idea what the girl was 
referring to would betray itself and accentuate her feelings of loneliness and psychic 
pain. Classic unipolars were usually tormented by the conviction that no one else could 
hear or understand them when they tried to communicate. Hence jokes, sarcasm, the 
psychopathology of unconscious arm-rubbing. 

Kate Gompert's head was rolling like a blind person's. 'Jesus what am I doing here. Bob 
Hope. Dope. Sinse. Stick. Grass. Smoke.' She made a quick duBois-gesture with thumb 
and finger held to rounded lips. The dealers down where I buy it some of them make 
you call it Bob Hope when you call, in case anybody's accessed the line. You're supposed 
to ask is Bob in town. And if they have some they say "Hope springs eternal," usually. It's 
like a code. One kid makes you ask him to please commit a crime. The dealers that stay 
around any length of time tend to be on the paranoid side. As if it would fool anybody 
who knew enough to bother to access the band on the call.' She seemed decidedly more 
animated. 'And one particular guy with snakes in a tank in a trailer in Allston, he —' 

'So drugs, then, you're saying you feel may be a factor,' the doctor interrupted. 

The depressed young woman's face emptied once more. She engaged briefly in 
something the staffers on Specials called the Thousand-Meter Stare. 

'Not "drugs," ' she said slowly. The doctor smelled shame in the room, sour and 
uremic. Her face had become distantly pained now. 

The girl said: 'Stopping.' 

The doctor felt comfortable saying once again that he was not sure he understood 
what she was trying to share with him. 

She now went through a series of expressions that made it clinically impossible for the 
doctor to determine whether or not she was entirely sincere. She looked either pained 
or trying somehow to suppress hilarity. She said 'I don't know if you'll believe me. I'm 
worried you'll think I'm crazy. I have this thing with pot.' 

'Meaning marijuana.' 

The doctor was oddly sure that Kate Gompert pretended to sniff instead of engaging 
in a real sniff. 'Marijuana. Most people think of marijuana as just some minor substance, 
I know, just like this natural plant that happens to make you feel good the way poison 
oak makes you itch, and if you say you're in trouble with Hope — people'll just laugh. 
Because there's much worse drugs out there. Believe me I know.' 

'I'm not laughing at you, Katherine,' the doctor said, and meant it. 

'But I love it so much. Sometimes it's like the center of my life. It does something to 
me, I know, that's not good, and I got told point-blank not to smoke, on the Parnate, 
because Dr. Garton said no one knew what certain combinations do yet and it'd be 
roulette. But after a while I always think to myself it's been a while and things will be 
different somehow this time if I do, even on the Parnate, so I do again, I start again. I'll 
start out doing just like a couple of hits off a duBois after work, to get me through 
dinner, because dinner with my mother and me is — well, but and pretty soon after a 
while I'm in my room with the fan pointed out the window all night, doing one-hitters 



and exhaling at the fan, to kill the smell, and I make her say I'm not there if anybody 
calls, and I lie about what I'm doing in there all night even if she doesn't ask, sometimes 
she asks and sometimes she doesn't. And then after a while I'm smoking joints at work, 
at breaks, going in the bathroom and standing on the toilet and blowing it out the 
window, there's this tiny window up high with the glass frosted and all filthy and 
cobwebby, and I hate having my face up next to it, but if I clean it off I'm afraid Mrs. 
Diggs or somebody will be able to tell somebody's been doing something up around the 
window, standing there in high heels on the rim of the toilet, brushing my teeth all the 
time and using up Collyrium 30 by the bottleful and switching the console to audio and 
always needing more water before I answer the console because my mouth's too dry to 
talk, especially on the Parnate, the Parnate makes my mouth dry anyways. And pretty 
soon I'm totally paranoid they know I'm stoned, at work, sitting there in the office, high, 
reeking and I'm the only one that can't tell I reek. I'm like so obsessed with Do They 
Know, Can They Tell, and then after a while I'm having my mother call in sick for me so I 
can stay home after she goes in to work and have the whole place to myself with 
nobody to worry about Do They Know, and smoke out the fan, and spray Lysol all over 
and stir Ginger's litter box around so the whole place reeks of Ginger, and smoke and 
draw and watch terrible daytime stuff on the TP because I don't want my mother to see 
any cartridge-orders on days I'm supposed to be in bed sick, I start to get obsessed with 
Does She Know. I'm getting more and more miserable and fed up with myself for 
smoking so much, this is after a couple weeks of it, is all, and I start getting high and 
thinking about nothing except how I have to quit smoking all this Bob so I can get back 
to work and start saying I'm here when people call, so I can start living some kind of 
damn life instead of just sitting around in pajamas pretending I'm sick like a third-grader 
and smoking and watching TP again, and so after I've smoked the last of whatever I've 
got I always say No More, This Is It, and I throw out my papers and my one-hitter. I've 
probably thrown about fifty one-hitters in dumpsters, including some nice wood and 
brass ones, including a couple from Brazil, the land-barge guys must go through our 
sector's dumpster once a day looking to get another good one-hitter. And anyways I 
quit. I do stop. I get sick of it, I don't like what it does to me. And I go back to work and 
work my fanny off, to make up for the last couple weeks and get a leg up on like building 
momentum for a whole new start, you know?' 

The young woman's face and eyes were going through a number of ranges of affective 
configurations, with all of them seeming inexplicably at gut-level somehow blank and 
maybe not entirely sincere. 

'And so,' she said, 'but then I quit. And a couple of weeks after I've smoked a lot and 
finally stopped and quit and gone back to really living, after a couple of weeks this 
feeling always starts creeping in, just creeping in a little at the edges at first, like first 
thing in the morning when I get up, or waiting for the T to go home, after work, for 
supper. And I try to deny it, the feeling, ignore it, because I fear it more than anything.' 

'The feeling you're describing, that starts creeping in.' 

Kate Gompert finally took a real breath. 'And then but no matter what I do it gets 
worse and worse, it's there more and more, this filter drops down, and the feeling 
makes the fear of the feeling way worse, and after a couple weeks it's there all the time. 



the feeling, and I'm totally inside it. I'm in it and everything has to pass through it to get 
in, and I don't want to smoke any Bob, and I don't want to work, or go out, or read, or 
watch TP, or go out, or stay in, or either do anything or not do anything, I don't want 
anything except for the feeling to go away. But it doesn't. Part of the feeling is being like 
willing to do anything to make it go away. Understand that. Anything. Do you 
understand? It's not wanting to hurt myself it's wanting to not hurt.' 

The doctor hadn't even pretended to try to take notes on all this. He couldn't keep 
himself from trying to determine whether the ambient blank insincerity the patient 
seemed to project during what appeared, clinically, to be a significant gamble and move 
toward trust and self-revealing was in fact projected by the patient or was somehow 
counter-transferred or -projected onto the patient from the doctor's own psyche out of 
some sort of anxiety over the critical therapeutic possibilities her revelation of concern 
over drug-use might represent. The time this thinking required looked like sober and 
thoughtful consideration of what Kate Gompert said. She was again gazing at her feet's 
interactions with the empty boating sneakers, her face moving between expressions 
associated with grief and suffering. None of the clinical literature the doctor had read 
for his psych rotation suggested any relation between unipolar episodes and withdrawal 
from cannabinoids. 

'So this has happened in the past, prior to your other hospitalizations, then, 
Katherine.' 

Her face, foreshortened by its downward angle, was working in the spread, writhing 
configurations of weeping, but no tears emerged. 'I just want you to shock me. Just get 
me out of this. I'll do anything you want.' 

'Have you explored this possible connection between your cannabis use and your 
depressions with your regular therapist, Katherine?' 

She did not respond directly as such. Her associations began to loosen, in the doctor's 
opinion, as her face continued to work dryly. 

'I had shock before and it got me out of this. Straps. Nurses with their sneakers in little 
green bags. Anti-saliva injections. Rubber thing for your tongue. General. Just some 
headaches. I didn't mind it at all. I know everybody thinks it's horrible. That old 
cartridge, Nichols and the big Indian. Distortion. They give you a general here, right? 
They put you under. It's not that bad. I'll go willingly.' 

The doctor was summarizing her choice of treatment-option, as was her right, on her 
chart. He had extremely good penmanship for a doctor. He put her get me out of this in 
quotation marks. He was adding his own post-assessment question. Then what?, when 
Kate Gompert began weeping for real. 


And just before 0145h. on 2 April Y.D.A.U., his wife arrived back home and uncovered 
her hair and came in and saw the Near Eastern medical attache and his face and tray 
and eyes and the soiled condition of his special recliner, and rushed to his side crying his 
name aloud, touching his head, trying to get a response, failing to get any response to 
her, he still staring straight ahead; and eventually and naturally she — noting that the 
expression on his rictus of a face nevertheless appeared very positive, ecstatic, even. 



you could say — she eventually and naturally turning her head and following his line of 
sight to the cartridge-viewer. 

Gerhardt Schtitt, Head Coach and Athletic Director at the Enfield Tennis Academy, 
Enfield MA, was wooed fiercely by E.T.A. Headmaster Dr. James Incandenza, just about 
begged to come on board the moment the Academy's hilltop was shaved flat and the 
place was up and running. Incandenza had decided he was going to bring Schtitt on 
board or bust — this even though Schtitt had then just lately been asked to resign from 
the staff of a Nick Bollettieri camp in Sarasota because of a really unfortunate incident 
involving a riding crop. 

By now, though, pretty much everybody now at E.T.A. feels as though stories about 
Schtitt's whole corporal-punitive thing must have been pumped up out of all sane 
proportion, because even though Schtitt still does favor those high and shiny black 
boots, and yes the epaulets, still, and now a weatherman's telescoping pointer that's a 
clear stand-in for the now-forbidden old riding crop, he has, Schtitt, at near what must 
be seventy, mellowed to the sort of elder-statesman point where he's become mostly a 
dispenser of abstractions rather than discipline, a philosopher instead of a king. His felt 
presence is here mostly verbal; the weatherman's pointer has not made corrective 
contact with even one athletic bottom in Schtitt's whole nine years at E.T.A. 

Still, although he now has all these Lebensgefahrtins 31 and prorectors to administer 
most of the necessary little character-building cruelties, Schtitt does like his occasional 
bit of fun, still. 

So but when Schtitt dons the leather helmet and goggles and revs up the old F.R.G.- 
era BMW cycle and trails the sweating E.T.A. squads up the Comm. Ave. hills into East 
Newton on their P.M. conditioning runs, making judicious use of his pea-shooter to 
discourage straggling sluggards, it's usually eighteen-year-old Mario Incandenza who 
gets to ride along in the sidecar, carefully braced and strapped, the wind blowing his 
thin hair straight back off his oversized head, beaming and waving his claw at people he 
knows. It's possibly odd that the leptosomatic Mario I., so damaged he can't even grip a 
stick, much less flail at a moving ball with one, is the one kid at E.T.A. whose company 
Schtitt seeks out, is in fact pretty much the one person with whom Schtitt speaks 
candidly, lets his pedagogical hair down. He's not close to his prorectors, particularly, 
Schtitt, and treats Aubrey deLint and Mary Esther Thode with a formality that's almost 
parodic. But often of a warm evening sometimes Mario and Coach Schtitt will find them¬ 
selves out alone under the East Courts' canvas pavilion or the towering copper beech 
west of Comm.-Ad., or at one of the initial-scarred redwood picnic tables off the path 
out behind the Headmaster's House where Mario's mother and uncle live, Schtitt 
savoring a post-prandial pipe, Mario enjoying the smells of the calliopsis alongside the 
grounds' quincunx paths, the sweetish pines and the briers' yeasty musk coming up 
from the hillside's slopes. And he actually likes the sulphury odor of Schtitt's obscure 
Austrian blend. Schtitt talks, Mario listens, generally. Mario is basically a born listener. 
One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget 
you're there, even when they're interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It's 
almost like they're like: If nobody's really in there, there's nothing to be shy about. 
That's why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs 



revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the beaming and 
brady-kinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly 
feel, here. 

Schtitt has the sort of creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously. He has 
surprised blue eyes and a vivid white crewcut of the sort that looks virile and good on 
men who have lost a lot of hair anyway. And skin so clean-sheet-white it almost glows; 
an evident immunity to the sun's UV; in pine-shaded twilight he is almost glowingly 
white, as if cut from the stuff of moons. He has a way of focusing his whole self's 
concentration very narrowly, adjusting his legs' spread for the varicoceles and curling 
one arm over the other and sort of drawing himself in around the pipe he attends to. 
Mario can sit motionless for really long periods. When Schtitt exhales pipe-smoke in 
different geometric shapes they both seem to study intently, when Schtitt exhales he 
makes little sounds variant in plosivity between P and B. 

'Am realizing whole myth of efficiency and no waste that is making this continent of 
countries we are in.' He exhales. 'You know myths?' 

'Is that like a story?' 

'Ach. A made-up story. For some children. An efficiency of Euclid only: flat. For flat 
children. Straight ahead! Plow ahead! Go! This is myth.' 

'There aren't any flat children, really.' 

'This myth of the competition and bestness we fight for you players here: this myth: 
they assume here always the efficient way is to plow in straight, go! The story that the 
shortest way between two places is the straight line, yes?' 

'Yes?' 

Schtitt can use the stem of the pipe to point, for emphasis: 'But what then when 
something is in the way when you go between places, no? Plow ahead: go: collide: 
kabong.' 

'Willikers!' 

'Where is their straight shortest then, yes? Where is the efficiently quickly straight of 
Euclid then, yes? And how many two places are there without there is something in the 
way between them, if you go?' 

It can be entertaining to watch the evening pines' mosquitoes light and feed deeply on 
luminous Schtitt, who is oblivious. The smoke doesn't keep them away. 

'When I am boyish, training to compete for best, our training facilities on a sign, very 
largely painted, stated WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN.' 

'Gosh.' 

It's a tradition, one stemming maybe from Wimbledon's All-England locker rooms' 
tympana, that every big-time tennis academy has its own special traditional motto on 
the wall in the locker rooms, some special aphoristic nugget that's supposed to describe 
and inform what the academy's philosophy's all about. After Mario's father Dr. 
Incandenza passed away, the new Headmaster, Dr. Charles Tavis, a Canadian citizen, 
either Mrs. Incandenza's half-brother or adoptive brother, depending on the version, 
C.T. had taken down Incandenza's founding motto — TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE 
EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST 32 — and had replaced it with the rather more upbeat 
THE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS HAS NONE. 



Mario is an enormous fan of Gerhardt Schtitt, whom most of the other E.T.A. kids 
regard as probably bats, and as w/o doubt mind-looseningly discursive, and show the 
old pundit even token respect mostly because Schtitt still personally oversees the daily 
drill-assignments and can, if aggrieved, have Thode and deLint make them extremely 
uncomfortable more or less at will, out there in A.M. practice. 

One of the reasons the late James Incandenza had been so terribly high on bringing 
Schtitt to E.T.A. was that Schtitt, like the founder himself (who'd come back to tennis, 
and later film, from a background in hard-core-math-based optical science), was that 
Schtitt approached competitive tennis more like a pure mathematician than a 
technician. Most jr.-tennis coaches are basically technicians, hands-on practical straight¬ 
ahead problem-solving statistical-data wonks, with maybe added knacks for short-haul 
psychology and motivational speaking. The point about not crunching serious stats is 
that Schtitt had clued Incandenza in, all the way back at a B.S. 1989 33 U.S.T.A. 
convention on photoelectric line-judging, that he, Schtitt, knew real tennis was really 
about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game's 
technicians revered, but in fact the opposite — not- order, limit, the places where things 
broke down, fragmented into beauty. That real tennis was no more reducible to 
delimited factors or probability curves than chess or boxing, the two games of which it's 
a hybrid. In short, Schtitt and the tall A.E.G.-optics man (i.e. Incandenza), whose fierce 
flat serve-and-haul-ass-to-the-net approach to the game had carried him through M.l.T. 
on a full ride w/ stipend, and whose consulting report on high-speed photoelectric 
tracking the U.S.T.A. mucky-mucks found dense past all comprehending, found 
themselves totally simpatico on tennis's exemption from stats-tracking regression. Were 
he now still among the living. Dr. Incandenza would now describe tennis in the 
paradoxical terms of what's now called 'Extra-Linear Dynamics.' 34 And Schtitt, whose 
knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese 
kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and 
Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and 
improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a 
fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a 
matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of 
uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible 
responses, n 2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza 
would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian 35 
continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because 
/nfoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, 
mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and 
imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill 
and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that 
made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self. 

'You mean like the baselines are boundaries?' Mario tries to ask. 

'Lieber Gott nein,' with a plosive disgusted sound. Schtitt likes best of all smoke-shapes 
to try to blow rings, and is kind of lousy at it, blowing mostly wobbly lavender hot dogs, 
which Mario finds delightful. 



The thing with Schtitt: like most Europeans of his generation, anchored from infancy 
to certain permanent values which — yes, OK, granted — may, admittedly, have a whiff 
of proto-fascist potential about them, but which do, nevertheless (the values), anchor 
nicely the soul and course of a life — Old World patriarchal stuff like honor and 
discipline and fidelity to some larger unit — Gerhardt Schtitt does not so much dislike 
the modern O.N.A.N.ite U.S. of A. as find it hilarious and frightening at the same time. 
Probably mostly just alien. This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario 
Incandenza has a severely limited range of verbatim recall. Schtitt was educated in pre- 
Unification Gymnasium under the rather Kanto-Hegelian idea that jr. athletics was 
basically just training for citizenship, that jr. athletics was about learning to sacrifice the 
hot narrow imperatives of the Self — the needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform 
cravings of the individual appetitive will — to the larger imperatives of a team (OK, the 
State) and a set of delimiting rules (OK, the Law). It sounds almost frighteningly simple- 
minded, though not to Mario, across the redwood table, listening. By learning, in 
palestra, the virtues that pay off directly in competitive games, the well-disciplined boy 
begins assembling the more abstract, gratification-delaying skills necessary for being a 
'team player' in a larger arena: the even more subtly diffracted moral chaos of full- 
service citizenship in a State. Except Schtitt says Ach, but who can imagine this training 
serving its purpose in an experialist and waste-exporting nation that's forgotten 
privation and hardship and the discipline which hardship teaches by requiring? A U.S. of 
modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of 
desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the 
acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of 
personal happiness: 

The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?' 

'Except why do you let deLint tie Pemulis and Shaw's shoes to the lines, if the lines 
aren't boundaries?' 

'Without there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely. 
Verstiegenheit . ,36 

'Bless you.' 

'Any something. The what: this is more unimportant than that there is something.' 

Schtitt one time was telling Mario, as they respectively walked and tottered down 
Comm. Ave. eastward into Allston to see about getting a gourmet ice cream someplace 
along there, that when he was Mario's age — or maybe more like Hal's age, whatever — 
he (Schtitt) had once fallen in love with a tree, a willow that from a certain humid twilit 
perspective had looked like a mysterious woman aswirl with gauze, this certain tree in 
the public Platz of some West German town whose name sounded to Mario like the 
sound of somebody strangling. Schtitt reported being seriously smitten with the tree: 

'I went daily to there, to be with the tree.' 

They respectively walked and tottered, ice-cream-bound, Mario moving like the one of 
them who was truly old, mind off his stride because he was trying to think hard about 
what Schtitt believed. Mario's thinking-hard expression resembles what for another 
person would be the sort of comically distorted face made to amuse an infant. He was 
trying to think how to articulate some reasonable form of a question like: But then how 



does this surrender-the-personal-individual-wants-to-the-larger-State-or-beloved-tree- 
or-something stuff work in a deliberately individual sport like competitive junior tennis, 
where it's just you v. one other guy? 

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they're not baselines, that 
contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, 
beautiful and infinitely dense? 

Schtitt's thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario's late 
father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and 
only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out 
terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the 
partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. 
As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You com¬ 
pete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear 
inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is 
an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. 
You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game 
possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, 
as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and 
mourned, over and over again. 

Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder 
on the green steel edge of a dumpster, pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt 
darts in to catch him, and it almost looks like they're doing a dance-floor dip as Schtitt 
says this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and 
angles and lines Mario's brothers worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is 
but one facet of the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot live without. 

Schtitt then falls into the sort of silence of someone who's enjoying mentally 
rewinding and replaying what he just came up with. Mario thinks hard again. He's trying 
to think of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self 
the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? Three passing 
Allstonian street-kids mock and make fun of Mario's appearance behind the pair's backs. 
Some of Mario's thinking-faces are almost orgasmic: fluttery and slack. And then but so 
what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own 
end? 

It's always Schtitt who ends up experimenting with some exotic icecream flavor, when 
they arrive. Mario always chickens out and opts for good old basic chocolate when the 
moment of decision at the counter comes. Thinking along the lines of like Better the 
flavor you know for sure you already love. 

'And so. No different, maybe,' Schtitt concedes, sitting up straight on a waffle-seated 
aluminum chair with Mario beneath an askew umbrella that makes the flimsy little table 
it's rooted to shake and clank in the sidewalk's breeze. 'Maybe no different, so,' biting 
hard into his tricolored cone. He feels at the side of his white jaw, where there's some 
sort of red welt, it looks like. 'Not different' — looking out into the Ave.'s raised median 
at the Green Line train rattling past downhill — 'except the chance to play.' He brightens 
in preparation to laugh in his startling German roar, saying 'No? Yes? The chance to play. 



yes?' And Mario loses a dollop of chocolate down his chin, because he has this 
involuntary thing where he laughs whenever anyone else does, and Schtitt is finding 
what he has just said very amusing indeed. 


YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


There is no jolly irony in Tiny Ewell's name. He is tiny, an elf-sized U.S. male. His feet 
barely reach the floor of the taxi. He is seated, being driven east into the grim three- 
decker districts of East Watertown, west of Boston proper. A rehabilitative staffer 
wearing custodial whites under a bombardier's jacket sits beside Tiny Ewell, big arms 
crossed and staring placid as a cow at the intricately creased back of the cabbie's neck. 
The window Tiny is next to has a sticker that thanks him in advance for not smoking. 
Tiny Ewell wears no winter gear over a jacket and tie that don't quite go together and 
stares out his window with unplacid intensity at the same district he grew up in. He 
normally takes involved routes to avoid Watertown. His jacket a 26S, his slacks a 26/24, 
his shirt one of the shirts his wife had so considerately packed for him to bring into the 
hospital detox and hang on hangers that won't leave the rod. As with all Tiny Ewell's 
business shirts, only the front and cuffs are ironed. He wears size 6 Florsheim wingtips 
that gleam nicely except for one big incongruous scuff-mark of white from where he'd 
kicked at his front door when he'd returned home just before dawn from an extremely 
important get-together with potential clients to find that his wife had had the locks 
changed and filed a restraining order and would communicate with him only by notes 
passed through the mail-slot below the white door's black brass (the brass had been 
painted black) knocker. When Tiny leans down and wipes at the scuff-mark with a slim 
thumb it only pales and smears. It is Tiny's first time out of Happy Slippers since his 
second day at the detox. They took away his Florsheims after 24 abstinent hours had 
passed and he started to perhaps D.T. a little. He'd kept noticing mice scurrying around 
his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded 
the room be fumigated at once and then began running around hunched and pounding 
with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they continued to ooze through 
the room's electrical outlets and scurry repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced 
nurse flanked by large men in custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, 
predicting that the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be fumigated. 
They gave him slippers of green foam-rubber with smiley-faces embossed on the tops. 
The detox's in-patients are encouraged to call these Happy Slippers. The staff refer to 
the footwear in private as 'pisscatchers.' It is Tiny Ewell's first day out of rubber slippers 



and ass-exposing detox pajamas and striped cotton robe in two weeks. The early- 
November day is foggy and colorless. The sky and the street are the same color. The 
trees look skeletal. There is bright wet wadded litter all along the seams of street and 
curb. The houses are skinny three-deckers, mashed together, wharf-gray w/ salt-white 
trim, madonnas in the yards, bowlegged dogs hurling themselves against the fencing. 
Some schoolboys in knee-pads and skallycaps are playing street hockey on a passing 
school's cement playground. Except none of the boys seems to be moving. The trees' 
bony fingers make spell-casting gestures in the wind as they pass. East Watertown is the 
obvious straight-line easement between St. Mel's detox and the halfway house's Enfield, 
and Ewell's insurance is paying for the cab. With his small round shape and bit of white 
goatee and a violent flush that could pass for health of some jolly sort. Tiny Ewell looks 
like a radically downscaled Burl Ives, the late Burl Ives as an impossible bearded child. 
Tiny looks out the window at the rose window of the church next to the school 
playground where the boys are playing/not playing. The rose window is not illuminated 
from either side. 

The man who for the last three days has been Tiny Ewell's roommate at St. Mel's 
Hospital's detoxification unit sits in a blue plastic straight-back chair in front of his and 
Ewell's room's window's air conditioner, watching it. The air conditioner hums and 
gushes, and the man gazes with rapt intensity into its screen of horizontal vents. The air 
conditioner's cord is thick and white and leads into a three-prong outlet with black heel- 
marks on the wall all around it. The November room is around 12° C. The man turns the 
air conditioner's dial from setting #4 to setting #5. The curtains above it shake and 
billow around the window. The man's face falls into and out of amused expressions as 
he watches the air conditioner. He sits in the blue chair with a trembling Styrofoam cup 
of coffee and a paper plate of brownies into which he taps ashes from the cigarettes 
whose smoke the air conditioner blows straight back over his head. The cigarette smoke 
is starting to pile up against the wall behind him, and to ooze and run chilled down the 
wall and form a sort of cloud-bank near the floor. The man's raptly amused profile 
appears in the mirror on the wall beside the dresser the two in-patients share. The man, 
like Tiny Ewell, has the rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage 
alcoholism. The man is in addition a burnt-yellow beneath his flush, from chronic 
hepatitis. The mirror he appears in is treated with shatterproof Lucite polymers. The 
man leans carefully forward with the plate of brownies in his lap and changes the setting 
on the air conditioner from 5 to 3 and then to 7, then 8, scanning the screen of gushing 
vents. He finally turns the selector's dial all the way around to 9. The air conditioner 
roars and blows his long hair straight back, and his beard blows back over his shoulder, 
ashes fly and swirl around from his plate of brownies, plus crumbs, and his rodney's tip 
glows cherry and gives sparks. He is deeply engaged by whatever he sees on 9. He gives 
Tiny Ewell the screaming meemies, Ewell has complained. He wears pisscatchers, a 
striped cotton St. Mel's robe, and a pair of glasses missing one lens. He has been 
watching the air conditioner all day. His face produces the little smiles and grimaces of a 
person who's being thoroughly entertained. 

When the big black rehabilitative staffer placed Tiny Ewell in the taxi and then 
squeezed in and told the cabbie they wanted Unit #6 in the Enfield Marine VA Hospital 



Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. in Enfield, the cabbie, whose photo was on the 
Mass. Livery License taped to the glove compartment, the cabbie, looking back and 
down at little Tiny Ewell's neat white beard and ruddy complexion and sharp threads, 
had scratched under his skallycap and asked if he was sick or something. 

Tiny Ewell had said, 'So it would seem.' 


By mid-afternoon on 2 April Y.D.A.U.: the Near Eastern medical attache; his devout 
wife; the Saudi Prince Q—'s personal physician's personal assistant, who'd been sent 
over to see why the medical attache hadn't appeared at the Back Bay Hilton in the A.M. 
and then hadn't answered his beeper's page; the personal physician himself, who'd 
come to see why his personal assistant hadn't come back; two Embassy security guards 
w/ sidearms, who'd been dispatched by a candidiatic, heartily pissed-off Prince Q—; and 
two neatly groomed Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers who'd seen human heads 
through the living room window and found the front door unlocked and come in with all 
good spiritual intentions — all were watching the recursive loop the medical attache 
had rigged on the TP's viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and 
attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room 
smelled very bad indeed. 


30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


He sat alone above the desert, redly backlit and framed in shale, watching very yellow 
payloaders crawl over the beaten dirt of some U.S.A. construction site several km. to the 
southeast. The outcropping's height allowed him, Marathe, to look out over most of 
U.S.A. area code 6026. His shadow did not yet reach the downtown regions of the city 
Tucson; not yet quite. Of sounds in the arid hush were only a faint and occasional hot 
wind, the blurred sound of the wings of sometimes an insect, some tentative trickling of 
loosened grit and small stones moving farther down the upslope behind. 

And as well the sunset over the foothills and mountains behind him: such a difference 
from the watery and somehow sad spring sunsets of southwestern Quebec's Papineau 
regions, where his wife had need of care. This (the sunset) more resembled an 
explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to 
regard it: it (the sunset) was swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of 
light when he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall. It 
hung just above the peaks of the Tortolita foothills behind him (Marathe), and slowly 



was sinking. 

Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de rollent 37 on a kind 
of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. As 
the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe's well- 
known 'Brockengespenst' phenomenon 38 enlarged and distended his seated shadow far 
out overland, so that the spokes of his chair's rear wheels cast over two whole counties 
below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move 
by playing slightly with the wheels' rubber rims; and his head's shadow brought to much 
of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk. 

He appeared to remain concentrated on his huge shadow-play as gravel and then also 
breath sounded from the steep hillside back above him, grit and dirty stones cascading 
onto the outcropping and gushing past his chair and off the front lip, and then the 
unmistakable yelp of an individual's impact with a cactus somewhere up behind. But 
Marathe, he had all the time without turning watched the other man's clumsy sliding 
descent's own mammoth shadow, cast as far east as the Rincon range just past the city 
Tucson, and could see the shadow rush in west toward his own as Unspecified Services' 
M. Hugh Steeply descended, falling twice and cursing in U.S.A. English, until the shadow 
collapsed nearly into Marathe's monstrous own. Another yelp took place as the 
Unspecified Services field-operative's fall and slide the last several meters carried him 
upon his bottom down onto the outcropping and then nearly all the way out and off it, 
Marathe having to release the machine pistol under his blanket to grab Steeply's bare 
arm and halt this sliding. Steeply's skirt was pulled obscenely up and his hosiery full of 
runs and stubs of thorns. The operative sat at Marathe's feet, glowing redly in the 
backlight, legs hanging over the shelf's edge, breathing with difficulty. 

Marathe smiled and released the operative's arm. 'Stealth becomes you,' he said. 

'Go shit in your chapeau,' Steeply wheezed, bring up his legs to survey the hosiery's 
damage. 

They spoke for the most part U.S.A. English when they met like this, covertly, in the 
field. M. Fortier 39 had wished Marathe to require that they interface always in 
Quebecois French, as for a small symbolic concession to the A.F.R. on the part of the 
Office of Unspecified Services, which the Quebecois Seperatiste Left referred to always 
as B.S.S., the 'Bureau des Services sans Specificite.' 

Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert's floor as 
Steeply got a hand under himself and rose, a huge and well-fed figure tottering on heels. 
The two men sent together a strange Brockengespenst-shadow out toward the city 
Tucson, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply's wig 
becoming uncombed in his descent. Steeply's gigantic prosthetic breasts pointed in 
wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty sky. The matte curtain of 
sunset's true dusk-shadow was moving itself very slowly in across the Rincons and 
Sonora desert east of the city Tucson, still many km. from obscuring their own large 
shadow. 

But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his Assassins des 
Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his 
wife, but to in truth do this — betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier 



and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying 
information to B.S.S. 40 — once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served 
now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now 
they spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply's preference. 

In fact, Steeply's Quebecois was better than Marathe's English, but c'etait la guerre, as 
one says. 

Marathe sniffed slightly. 'Thus, so, we now are both here.' He wore a windbreaker and 
did not perspire. 

Steeply's eyes were luridly made up. The rear area of his dress was dirty. Some of his 
makeup had started to run. He was forming a type of salute to shade his eyes and 
looking upward behind them at what remained of the explosive and trembling sun. 
'How in God's name did you get up here?' 

Marathe slowly shrugged. As usual, he appeared to Steeply as if he were half-asleep. 
He ignored the question and said only, shrugging, 'My time is finite.' 

Steeply had also with him a woman's handbag or purse. 'And the wife?' he said, gazing 
upward as yet. 'How's the wife doing?' 

'Holding her own weight, thank you,' Marathe said. His tone of his voice betrayed 
nothing. 'And so thus what is it your Offices believe they wish to know?' 

Steeply tottered on a leg as he removed one shoe and poured from it grit. 

'Nothing terribly surprising. A bit of razzle-dazzle up northeast in your so-called Ops- 
area, certainly you heard.' 

Marathe sniffed. A large odor of inexpensive and high-alcohol perfume came not from 
Steeply's person but from his handbag, which failed to complement his shoes. Marathe 
said, 'Dazzle?' 

'As in a civilian-type individual receives a certain item. Don't tell me this is news to you 
guys. Not on InterLace pulse, this item. Arrives via normal physical mail. We're sure you 
heard, Remy. A cartridge-copy of a certain let's call it between ourselves "the 
Entertainment." As in in the mail, without warning or motive. Out of the blue.' 

'From somewhere blue?' 

The B.S.S. operative had perspired also through his rouge, and his mascara had melted 
to become whorish. 'A person with no political value to anybody except that the Saudi 
Ministry of Entertainment made one the hell of a shrill stink.' 

'The medical attache, the specialist of digesting, you refer to.' Marathe shrugged again 
in that maddening Francophone way that can mean several things. 'Your offices wish to 
ask was the Entertainment's cartridge disseminated through our mechanisms?' 

'Don't let's waste your finite time, ami old friend,' Steeply said. 'The mischief happens 
to occur in metropolitan Boston. Postal codes route the package through the desert 
Southwest, and we know your dissemination-scheme's routing mechanism is proposed 
for somewhere between Phoenix and the border down here.' Steeply had worked hard 
at feminizing his expressions and gesturing. 'It would be a bit starry-eyed of O.U.S. not 
to think of your distinguished cell, no?' 

Beneath Marathe's windbreaker was a sportshirt whose breast pocket was filled with 
many pens. He said: 'Us, we don't have the information on even casualties. From this 
blue dazzle you speak of.' 



Steeply was trying to extract something stubborn from inside his other shoe. 'Upwards 
of twenty, Remy. Out of commission altogether. The attache and his wife, the wife a 
Saudi citizen. Four more raggers, all with embassy cards. Couple neighbors or 
something. The rest mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from 
going in before they killed the power.' 

'Local police forces. Gendarmes.' 

'The local constabulary.' 

'The minions of the law of the land.' 

'The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared for an Entertainment like this.' 
Steeply even removed and replaced his pumps in the upright-on-one-leg-bringing-other- 
foot-up-behind-his-bottom way of a feminine U.S.A. woman. But he appeared huge and 
bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual 
despair. He said, 'The attache had diplomatic status, Remy. Mideast. Saudi. Said to be 
close to minor members of the royal family.' 

Marathe sniffed hard, as if congested of the nose. 'A puzzling,' he said. 

'But also a compatriot of yours. Canadian citizenship. Born in Ottawa, to Arab emigres. 
Visa lists a residence in Montreal.' 

'And Services Without Specificity wishes maybe to ask were there below-the-surface 
connections that make the individual not such a civilian, unconnected. To ask of us 
would the A.F.R. wish to make of him the example.' 

Steeply was removing dirt from his bottom, swatting himself on the bottom. He stood 
more or less directly over Marathe. Marathe sniffed. 'We have neither digestive 
medicals nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action. You have personally seen 
A.F.R.'s initial lists. Nor in particular Montreal civilians. We have, as one will say, larger 
seafood to cook.' 

Steeply was looking out over the desert and city, also, as he swatted at himself. He 
seemed to have noticed the gespenst-phenomenon of his own shadow. Marathe for 
some reason pretended again to sniff the nose. The wind was moderate and constant 
and of about the temperature of a U.S.A. clothes-dryer set on Low. It made the shrill 
whistling sounds. Also sounds of the blowing grit. Weeds-of-tumbling like enormous 
hairballs rolled often across the Interstate Highway of 1-10 far below. Their specular 
perspective, the reddening light on vast tan stone and the oncoming curtain of dusk, the 
further elongation of their monstrous agnate shadows: all was almost mesmerizing. 
Neither man seemed able to look at anything but the vista below. Marathe could 
simultaneously speak in English and think in French. The desert was the tawny color of 
the hide of the lion. Their speaking without looking at one another, facing both the 
same direction — this gave their conversing an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends 
at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple. Marathe thought this as he 
opened and closed his upheld hand, making over the city Tucson a huge and black 
blossom open itself and close itself. 

And Steeply raised his bare arms and held them out and crossed them, maybe as if 
signalling for distant aid; this made X's and pedentive V's over much in the city Tucson. 
'Still, Remy, but born in the hated-by-you Ottawa, this civilian attache, and connected to 
a major buyer of trans-grid entertainment. And follow-up out of the Boston offices 



reports possible indications of the victim's prior possible involvement with the widow of 
the auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first place. The 
samizdat. ’ 

'Prior?' 

Steeply produced from his handbag Belgian cigarettes of a many-mm. and habitually 
female type. 'Film director's wife'd taught out at Brandeis where the victim'd done his 
residency. The husband was on board over at A.E.C., and different agencies' background 
checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse.' With the slight 
pause of which Steeply could excel: 'Particularly a Canadian pulse.' 

'Involvement of sexuality is what you are meaning, then, not politics.' 

Steeply said, 'This wife herself a Quebecer, Remy, from L'lslet county — Chief Tine 
says three years spent on Ottawa's "Personnes Qui On Doit" list. There's such a thing as 
political sex.' 

'I have said to you all we know. Civilians as individual warnings to O.N.A.N. are not our 
desire. This is known by you.' Marathe's eyes looked nearly closed. 'And your tits, they 
have become cock-eyed, I will tell you. Services Without Specificity, they have given you 
ridiculous tits, and now they point differently.' 

Steeply looked down at himself. One of the false breasts (surely false: surely they 
would not go as far as the hormonal, Marathe thought) nearly touched the chins of 
Steeply when his looking down produced his double chins. 'I was asked to secure 
personal verification, is all,' he said. 'My general sense at the Office is the brass consider 
the whole incident a stumper. There're theories and countertheories. There are even 
antitheories positing error, mistaken identity, sick hoax.' His shrugging, with his hands 
on the prosthesis, appeared not at all Gallic. 'Still: twenty-three human beings lost for all 
time: that'd be some hoax, no?' 

Marathe sniffed. 'Asked to verify by our mutual M. Tine? How you call him: "Rod, a 
God"?' 

(Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. 
and continental Reconfiguration, who held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and 
whose stenographer had long doubled as the ster\ograpber-cum-jeune-fille-de-Vendredi 
of M. DuPlessis, former asst, coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose 
passionate, ill-disguised attachment (Tine's) to this double-amaneunsis — one Mile. 
Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L'lslet, Quebec — gave rise to these questions of the 
high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he 'doubled' 41 for Quebec out of the love for Luria 
or 'tripled' the loyalties, pretending only to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his 
U.S.A. fealty against the pull of an irresistible love, it was said.) 

'The, Remy.' It was clear that Steeply could not fix his breasts' directions without 
pulling down severely his decolletage, which he was shy to do. He produced from his 
handbag sunglasses and put on the sunglasses. They were embellished with rhinestones 
and looked absurd. 'Rod the God.' 

Marathe forced himself to say nothing of their appearance. Steeply tried with several 
matches to light a cigarette in the wind. The encroachment of true dusk began to erase 
his wig's chaotic shadow. Electric lights began to twinkle in the Rincon foothills east of 
the city. Steeply tried somewhat to cup his body around the match, for shelter for the 



flame. 

It's a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the 
southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that 
forms a uremic-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as 
Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a 
Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of 
the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his 
hamsters were named Ward and June. 

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' 
whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable — it's that implacable-herd expression. 
They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the 
east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged 
outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine. 

All these territories are now property of Canada. 

With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that 
come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity 
anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry 
nothing even remotely vegetablish if in the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a 
herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own. If American, 
north not advisable. Move south, calmly and in all haste, toward some border 
metropolis — Rome NNY or Glens Falls NNY or Beverly MA, say, or those bordered 
points between them at which the giant protective ATFISCME fans atop the hugely 
convex protective walls of anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and piss-colored bank of 
teratogenic Concavity clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over 
your protected head. 

The heavy-tongued English of Steeply was even more difficult to understand with a 
cigarette in the mouth. Fie said, 'And you'll of course report this little interface of you 
and me right back to Fortier.' 

Marathe shrugged.' 'n sur.' 

Steeply got it lit. Fie was a large and soft man, some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport 
athlete now become fat. Fie appeared to Marathe to look less like a woman than a 
twisted parody of womanhood. Electrolysis had caused patches of tiny red pimples 
along his jowls and upper lip. Fie also held his elbow out, the arm holding the match for 
lighting, which is how no woman lights a cigarette, who is used to breasts and keeps the 
lighting elbow in. Also Steeply teetered ungracefully on his pumps' heels on the stone's 
uneven surface. Fie never for a moment turned his back completely at Marathe as he 
stood on the lip of the outcropping. And Marathe had his chair's wheels' clamps now 
locked down tight and a firm grip on the machine pistol's pebbled grip. Steeply's purse 
was small and glossy black, and the sunglasses he wore had womanly frames with small 
false jewels at the temples. Marathe believed that something in Steeply enjoyed his 
grotesque appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. 
superiors requested of him. 

Steeply now looked at him, in probability, behind the dark glasses. 'And also that I just 
right now asked you if you'd report it, and that you said bien sur?' 



Marathe's laugh had this misfortune to sound false and overhearty, whether or not 
sincere. He made a mustache of his finger, pretending for some reason to stifle a need 
to sneeze. 'You verify this because of why?' 

Steeply scratched under the hem of his blonde wig with (stupidly, dangerously) the 
thumb of his hand that held the cigarette. 'Well you are already tripling, Remy, aren't 
you? Or would it be quadrupling. We know Fortier and the A.F.R. know you're here with 
me now.' 

'But do my brothers on wheels know that you are knowing this, that they have sent 
me to pretend I double?' 

Marathe's sidearm, a Sterling UL35 9 mm machine pistol with a Mag Na Port silencer, 
did not have a safety. Its fat and texture-of-pebbles grip was hot from Marathe's palm, 
and in turn caused Marathe's palm to perspire beneath the blanket. From Steeply there 
merely was silence. 

Marathe said: '...have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray.' 42 

And the desert U.S.A.'s light had become now sad, more than half the round sun gone 
behind the Tortolitas. Only now the chair's wheels and Steeply's thick legs cast shadows 
below the dusk-line, and these shadows were becoming squat and retreating back up 
toward the two men. 

Steeply did a brief pretend-Charleston, playing with his legs' shadows. 'Nothing 
personal. You know that. It's the obsessive caution. Who was it — who once said we get 
paid to drive ourselves crazy, the caution thing? You guys and Tine — your DuPlessis 
always suspected he tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.' 

Marathe shrugged hard. 'And abruptly M. DuPlessis has now passed away from life. 
Under circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion.' Again with the false-sounding 
laugh. 'An inept burglary and grippe indeed.' 

Both men were silent. Steeply's left arm had on it a nasty mesquite scratch, Marathe 
could observe. 

Marathe finally glanced at his watch, its dial illuminated in his body's shadow. Both 
men's shadows were now climbing the steep incline, returning up to them. 'Me, I think 
that we go about our affairs in a more simple manner than your B.S.S. office. If M. Tine's 
betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware.' 

'Because of Luria.' 

Marathe pretended to fuss with his blanket, rearranging it. 'But yes. The caution. Luria 
would be aware.' 

Steeply stepped gingerly up to the edge and tossed out his cigarette's stub. The wind 
caught the stub and it soared slightly upward from his hand, moving east. Both men 
were silent until the butt fell and hit the dark mountainside off below them, a tiny 
bloom of orange. Their silence then became contemplative. Something tight in the air 
between them loosened. Marathe no longer felt the sun on his skull. Dusk settled about 
them. Steeply had found his triceps' scratch and twisted the flesh of his arm to examine 
it, his rouged lips rounded with concern. 



YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


Tuesday, 3 November, Enfield Tennis Academy: A.M. drills, shower, eat, class, lab, 
class, class, eat, prescriptive-grammar exam, lab/class, conditioning run, P.M. drills, play 
challenge match, play challenge match, upper-body circuits in weight room, sauna, 
shower, slump to locker-room floor w/ other players. 

'...to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness? Or to even feel it in 
the first place?' 

1640h.: the Comm.-Ad. Bldg.'s males' locker room is full of clean upper-classmen in 
towels after P.M. matches, the players' hair wet-combed and shining with Barbicide. 
Pemulis uses the comb's big-toothed end to get that wide-furrowed look that kids from 
Allston favor. Hal's own hair tends to look wet-combed even when it's dry. 

'So,' Jim Troeltsch says, looking around. 'So what do you think?' 

Pemulis lowers himself to the floor by the sinks, leaning up against the cabinet where 
they keep all the disinfectants. He has this way of looking warily to either side of him 
before he says anything. 'Was there like a central point to all that, Troeltsch?' 

'The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not about real unhappy 
families,' Hal says quietly. 

John Wayne, as do most Canadians, lifts one leg slightly to fart, like the fart was some 
kind of task, standing at his locker, waiting for his feet to get dry enough to put on socks. 

There is a silence. Showerheads dribble on tile. Steam hangs. Distant ghastly sounds 
from T. Schacht over in one of the stalls off the showers. Everyone stares into the 
middle distance, stunned with fatigue. Michael Pemulis, who can stand about ten 
seconds of communal silence tops, clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and 
back into the sink behind him. The plate mirrors caught part of its quivering flight, Hal 
sees. Hal closes his eyes. 

'Tired,' someone exhales. 

Ortho Stice and John ('N.R.') Wayne seem less fatigued than detached; they have the 
really top player's way of shutting the whole neural net down for brief periods, staring 
at the space they took up, hooded in silence, removed, for a moment, from the 
connectedness of all events. 

'Right then,' Troeltsch says. 'Pop quiz. Pop test-question. Most crucial difference, for 
Leith tomorrow, between your historical broadcast TV set and a cartridge-capable TP.' 

Disney R. Leith teaches E.T.A.'s History of Entertainment I and II as well as certain high- 
level esoteric Optics things you needed Permission of Inst, to get into. 

'The Cathodeluminescent Panel. No cathode gun. No phosphenic screen. Two to the 
screen's diagonal width in cm. lines of resolution, total.' 

'You mean a high-def. viewer in general, or a specifically TP-component viewer?' 

'No analogs,' Struck says. 

'No snow, no faint weird like ghostly double next to UHF images, no vertical roll when 



planes fly over.' 

'Analogs v. digitals.' 

'You referring to broadcast as in network versus a TP, or network-plus-cable versus a 
TP?' 

'Did cable TV use analogs? What, like pre-fiber phones?' 

'It's the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That 
word he uses about eleven times an hour.' 

'What did pre-fiber phones use, exactly?' 

'The old tin-can-and-string principle.' "Seminal." He keeps saying it. "Seminal, 
seminal." 

'The biggest advance in home communications since the phone he says.' 

'In home entertainment since the TV itself.' 

'Leith might say the Write-Capable CD, for entertainment.' 

'He's hard to pin down if you get him on entertainment qua entertainment.' 

'The Diz'll say use your own judgment,' Pemulis says. 'Axford took it last year. He 
wants an argument made. He'll skewer you if you treat it like there's an obvious 
answer.' 

'Plus there's the InterLace de-digitizer instead of an antenna, with a TP,' Jim Struck 
says, squeezing at something behind his ear. Graham ('Yard-guard') Rader is checking his 
underarm for more hair. Freer and Shaw might be asleep. 

Stice has pulled his towel down slightly and is fingering the deep red abdominal stripe 
a jock's waistband leaves. 'Boys, I ever become president, the first thing to go's elastic.' 

Troeltsch pretends to shuffle cards. 'Next item. Next like flash-card. Define acutance. 
Anybody?' 

'A measure of resolution directly proportional to the resolved ratio of a given pulse's 
digital code,' Hal says. 

'The Incster has the last word once again,' says Struck. Which invites a chorus: 

'The Halster.' 

'Halorama.' 

'Halation.' 

'Halation,' Rader says. 'A halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen on 
chemical film at low speed.' 

'That most angelic of distortions.' 

Struck says 'We'll be like vying for the seats all around Inc tomorrow.' Hal shuts his 
eyes: he can see the page of text right there, all highlighted, all yellowed up. 

'He can scan the page, rotate it, fold the corner down and clean under his nails with it, 
all mentally.' 

'Leave him alone,' Pemulis says. 

Freer opens his eyes. 'Do a dictionary-page for us, man, Inc.' 

Stice says 'Leave him be.' 

It's all only half-nasty. Hal is placid about getting his balls smacked around; they all 
are. He does his share of chops-busting. Some of the littler kids who take their showers 
after the upperclassmen are hanging around listening. Hal sits on the floor, quiescent, 
chin on his chest, just thinking it's nice finally to breathe and get enough air. 



The temperature had fallen with the sun. Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind 
roll across the incline and desert floor. Marathe could sense or feel many million floral 
pores begin slowly to open, hopeful of dew. The American Steeply produced small 
exhalations between his teeth as he examined his scratch of the arm. Only one or two 
remaining tips of the digitate spikes of the radial blades of the sun found crevices 
between the Tortolitas' peaks and probed at the roof of the sky. There were the slight 
and dry locationless rustlings of small living things that wish to come out at night, 
emerging. The sky was violet. 


Everyone in the locker room's got a towel around his waist like a kilt. Everyone except 
Stice has a white E.T.A. towel; Stice uses his own sort of trademark towels, black ones. 
After a silence Stice shoots some air out through his nose. Jim Struck picks liberally at his 
face and neck. There are one or two sighs. Peter Beak and Evan Ingersoll and Kent Blott, 
twelve, eleven, ten, are up sitting on the blond-wood benches that run in front of the 
lockers' rows, sitting there in towels, elbows on knees, not taking part. So is Zoltan 
Csikzentmihalyi, who's sixteen but speaks very little English. Idris Arslanian, new this 
year, ethnically vague, fourteen, all feet and teeth, is a shadowy lurking presence just 
outside the locker-room door, poking the non-Caucasoid snout in occasionally and then 
withdrawing, terribly shy. Each E.T.A. player in 18-and-Unders has like four to six 14- 
and-Unders kids he's supposed to keep his more experienced wing over, look out for. 
The more the E.T.A. administration trusts you, the younger and more generally clueless 
the little kids in your charge. Charles Tavis instituted the practice and calls it the Big 
Buddy System in the literature he sends new kids' parents. So the parents can feel their 
kid's not getting lost in the institutional shuffle. Beak, Blott, and Arslanian are all in Hal's 
Big Buddy group for Y.D.A.U. He also in effect has Ingersoll, having traded Todd ('Postal- 
Weight') Possalthwaite to Axford off the books for Ingersoll, because Trevor Axford 
found he so despised the Ingersoll kid for some unanalyzable reason that he was 
struggling against a horrible compulsion to put Ingersoll's little fingers into the gap by 
the hinges of an open door and then very slowly close the door, and came to Hal almost 
in tears, Axford had. Though technically Ingersoll is still Axford's and Possalthwaite Hal's. 
Possalthwaite, the great lobber, has a weird young-old face and little wet lips that lapse 
into a sucking reflex under stress. In theory, a Big Buddy's somewhere between an R.A. 
and a prorector. He's there to answer questions, ease bumpy transitions, show ropes, 
act as liaison with Tony Nwangi and Tex Watson and the other prorectors specializing in 
little kids. Be somebody they can come to off the record. A shoulder to climb up on a 
footstool and cry on. If a 16-and-Under gets made a Big Buddy it's kind of an honor; it 
means they think you're going places. When there's no tournament or travel, etc.. Big 
Buddies get together with their quar-to-sextet in small-group private twice a week, in 
the interval between P.M. challenge matches and dinner, usually after saunas and 
showers and a few minutes of sitting slumped around the locker room sucking air. 
Sometimes Hal sits with his Little Buddies at dinner and eats with them. Not often. 



however. The savvier Big Buddies don't get too overly close with their L.B. ephebes, 
don't let them forget about the unbridgeable gaps of experience and ability and general 
status that separate ephebes from upperclassmen who've hung in and stuck it out at 
E.T.A. for years and years. Gives them more to look up to. The savvy Big Buddy doesn't 
rush in or tread heavy; he holds his own ground and lets the suppliants realize when 
they need his help and come to him. You have to know when to tread in and take an 
active hand and when to hang back and let the littler kids learn from the personal 
experience they'll have to learn from, inevitably, if they want to be able to hang. Every 
year, the biggest source of attrition, besides graduating 18s, is 13-15s who've had 
enough and just can't hang. This happens; the administration accepts it; not everyone's 
cut out for what's required of you here. Though C.T. makes his administrative assistant 
Lateral Alice Moore drive the prorectors bats trying to ferret out data on littler kids' 
psychic states, so he can forecast probable burnouts and attritive defections, so he'll 
know how many slots he and Admissions'll have to offer Incomings for the next term. 
Big Buddies are in a tricky position, requested to keep the prorectors generally informed 
about who among their charges seems shaky in terms of resolve, capacity for suffering 
and stress, physical punishment, homesickness, deep fatigue, but at the same time 
wanting to remain a trustworthy confidential shoulder and wing for their Little Buddies' 
most private and delicate issues. 

Though he, too, has to struggle with a strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, who 
reminds him of someone he dislikes but can't quite place, Hal on the whole rather likes 
being a Big B. He likes being there to come to, and likes delivering little unpretentious 
minilectures on tennis theory and E.T.A. pedagogy and tradition, and getting to be kind 
in a way that costs him nothing. Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he 
doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hair¬ 
less plump trusting clueless faces. The twice-weekly (more like once-weekly, as things 
usually pan out) group interfaces with his quintet are unpleasant only after a particularly 
bad P.M. session on the courts, when he's tired and on edge and would far rather go off 
by himself and do secret stuff in underground ventilated private. 

Jim Troeltsch feels at his glands. John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a- 
shoe school. 

'Tired,' Ortho Slice again sighs. He pronounces it 'tard.' To a man, now, the 
upperclassmen are down slumped on the locker room's blue crush carpet, their legs 
straight out in front of them, toes pointing out at that distinctive morgue-angle, their 
backs up against the blue steel of the lockers, careful to avoid the six sharp little 
louvered antimildew vents at each locker's base. All of them look a bit silly naked 
because of their tennis tans: legs and arms the deep sienna of a quality catcher's mitt, 
from the summer, the tan just now this late starting to fade, but feet and ankles of 
toadbelly-white, the white of the grave, with chests and shoulders and upper arms more 
like off-white — the players can sit shirtless in the stands at tournaments when they're 
not playing and get at least a bit of thoracic sun. The faces are the worst, maybe, most 
red and shiny, some still deep-peeling from three straight weeks of outdoor 
tournaments in August-September. Besides Hal, who's atavistically dark-complected 
anyway, the ones here with the least bad piebald coloring are the players who can 



tolerate spraying themselves down with Lemon Pledge before outdoor play. It turns out 
Lemon Pledge, when it's applied in pre-play stasis and allowed to dry to a thin crust, is a 
phenomenal sunscreen, UV-rating like 40+, and the only stuff anywhere that can survive 
a three-set sweat. No one knows what jr. player at what academy found this out about 
Pledge, years back, or how: rather bizarre discovery-circumstances are envisioned. The 
smell of sweat-wet Pledge out on the court makes some of the more delicately 
constituted kids sick, though. Others feel sunscreen of any kind to be unconscionably 
pussified, like white visors or on-court sunglasses. So most of the E.T.A. upperclassmen 
have these vivid shoe-and-shirt tans that give them the classic look of bodies hastily 
assembled from different bodies' parts, especially when you throw in the heavily 
muscled legs and usually shallow chests and the two arms of different sizes. 

'Tard tard tard, 1 Stice says. 

Group empathy is expressed via sighs, further slumping, small spastic gestures of 
exhaustion, the soft clanks of skulls' backs against the lockers' thin steel. 

'My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing. I'm so 
tired.' 

'I'm waiting til the last possible second to even breathe. I'm not expanding the cage till 
driven by necessity of air.' 

'So tired it's out of tired's word-range,' Pemulis says. 'Tired just doesn't do it.' 

'Exhausted, shot, depleted,' says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the heel of 
his hand. 'Cashed. Totalled.' 

'Look.' Pemulis pointing at Struck. 'It's trying to think.' 

'A moving thing to see.' 

'Beat. Worn the heck out.' 

'Worn the fuck-all out is more like.' 

'Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.' 

'None even come close, the words.' 

'Word-inflation,' Stice says, rubbing at his crewcut so his forehead wrinkles and clears. 
'Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. 
Like grade-inflation.' 

'Should be so lucky,' says Struck, who's been on academic probation since fifteen. 

Stice is from a part of southwest Kansas that might as well be Oklahoma. He makes 
the companies that give him clothes and gear give him all black clothes and gear, and his 
E.T.A. cognomen is 'The Darkness.' 

Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. 'Hyperbolicker?' 

'My daddy as a boy, he'd have said "tuckered out'"ll do just fine.' 

'Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.' 

'Phrases and clauses and models and structures,' Troeltsch says, referring again to a 
prescriptive exam everyone but Hal wishes now to forget. 'We need an inflation- 
generative grammar.' 

Keith Freer makes a motion as if taking his unit out of his towel and holding it out at 
Troeltsch: 'Generate this.' 

'Need a whole new syntax for fatigue on days like this,' Struck says. 'E.T.A.'s best 
minds on the problem. Whole thesauruses digested, analyzed.' Makes a sarcastic 



motion. 'Hal?' 

One semion that still works fine is holding your fist up and cranking at it with the other 
hand so the finger you're giving somebody goes up like a drawbridge. Though of course 
Hal's mocking himself at the same time. Everybody agrees it speaks volumes. Idris 
Arslanian's shoes and incisors appear briefly in the doorway's steam, then withdraw. 
Everyone's reflection is sort of cubist in the walls' shiny tiling. The name handed down 
paternally from an Umbrian five generations past and now much diluted by N.E. Yankee, 
a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding, 
Hal is the only extant Incandenza who looks in any way ethnic. His late father had been 
as a young man darkly tall, high flat Pima-tribe cheekbones and very black hair 
Brylcreemed back so tight there'd been a kind of enforced widow's peak. Himself had 
looked ethnic, but he isn't extant. Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish, 
only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unburnable even w/o sunscreen, his 
untanned feet the color of weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. His 
sleekness isn't oily so much as moist, milky; Hal worries secretly that he looks half¬ 
feminine. His parents' pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war: Hal's 
eldest brother Orin had got the Moms's Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype, the deep- 
socketed and lighter-blue eyes, the faultless posture and incredible flexibility (Orin was 
the only male anybody at E.T.A.'d ever heard of who could do a fully splayed 
cheerleader-type split), the rounder and more protrusive zygomatics. 

Hal's next-oldest brother Mario doesn't seem to resemble much of anyone they know. 

On most of the nontravel days that he doesn't Big Buddy with his charges, Hal will wait 
till most everybody's busy in the sauna and shower and stow his sticks in his locker and 
stroll casually down the cement steps into E.T.A.'s system of tunnels and chambers. He 
has some way he can casually drift off and have quite a while go by before anyone even 
notices his absence. He'll often stroll casually back into the locker room just as people 
are slumped on the floor in towels discussing fatigue, carrying his gear bag and 
substantially altered in mood, and go in when most of the littler kids are in there peeling 
Pledge-husks off their limbs and taking their turn showering, and shower, using one of 
the kids' shampoo out of a bottle shaped like a cartoon character, then hike the head 
back and apply Visine in a Schacht-free stall, gargle and brush and floss and dress, 
usually not even needing to comb his hair. He carries Visine AC, mint-flavored floss, and 
a traveller's toothbrush in a pocket of his Dunlop gear bag. Ted Schacht, big into oral 
hygiene, regards Hal's bag's floss and brush as an example to them all. 

'So tired it's like I'm almost high.' 

'But not pleasantly high,' Troeltsch says. 

'It'd be a pleasanter tiredness-high if I didn't have to wait till fucking 1900 to start all 
this studyin',' Stice says. 

'You'd think Schtitt could at least not turn up the juice the week before midterms.' 

'You'd think that the coaches and the teachers could try and get together on their 
scheduling.' 

'It'd be like a pleasant fatigue if I could just go up after dinner and hunker on down 
with the mind in neutral and watch something uncomplex.' 

'Not have to worry about prescriptive forms or acutance.' 



'Kick back.' 

'Watch something with chase scenes and lots of stuff blowing up all over the place.' 

'Relax, do bongs, kick back, look at lingerie catalogues, eat granola with a great big 
wooden spoon,' Struck says wistfully. 

'Get laid.' 

'Just get one night off to like R and R.' 

'Slip on the old environmental suit and listen to some atonal jazz.' 

'Have sex. Get laid.' 

'Bump uglies. Do the nasty. Haul ashes.' 

'Find me one of them Northeast Oklahoma drive-in burger-stand waitresses with the 
great big huge titties.' 

'Those enormous pink-white French-painting tits that sort of like tumble out.' 

'One of those wooden spoons so big you can barely get your mouth around it.' 

'Just one night to relax and indulge.' 

Pemulis belts out two quick verses of Johnny Mathis's 'Chances Are,' left over from the 
shower, then subsides to examine something on his left thigh. Shaw has a spit-bubble 
going, growing to such exceptional size for just spit that half the room watches until it 
finally goes at the same moment Pemulis breaks off. 

Evan Ingersoll says 'We get off Saturday for Interdependence Day Eve, though, the 
board said.' 

Several upperclass heads are cocked up at Ingersoll. Pemulis makes a bulge in his 
cheek with his tongue and moves it around. 

'Flubbaflubba': Stice makes his jowls fly around. 

'We get off classes is all. Drills and challenges go merrily on, deLint says,' Freer points 
out. 

'But no drills Sunday, before the Gala.' 

'But still matches.' 

Every jr. player presently in this room is ranked in the top 64 continentally, except 
Pemulis, Yardley and Blott. 

There'd be clear evidence that T. Schacht's still in one of the toilet stalls off the 
showers even if Hal couldn't see the tip of one of Schacht's enormous purple shower 
thongs under the door of the stall right by where the shower-area entryway cuts into his 
line of sight. Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors. The 
defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on 
knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial 
type of waiting, almost religious. Luther's shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, 
placid, possibly made of wood, Luther's 16th-century shoes, awaiting epiphany. The 
mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station Johns, 
heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush. Women's slippers, 
centurions' dusty sandals, dock-workers' hobnailed boots. Popes' slippers. All waiting, 
pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping. Huge shaggy-browed men in skins hunched just 
past the firelight's circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting. Schacht suffered from 
Crohn's Disease, 43 a bequest from his ulcerative-colitic dad, and had to take carminative 
medication with every meal, and took a lot of guff about his digestive troubles, and had 



developed of all things arthritic gout, too, somehow, because of the Crohn's Disease, 
which had settled in his right knee and caused him terrible pain on the court. 

Freer's and Tall Paul Shaw's racquets fall off the bench with a clatter, and Beak and 
Blott move fast to pick them up and stack them back on the bench. Beak one-handed 
because the other hand is keeping his towel fastened. 

'Because so that was let's see,' Struck says. 

Pemulis loves to sing around tile. 

Struck's hitting his palm with a finger for either emphasis or ordinal counting. 'Close to 
let's call it an hour run for the A-squads, an hour-fifteen drills, two matches back to 
back.' 

'I only played one,' Troeltsch injects. 'Had a measurable fever in the A.M., deLint said 
to throttle down today.' 

'Folks that went three sets only played one match, Spodek and Kent for an instance,' 
Stice says. 

'Funny how Troeltsch how his health always seems to rally when A.M. drills get out,' 
Freer says. 

'— like conservatively two hours for the matches. Conservatively. Then half an hour on 
the machines under fucking Loach's beady browns, sitting there with the clipboard. 
That's let's call it five hours of vigorous nonstop straight-out motion.' 

'Sustained and strenuous exertion.' 

'Schtitt's determinated this year we ain't singing no silly songs at Port Washington.' 

John Wayne hasn't said one word this whole time. The contents of his locker are neat 
and organized. He always buttons his shirt all the way up to the top button as if he were 
going to put on a tie, which he doesn't even own. IngersolPs also getting dressed out of 
his underclassman's small square locker. 

Stice says 'Except they seem to forget we're still in our puberty.' 

IngersolI is a kid seemingly wholly devoid of eyebrows, as far as Hal can see. 

'Speak for yourself. Darkness.' 

'I'm saying how stressing the pubertyizing skeleton like this, it's real short-sighted.' 
Stice's voice rises.' 'm I supposed to do when I'm twenty and in the Show playing 
nonstop and I'm skeletally stressed and injury-proned?' 

'Dark's right.' 

A curled bit of cloudy old Pledge-husk and a green thread from a strip of GauzeTex 
wrap are complexly entwined in the blue fibers of the carpet near Hal's left ankle, which 
ankle is faintly swollen and has a blue tinge. He keeps flexing the ankle whenever it 
occurs to him to. Struck and Troeltsch spar briefly with open hands, feinting and 
bobbing their heads, both still seated on the floor. Hal, Stice, Troeltsch, Struck, Rader, 
and Beak are all rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands, as per 
Academy mandate. Struck's shoulders and neck have furious purple inflammations; Hal 
had also noticed a boil on the inside of Schacht's thigh, when Ted'd sat down. Hal's 
face's reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then if he moves his 
head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical twang in the 
next tile. That post-shower community feeling is dissipating. Even Evan Ingersoll looks 
quickly at his watch and clears his throat. Wayne and Shaw have dressed and left; Freer, 



a major Pledge-devotee, is at his hair in the mirror, Pemulis also rising now to get away 
from Freer's feet and legs. Freer's eyes have a protrusive wideness to them that the 
Axhandle says makes Freer always look like he's getting shocked or throttled. 

And time in the P.M. locker room seems of limitless depth; they've all been just here 
before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow. The light saddening outside, a grief felt 
in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows. 

'I'm thinking it's Tavis,' Freer says to them all in the mirror. 'Where there's excess work 
and suffering can fucking Tavis be far behind.' 

'No, it's Schtitt,' Hal says. 

'Schtitt was short a few wickets out of the old croquet set long before he got hold of 
us, men,' Pemulis says. 

'Peemster and Hal.' 

'Halation and Pemurama.' 

Freer purses his little lips and expels air like he's blowing out a match, blowing some 
tiny grooming-remnant off the big mirror's glass. 'Schtitt just does what he's told like a 
good Nazi.' 

'What the hail is that supposed to mean?' asks a Stice who's well known for asking 
Flow High Sir when Schtitt says Jump, now feeling at the carpet around him for 
something to throw at Freer. Ingersoll tosses Stice a woppsed-up towel, trying to be 
helpful, but Slice's eyes are on Freer's in the glass, and the towel hits him on the head 
and sits there, on his head. The room's emotions seem to be inverting themselves every 
couple seconds. There's half-cruel laughter at Stice as Hal struggles to his feet, rising in 
careful stages, putting most of his weight on the good ankle. Hal's towel falls off as he 
does his combination. Struck says something that's lost in the roar of a high-pressure 
toilet. 


The feminized American stood at a slight angle to Marathe upon the outcropping. Fie 
stared out at the dusk-shadow they were now inside, and as well the increasingly 
complicated twinkle of the U.S.A. city Tucson, seeming slackly transfixed. Steeply, in the 
way vistas too large for the eye to contain transfix persons in a kind of torpid spectation. 

Marathe seemed on the edge of sleep. 

Even the voice of Steeply had a different timbre inside the shadow. 'They say it's a 
great and maybe even timeless love. Rod Tine's for your Luria person.' 

Marathe grunted, shifting slightly in the chair. 

Steeply said 'The sort that gets sung about, the kind people die for and then get 
immortalized in song. You got your ballads, your operas. Tristan and Isolde. Lancelot and 
what's-her-name. Agamemnon and Helen, Dante and Beatrice.' 

Marathe's drowsy smile continued upward to become a wince. 'Narcissus and Echo. 
Kierkegaard and Regina. Kafka and that poor girl afraid to go to the postbox for the 
mail.' 

'Interesting choice of example here, the mailbox.' Steeply pretended to chuckle. 

Marathe came alert. Take off your wig and be shitting inside it, Hugh Steeply B.S.S. 
And the ignorance of you appalls me. Agamemnon had no relation with this queen. 



Menelaus was husband, him of Sparta. And you mean Paris. Helen and Paris. He of 
Troy. 1 

Steeply seemed amused in the idiotic way: 'Paris and Helen, the face that launched 
vessels. The horse: the gift which was not a gift. The anonymous gift brought to the 
door. The sack of Troy from inside.' 

Marathe rose slightly on his stumps in the chair, showing some emotions at this 
Steeply. 'I am seated here appalled at the naivete of history of your nation. Paris and 
Helen were the excuse of the war. All the Greek states in addition to the Sparta of 
Menelaus attacked Troy because Troy controlled the Dardanelles and charged the 
ruinous tolls for passage through, which the Greeks, who would like very dearly the easy 
sea passage for trade with the Oriental East, resented with fury. It was for commerce, 
this war. The one-quotes "love" one-does-not-quote of Paris for Helen merely was the 
excuse.' 

Steeply, genius of interviewing, sometimes affected more than usual idiocy with 
Marathe, which he knew baited Marathe. 'Everything reduces itself to politics for you 
guys. Wasn't that whole war just a song? Did that war even really take place, that 
anybody knows of?' 

'The point is that what launches vessels of war is the state and community and its 
interests,' Marathe said without heat, tiredly. 'You only wish to enjoy to pretend for 
yourself that the love of one woman could do this, launch so many vessels of alliance.' 

Steeply was stroking the perimeters of the mesquite-scratch, which made his shrug 
appear awkward. 'I don't think I'd be so sure. Those around Rod the God say the man 
would die twice for her. Say he wouldn't have to even think about it. Not just that he'd 
let the whole of O.N.A.N. come down, if it came to that. But'd die.' 

Marathe sniffed. 'Twice.' 

'Without even having to pause and think,' Steeply said, stroking at his lip's 
electrolysistic rash in a ruminative fashion. 'It's the reason most of us think he's still 
there, why he's still got President Gentle's ear. Divided loyalties are one thing. But if he 
does it for love — well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the 
political, wouldn't you say?' Steeply smiled broadly down at Marathe. 

Marathe's own betrayal of A.F.R.: for medical care for the conditions of his wife; for 
(Steeply might imagine to think) love of a person, a woman. 'Tragic saying as if Rodney 
Tine of Nonspecificity were not responsible for choosing it, as the insane are not 
responsible,' said Marathe quietly. 

Steeply now was smiling even more broadly. 'It has a kind of tragic quality, timeless, 
musical, that how could Gentle resist?' 

Marathe's tone now became derisive despite his legendary sangfroid in matters of 
technical interviews: 'These sentiments from a person who allows them to place him in 
the field as an enormous girl with tits at the cock-eyed angle, now discoursing on tragic 
love.' 

Steeply, impassive and slackly ruminative, picked at the lipstick of the corner of his 
mouth with a littlest finger, removing some grain of grit, gazing out from their shelf of 
stone. 'But sure. The fanatically patriotic Wheelchair Assassins of southern Quebec 
scorn this type of interpersonal sentiment between people.' Looking now down at 



Marathe. 'No? Even though it's just this that has brought you Tine, yours for Luria to 
command, should it ever come to that?' 

Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. 'Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, 
"fanatic," do they teach you it comes from the Latin for "temple"? It is meaning, literally, 
"worshipper at the temple." 

'Oh Jesus now here we go again,' Steeply said. 

'As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine's grand love. It 
means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our 
temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.' 

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. 'Herrrrrre we go.' 

Marathe ignored this. 'Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. 
only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your 
attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish 
to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This 
is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sick¬ 
ness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.' 

'How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?' 

'You U.S.A.'s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a 
woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. 
Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. 
Something bigger than the self.' 

Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts: 'Ohh... Can -ada...' 

Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. 'Make amusement all you wish. But 
choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you 
would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would 
die without thinking for what?' 

The A.F.R.'s extensive file on Steeply included mention of his recent divorce. Marathe 
already had informed Steeply of the existence of this file. He wondered how badly 
Steeply doubted what he reported, Marathe, or whether he assumed its truth simply. 
Though the persona of him changed, Steeply's car for all field assignments was this 
green sedan subsidized by a painful ad for aspirin upon its side — the file knew this 
stupidity — Marathe was sure the sedan with its aspirin advertisement was somewhere 
below them, unseen. The fanatically beloved car of M. Hugh Steeply. Steeply was 
watching or gazing at the darkness of the desert floor. He did not respond. His 
expression of boredom could be real or tactical, either of these. 

Marathe said, 'This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who 
teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to 
think two times?' 

'This from a man who —' 

Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. 'For this choice determines all else. No? All 
other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the 
temple, thus, for U.S.A.'s? What is it, when you fear that you must protect them from 
themselves, if wicked Quebecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm 
homes?' 



Steeply's face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew 
well Quebecers found repellent on Americans. 'But you assume it's always choice, 
conscious, decision. This isn't just a little naive, Remy? You sit down with your little 
accountant's ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?' 

'The alternatives are —' 

'What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes 
to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in 
that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?' 

Marathe's sniff held disdain. 'Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. 
Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective 
narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are 
by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.' 

A silence ensued this. 

Marathe shifted in his chair. 'In a case such as this you become the slave who believes 
he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would 
die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.' 

Another silence ensued. Steeply, who had made his early career with Unspecified 
Services conducting technical interviews, 44 used silent pauses as integral parts of his 
techniques of interface. Here it defused Marathe. Marathe felt the ironies of his 
position. One strap of Steeply's prostheses' brassiere had slipped into view below his 
shoulder, where it cut deeply into his flesh of the upper arm. The air smelled faintly of 
creosote, but much less strongly smelling than the ties of train tracks, which Marathe 
had smelled at close range. Steeply's back was broad and soft. Marathe eventually said: 

'You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock 
beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: "tragically, 
unvoluntarily, lost." 

Another silence ensued. Steeply farted mildly. Marathe shrugged. The B.S.S. Field 
Operative Steeply may not have been truly sneering. The city Tucson's lume appeared a 
bleached and ghostly white in the unhumid air. Crepuscular animals rustled and perhaps 
scuttled. Dense and unbeautiful spider webs of the poisonous U.S.A. species of spider 
Black Widow were beneath the shelf and the incline's other outcroppings. And when the 
wind hit certain angles in the mountainside it moaned. Marathe thought of his victory 
over the train that had taken his legs. 45 He attempted in English to sing: 

' "Oh Say, Land of the Free." ' 

And they both could feel this queer dry night-desert chill descend with the moon's 
gibbous rise — a powdery wind down below making dust to shift and cactus needles 
whistle, the sky's stars adjusting to the color of low flame — but were themselves not 
yet chilled, even Steeply's sleeveless dress: he and Marathe stood and sat in the form¬ 
fitting astral spacesuit of warmth their own radiant heat produced. This is what happens 
in dry night climes, Marathe was learning. His dying wife had never once left 
southwestern Quebec. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulents' remote embryonic 
disseminatory Ops base down here in Southwest U.S.A. seemed to him like the surface 
of the moon: four corrugated Quonsets and kiln-baked earth and air that swam and 
shimmered like the area behind jet engines. Empty and dirty-windowed rooms. 



doorknobs hot to touch and hell-stench inside the empty rooms. 

Steeply was continuing saying nothing while he tamped down another of his long 
Belgian cigarettes. Marathe continued to hum the U.S.A. song, all over the map in terms 
of key. 


3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. 


'Because none of them really meant any of it,' Hal tells Kent Blott. 'The end-of-the-day 
hatred of all the work is just part of the work. You think Schtitt and deLint don't know 
we're going to sit in there together after showers and bitch? It's all planned out. The 
bitchers and moaners in there are just doing what's expected.' 

'But I look at these guys that've been here six, seven years, eight years, still suffering, 
hurt, beat up, so tired, just like I feel tired and suffer, I feel this what, dread, this dread, I 
see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day of tiredness and 
stress and suffering stretching ahead, and for what, for a chance at a like a pro career 
that I'm starting to get this dready feeling a career in the Show means even more 
suffering, if I'm skeletally stressed from all the grueling here by the time I get there.' 

Blott's on his back on the shag carpet — all five of them are — stretched out splay- 
limbed with their heads up supported on double-width velourish throw-pillows on the 
floor of V.R.6, one of the three little Viewing Rooms on the second floor of the Comm.- 
Ad. Bldg., two flights up from the locker rooms and three from the main tunnel's mouth. 
The room's new cartridge-viewer is huge and almost painfully high-definition; it hangs 
flat on the north wall like a large painting; it runs off a refrigerated chip; the room's got 
no TP or phone-console; it's very specialized, just a player and viewer, and tapes; the 
cartridge-player sits on the second shelf of a small bookcase beneath the viewer; the 
other shelves and several other cases are full of match-cartridges, motivational and 
visualization cartridges — InterLace, Tatsuoka, Yushityu, SyberVision. The 300-track wire 
from the cartridge-player up to the lower-right corner of the wall-hung viewer is so thin 
it looks like a crack in the wall's white paint. Viewing Rooms are windowless and the air 
from the vent is stale. Though when the viewer's on it looks like the room has a window. 

Hal's put on an undemanding visualization-type cartridge, as he usually does for a Big 
Buddy group-interface when they're all tired. He's killed the volume, so you can't hear 
the reinforcing mantra, but the picture is bright and bell-clear. It's like the picture 
almost leaps out at you. A graying and somewhat ravaged-looking Stan Smith in 
anachronistic white is at a court's baseline hitting textbook forehands, over and over 
again, the same stroke, his back sort of osteoporotically hunched but his form 
immaculate, his footwork textbook and effortless — the frictionless pivot and back-set 
of weight, the anachronistic Wilson wood stick back and pointing straight to the fence 



behind him, the fluid transfer of weight to the front foot as the ball comes in, the 
contact at waist-level and just out front, the front leg's muscles bunching up as the back 
leg's settle, eyes glued to the yellow ball in the center of his strings' stencilled W — 
E.T.A. kids are conditioned to watch not just the ball but the ball's rotating seams, to 
read the spin coming in — the front knee dipping slightly down under bulging quads as 
the weight flows more forward, the back foot up almost en-pointe on the gleaming 
sneaker's unscuffed toe, the no-nonsense flourishless follow-through so the stick ends 
up just in front of his gaunt face — Smith's cheeks have hollowed as he's aged, his face 
has collapsed at the sides, his eyes seem to bulge from the cheekbones that protrude as 
he inhales after impact, he looks desiccated, aged in hot light, performing the same 
motions over and over, for decades, his other hand floating up gently to grasp the stick's 
throat out in front of the face so he's flowed back into the Ready Stance all over again. 
No wasted motion, egoless strokes, no flourishes or tics or excesses of wrist. Over and 
over, each forehand melting into the next, a loop, it's hypnotizing, it's supposed to be. 
The soundtrack says 'Don't Think Just See Don't Know Just Flow' over and over, if you 
turn it up. You're supposed to pretend it's you on the bell-clear screen with the fluid and 
egoless strokes. You're supposed to disappear into the loop and then carry that 
disappearance out with you, to play. The kids're lying there limp and splayed, supine, 
jaws slack, eyes wide and dim, a relaxed exhausted warmth — the flooring beneath the 
shag is gently heated. Peter Beak is asleep with his eyes open, a queer talent E.T.A. 
seems to instill in the younger ones. Orin had been able to sleep with his eyes open at 
the dinner table, too, at home. 

Hal's fingers, long and light brown and still slightly sticky from tincture of benzoin, 46 
are laced behind his upraised head on the pillow, cupping his own skull, watching Stan 
Smith, eyes heavy too. 'You feel as though you'll be going through the exact same sort of 
suffering at seventeen you suffer now, here, Kent?' 

Kent Blott has colored shoelaces on his sneakers with 'Mr.-Bouncety-Bounce- 
Program'-brand bow-biters, which Hal finds extraordinarily artless and young. 

Peter Beak snores softly, a small spit-bubble protruding and receding. 

'But Blott surely you've considered this: Why are they all still here, then, if it's so awful 
every day?' 

'Not every day,' Blott says. 'But pretty often it's awful.' 

'They're here because they want the Show when they get out,' Ingersoll sniffs and 
says. The Show meaning the A.T.P. Tour, travel and cash prizes and endorsements and 
appearance fees, match-highlights in video mags, action photos in glossy print-mags. 

'But they know and we know one very top junior in twenty even gets all the way to the 
Show. Much less survives there long. The rest slog around on the satellite tours or 
regional tours or get soft as club pros. Or become lawyers or academics like everyone 
else,' Hal says softly. 

'Then they stay and suffer to get a scholarship. A college ride. A white cardigan with a 
letter. Girl coeds keen on lettermen.' 

'Kent, except for Wayne and Pemulis not one guy in there needs any kind of 
scholarship. Pemulis'll get a full ride anywhere he wants, just on test-scores. Slice's 
aunts'll send him anywhere even if he doesn't want to play. And Wayne's headed for the 



Show, he'll never do more than a year in the O.N.A.N.C.A.A.'s.' Blott's father, a cutting- 
edge E.N.T. oncologist, flew all over the world removing tumors from wealthy mucous 
membranes; Blott has a trust fund. 'None of that's the point and you guys know it.' 

'They love the game, you're going to say.' 

Stan Smith has switched to backhands. 

'They sure must love something, Ingersoll, but how about for a second I say that's not 
Kent's point either. Kent's point's the misery in that room just now. K.B., I've taken part 
in essentially that same bitter bitchy kind of session hundreds of times with those same 
guys after bad P.M.s. In the showers, in the sauna, at dinner.' 

'Very much bitching also in the lavatories,' Arslanian says. 

Hal unsticks his hair from his fingers. Arslanian always has a queer faint hot-doggish 
smell about him. 'The point is it's ritualistic. The bitching and moaning. Even assuming 
they feel the way they say when they get together, the point is notice we were all sitting 
there all feeling the same way together.' 

'The point is togetherness?' 

'Shouldn't there be violas for this part, Hal, if this is the point?' 

'Ingersoll, I —' 

Beak's cold-weather adenoids wake him periodically, and he gurgles and his eyes roll 
up briefly before they level out and he settles back, seeming to stare. 

Hal creatively visualizes that Smith's velvety backhand is him slo-mo slapping Evan 
Ingersoll into the opposite wall. Ingersoll's parents founded the Rhode Island version of 
the service where you order groceries by TP and teenagers in fleets of station wagons 
bring them out to you, instead of supermarkets. 'What the point is is that we'd all just 
spent three hours playing challenges against each other in scrotum-tightening cold, 
assailing each other, trying to take away each other's spots on the squads. Trying to de¬ 
fend them against each other's assaults. The system's got inequality as an axiom. We 
know where we stand entirely in relation to one another. John Wayne's over me, and 
I'm over Struck and Shaw, who two years back were both over me but under Troeltsch 
and Schacht, and now are over Troeltsch who as of today is over Freer who's 
substantially over Schacht, who can't beat anyone in the room except Pemulis since his 
knee and Crohn's Disease got so much worse, and is barely hanging on in terms of 
ranking, and is showing incredible balls just hanging on. Freer beat me 4 and 2 in the 
quarters of the U.S. Clays two summers ago, and now he's on the B-squad and five slots 
below me, six slots if Troeltsch can still beat him when they play again after that illness- 
default.' 

'I am over Blott. I am over Ingersoll,' Idris Arslanian nods. 

'Well Blott's just ten, Idris. And you're under Chu, who's on an odd year and is under 
Possalthwaite. And Blott's under Beak and Ingersoll simply by virtue of age-division.' 

'I know just where I stand at all times,' muses Ingersoll. 

SyberVision edits its visualization sequences with a melt-filter so Stan Smith's follow- 
through loops seamlessly into his backswing for the exact same next stroke; the 
transitions are gauzy and dreamlike. Hal struggles to hike himself up onto his elbows: 

'We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the 
meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common. 



this aloneness.' 

'E Unibus Pluram,' Ingersoll muses. 

Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll's face is completely devoid of eyebrows and is 
round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake. 'So how can we also be 
together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris's singles 
at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge for his spot 
again?' 

'I do not require his root, for I am ready.' Arslanian bares canines. 

'Well that's the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and 
shower and play together, how can we keep from being 136 deeply alone people all 
jammed together?' 

'You're talking about community. This is a community-spiel.' 

'I think alienation,' Arslanian says, rolling the profile over to signify he's talking to 
Ingersoll. 'Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism.' His 
upper lip goes up and down over his teeth. 

Hal says, 'In a nutshell, what we're talking about here is loneliness.' 

Blott looks about ready to cry. Beak's palsied eyes and little limb-spasms signify a 
troubling dream. Blott rubs his nose furiously with the heel of his hand. 

'I miss my dog,' Ingersoll concedes. 

'Ah.' Hal rolls onto one elbow to hike a finger into the air. 'Ah. But then so notice the 
instant group-cohesion that formed itself around all the pissing and moaning down 
there why don't you. Blott. You, Kent. This was your question. The what looks like 
sadism, the skeletal stress, the fatigue. The suffering unites us. They want to let us sit 
around and bitch. Together. After a bad P.M. set we all, however briefly, get to feel we 
have a common enemy. This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you 
together like a common enemy.' 

'Mr. deLint.' 

'Dr. Tavis. Schtitt.' 

'DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt's henchmen and henchwomen.' 

'I hate them!' Blott cries out. 

'And you've been here this long and you still think this hatred's an accident?' 

'Purchase a clue Kent Blott!' Arslanian says. 

'The large and economy-size clue, Blott,' Ingersoll chimes. 

Beak sits up and says 'God no not with pliers!' and collapses back again, again with the 
spit-bubble. 

Hal is pretending incredulity. 'You guys haven't noticed yet the way Schtitt's whole 
staff gets progressively more foul-tempered and sadistic as an important competitive 
week comes up?' 

Ingersoll up on one elbow at Blott. 'The Port Washington meet. I.D. Day. The Tucson 
WhataBurger the week after. They want us in absolute top shape, Blott.' 

Hal lies back and lets Smith's ballet de se loosen his facial muscles again, staring. 'Shit, 
Ingersoll, we're all in top shape already. That's not it. That's the least of it. We're off the 
charts, shape-wise.' 

Ingersoll: 'The average North American kid can't even do one pull-up, according to 



Nwangi.' 

Arslanian points down at his own chest. 'Twenty-eight pull-ups.' 

'The point,' Hal says softly, 'is that it's not about the physical anymore, men. The 
physical stuff's just pro forma. It's the heads they're working on here, boys. Day and 
year in and out. A whole program. It'll help your attitude to look for evidence of design. 
They always give us something to hate, really hate together, as big stuff looms. The 
dreaded May drills during finals before the summer tour. The post-Christmas crackdown 
before Australia. The November freezathon, the snot-fest, the delay in upping the Lung 
and getting us under cover. A common enemy. / may despise K. B. Freer, or' (can't quite 
resist) 'Evan Ingersoll, or Jennie Bash. But we despise Schtitt's men, the double matches 
on top of runs, the insensitivity to exams, the repetition, the stress. The loneliness. But 
we get together and bitch, all of a sudden we're giving something group expression. A 
community voice. Community, Evan. Oh they're cunning. They give themselves up to our 
dislike, calculate our breaking points and aim for just over them, then send us into the 
locker room with an unstructured forty-five before Big Buddy sessions. Accident? 
Random happenstance? You guys ever see evidence of the tiniest lack of coolly 
calculated structure around here?' 

'The structure's what I hate the most of all,' Ingersoll says. 

'They know what's going on,' Blott says, bouncing a little on his tailbone. 'They want us 
to get together and complain.' 

'Oh they're cunning,' Ingersoll says. 

Hal curls himself a bit on one elbow to put in a small plug of Kodiak. He can't tell 
whether Ingersoll's being insolent. He lies there very slack, visualizing Smith pounding 
overheads down onto Ingersoll's skull. Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to Lyle's 
diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll — this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft 
eyebrowless face and unwrinkled thumb-joints, with the runty, cuddled look of a 
Mama's boy from way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to 
advance some impression of himself — that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the 
kid certain parts of himself he can't or won't accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal 
when Ingersoll's in the room. He wishes him ill. 

Blott and Arslanian are looking at him. 'Are you OK?' 

'He is tired,' Arslanian says. 

Ingersoll drums idly on his own ribcage. 

Hal usually gets secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime he 
hasn't gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit — some rebound effect 
from B. Hope's desiccating action — and his eyes start to water as if he's just yawned. 
The smokeless tobacco started almost as an excuse to spit, sometimes. Hal's struck by 
the fact that he really for the most part believes what he's said about loneliness and the 
structured need for a we here; and this, together with the Ingersoll-repulsion and spit- 
flood, makes him uncomfortable again, brooding uncomfortably for a moment on why 
he gets off on the secrecy of getting high in secret more than on the getting high itself, 
possibly. He always gets the feeling there's some clue to it on the tip of his tongue, some 
mute and inaccessible part of the cortex, and then he always feels vaguely sick, scanning 
for it. The other thing that happens if he doesn't do one-hitters sometime before dinner 



is he feels slightly sick to his stomach, and it's hard to eat enough at dinner, and then 
later when he does go off and get off he gets ravenous, and goes out to Father & Son 
Market for candy, or else floods his eyes with Murine and heads down to the 
Headmaster's House for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms, and eats like such 
a feral animal that the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart 
good to see him pack it away, but then he wakes before dawn with awful indigestion. 

'So the suffering gets less lonely,' Blott prompts him. 

Two curves down the hall in V.R.5, where the viewer's on the south wall and doesn't 
get turned on, the Canadian John Wayne's got LaMont Chu and 'Sleepy T.P.' Peterson 
and Kieran McKenna and Brian van Vleck. 

'He's talking about developing the concept of tennis mastery,' Chu tells the other 
three. They're on the floor Indian-style, Wayne standing with his back against the door, 
rotating his head to stretch the neck. 'His point is that progress towards genuine Show- 
caliber mastery is slow, frustrating. Humbling. A question of less talent than 
temperament.' 

'Is this right Mr. Wayne?' 

Chu says '...that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so 
there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, 
on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next 
one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience 
and hanging in there.' 

'Plateaux,' Wayne says, looking at the ceiling and pushing the back of his head 
isometrically against the door. 'With an X. Plateaux.' 

The inactive viewer's screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight 
down on a cold day. Chu's cross-legged posture is textbook. 'What John's saying is the 
types who don't hang in there and slog on the patient road toward mastery are basically 
three. Types. You've got what he calls your Despairing type, who's fine as long as he's in 
the quick-improvement stage before a plateau, but then he hits a plateau and sees 
himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming to get a little worse, and 
this type gives in to frustration and despair, because he hasn't got the humbleness and 
patience to hang in there and slog, and he can't stand the time he has to put in on 
plateaux, and what happens?' 

'Geronimo!' the other kids yell, not quite in sync. 

'He bails, right,' Chu says. He refers to index cards. Wayne's head makes the door 
rattle slightly. Chu says, 'Then you've got your Obsessive type, J.W. says, so eager to 
plateau-hop he doesn't even know the word patient, much less bumble or slog, when he 
gets stalled at a plateau he tries to like will and force himself off it, by sheer force of 
work and drill and will and practice, drilling and obsessively honing and working more 
and more, as in frantically, and he overdoes it and gets hurt, and pretty soon he's all 
chronically messed up with injuries, and he hobbles around on the court still obsessively 
overworking, until finally he's hardly even able to walk or swing, and his ranking 
plummets, until finally one P.M. there's a little knock on his door and it's deLint, here for 
a little chat about your progress here at E.T.A.' 

'Banzai! El Bailo! See yaI' 



'Then what John considers maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly 
masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You've got the Complacent type, who 
improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement 
he's made to get to the plateau, and doesn't mind staying at the plateau because it's 
comfortable and familiar, and he doesn't worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you 
find he's designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in 
the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still — his whole game is based on 
this plateau now. And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the 
chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he'll say he doesn't care, he says 
he's in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something 
sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to 
everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other 
guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he's content. Until one day 
there's a quiet knock at the door.' 

'It's DeLint!' 

'A quiet chat!' 

'Geronzai!' 

Van Vleck looks up at Wayne, who's now turned away with his hands against the door 
frame, shoving, one leg back, stretching the right calf. 'This is your advice, Mr. Wayne 
sir? This isn't Chu palming himself off as you again?' 

They all want to know how Wayne does it, #2 continentally in 18's at just seventeen, 
and very likely #1 after the WhataBurger and already getting calls from ProServ agents 
Tavis has Lateral Alice Moore screen. Wayne's the most sought-after Big Buddy at E.T.A. 
You have to apply for Wayne as Buddy by random drawing. 

LaMont Chu and T. P. Peterson are sending van Vleck optical daggers as Wayne turns 
around to stretch a hip-flexor and says he's said pretty much all he has to say. 

'Todder, I admire your savvy, I admire a kid's certain worldly skepticism, no matter 
how misplaced it is here. So even though it fucks me on the odds, so there's now like 
practically no way I can come out square,' M. Pemulis says in V.R.2, subdorm C, sitting 
on the very edge of the divan with a few feet of beige shag between him and his four 
kids, all cross-legged on cushions; he says. Til reward your worldly skepticism this once 
by letting you try it with only two, so like I've got just two cards here, and I hold them 
up, one in each hand...' He stops abruptly, knocks his temple with the heel of a hand 
that holds a Jack. 'Whoa, what am I thinking. We all gotta put in our fiveski here first.' 

Otis P. Lord clears his throat: 'The ante.' 

'Or it's called the pot,' says Todd Possalthwaite, laying a five on the little pile. 

'Jaysus I'm thinking, sweet Jaysus what am I getting into with these kids that speak the 
lingo like veteran Jersey-shore croupiers. I got to be missing a widget or something, 't 
the fuck, though, you know what I'm saying? So Todd man you choose just one of the 
cards, we got the clubby Jack and the spade Queen here, and you choose... and so down 
they go both of them face-down, and I like swirl them around on the floor a little, not 
shuffle but swirl so they're in plain view the whole time, and you follllllowwwwwwww 
the card you chose, around and around, which like with three cards maybe I've got 
some chance you lose track but with two? With just two?' 



Ted Schacht in V.R.3 at his giant plasticene oral demonstrator, the huge dental mock- 
up, white planks of teeth and obscene pink gums, twine-size floss anchored around both 
wrists: 

'The vital thing here gentlemen being not the force or how often you rotate to 
particulate-free floss but the motion , see, a soft sawing motion, gently up and down 
both ancipitals of the enamel 1 — demonstrating down the side of a bicuspid big as the 
kids' heads, the plasticene gum-stuff yielding with sick sucking sounds, Schacht's five 
kids all either glazed-looking or glued to their watch's second-hand — 'and then here's 
the key, here's the thing so few people understand: down below the ostensible gumline 
into the basal recessions at either side of the gingival mound that obtrudes between the 
teeth, down below , where your most pernicious particulates hide and breed.' 

Troeltsch holds court in his, Pemulis and Schacht's room in Subdorm C, supinely 
upright against both of his and one of Schacht's pillows, the vaporizer chugging, one of 
his kids holding Kleenex at the ready. 

'Boys, what it is is I'll tell you it's repetition. First last always. It's hearing the same 
motivational stuff over and over till sheer repetitive weight makes it sink down into the 
gut. It's making the same pivots and lunges and strokes over and over and over again, at 
you boys's age it's reps for their own sake, putting results on the back burner, why they 
never give anybody the boot for insufficient progress under fourteen, it's repetitive 
movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive weight of 
the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the 
more nether regions, through repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. 
The machine-language. The autonomical part that makes you breathe and sweat. It's no 
accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breathe tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive 
means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language 
of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. At like fourteen, give 
and take, they figure here. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there's no 
point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware 
and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don't 
need for the mechanics anymore, after they've sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. 
Flardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking 
a whole different way now, playing. The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops 
being a ball. The ball starts being something that you just know ought to be in the air, 
spinning. This is when they start getting on you about concentration. Right now of 
course you have to concentrate, there's no choice, it's not wired down into the language 
yet, you have to think about it every time you do it. But wait till fourteen or fifteen. 
Then they see you as being at one of the like crucial plateaus. Fifteen, tops. Then the 
concentration and character shit starts. Then they really come after you. This is the 
crucial plateau where character starts to matter. Focus, self-consciousness, the 
chattering head, the cackling voices, the choking-issue, fear versus whatever isn't fear, 
self-image, doubts, reluctances, little tight-lipped cold-footed men inside your mind, 
cackling about fear and doubt, chinks in the mental armor. Now these start to matter. 
Thirteen at the earliest. Staff looks at a range of thirteen to fifteen. Also the age of 
manhood-rituals in various cultures. Think about it. Until then, repetition. Until then you 



might as well be machines, here, is their view. You're just going through the motions. 
Think about the phrase: Going Through The Motions. Wiring them into the 
motherboard. You guys don't know how good you've got it right now.' 

James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. of Orinda CA prefers one long Q&A-type interface, 
with V.R.8's viewer playing ambient stuff against relaxation-vistas of surf, shimmering 
ponds, fields of nodding wheat. 

'Time for about maybe two more, me droogies.' 

'Say it's close and the guy starts kertwanging you. Balls are way in and he's calling 
them out. You can't believe the flagrancy of it.' 

'Implicit this is a no-linesman situation, Traub, you're saying.' 

Creepily-blue-eyed Audern Tallat-Kelpsa chimes in: 'This is early rounds. The kind they 
give you only two balls. Honor systems. All of a sudden there he is kertwanging on you. 
It happens.' 

'I know it happens.' 

Traub says, 'Whether he's outright kertwanging or just head-fucking you. Do you start 
kertwanging back? Tit for tat? What do you do?' 

'Do we assume there's a crowd.' 

'Early round. Remote court. No witnesses. You're on your own out there. Do you 
kertwang back.' 

'You do not kertwang back. You play the calls, not a word, keep smiling. If you still win, 
you'll have grown inside as a person.' 

'If you lose?' 

'If you lose, you do something private and unpleasant to his water-jug right before his 
next round.' 

A couple of the kids have notebooks and studious nods. Struck is a prized tactician, 
very formal in B.B. group-sessions, something scholarly and detached about him his 
charges often revere. 

'We can discuss private water-jug unpleasantness on Friday,' Struck says, looking at his 
watch. 

A hand raised by the violently cross-eyed Carl Whale, age thirteen. Acknowledgment 
from Struck. 

'Say you have to fart.' 

'You're serious, Mobes, aren't you.' 

'Jim sir, say you're playing out there, and suddenly you have to fart. It feels like one of 
those real hot nasty pressurized ones.' 

'I get the picture.' 

Now some empathic murmurs, exchanged looks. Josh Gopnik is nodding very 
intensely. Struck stands very straight to the right of the viewer, hands behind his back 
like an Oxford don. 

'I mean the kind that's real urgent.' Whale looks briefly around him. 'But that it's not 
impossible it's actually a need to go to the bathroom, instead, masquerading as a fart.' 

Now five heads are nodding, pained, urgent: clearly a vexing sub-14 issue. Struck 
examines a cuticle. 

'Meaning defecate is what you mean, then, Mobes. Go to the bathroom.' 



Gopnik looks up. 'Carl's saying the kind where you don't know what to do. What if you 
think you have to fart but it's really that you have to shit?' 

'As in it's a competitive situation, it's not a situation where you can go bearing down 
and forcing and see what happens.' 

'So out of caution you don't,' Gopnik says. 

'—fart,' Philip Traub says. 

'But then you've denied yourself an urgent fart, and you're running around trying to 
compete with a terrible hot nasty uncomfortable fart riding around the court inside 
you.' 

Two levels down. Ortho Stice and his brood: the little libraryish circle of soft chairs and 
lamps in the warm foyer off the front door to subdorm C: 

'And what he says he says it's about more than tennis, mein kinder. Mein kinder, well 
it sort of means my family. He eyeballs me right square in the eye and says it's about 
how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn't know were there and get down in 
there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. 
Deny. What are you willing to give. You'll hear him ask it if you're privileged to ever get 
an interface. The call could come at anytime: the man wants a mano-to-mano interface. 
You'll hear him say it over and over. What have you got to give. What are you willing to 
part with. I see you're looking a little pale there, Wagenknecht. Is this scary you bet your 
little pink personal asses it's scary. It's the big time. He'll tell you straight the fuck out. 
It's about discipline and sacrifice and honor to something way bigger than your personal 
ass. He'll mention America. He'll talk patriotism and don't think he won't. He'll talk 
about it's patriotic play that's the high road to the thing. He's not American but I tell you 
straight out right here he makes me proud to be American. Mein kinder. He'll say it's 
how to learn to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn't good its 
own self.' 

There's a long pause. The front door is newer than the wood around it. 

'I'd chew fiberglass for that old man.' 

The only reason the Buddies in V.R.8 can hear the little burst of applause from the 
foyer is because Struck won't hesitate to pause and consider silently as long as he has 
to. To the kids the pauses spell dignity and integrity and the still-water depth of a guy 
with nine years in at three different academies, and who has to shave daily. He exhales 
a slow breath through rounded lips, looking off up at the ceiling's guilloche border. 

'Mobes, if it's me: I let it ride.' 

'You let it out come what may?' 

'A la contraire. I let it ride around inside all day if I have to. I make an iron rule: nothing 
escapes my bottom during play. Not a toot or a whistle. If I play hunched over I play 
hunched over. I take the discomfort in the name of dignified caution, and when it's 
especially bad I look up at sky between points and I say to the sky Thank You Sir may I 
have another. Thank You Sir may I have another.' 

Gopnik and Tallat-Kelpsa are writing this down. 

Struck says, 'That's if I want to hang for the long haul.' 

'One side of the gingival mound, then up over the apex and down over the other side 
of the gingival mound, using you should cultivate a certain amount of touch with the 



string.' 

'Now the big question of character is do we let a fluke of a probably one-in-a-hundred 
lapse in concentration make us throw up our faggy hands and go dragging 
characterlessly back to our dens to lick the whimpering wounds, or do we narrow our 
eyes and put out the chin and say Pemulis we say we say Pemulis, Double or Nothing, 
when the odds remain so almost crazily stacked in our favor today.' 

'So they do it on purpose? 1 Beak is asking. 'Try to make us hate them?' 

Limits and rituals. It's almost time for communal dinner. Sometimes Mrs. Clarke in the 
kitchen lets Mario ring a triangle with a steel ladle while she rolls back the dining-room 
doors. They make the servers wear hairnets and little Ob/Gynish gloves. Hal could take 
out the plug and nip down into the tunnels, maybe not even all the way down into the 
Pump Room. Be only twenty minutes late. He's thinking in an abstract absent way about 
limits and rituals, listening to Blott give Beak his apergu. Like as in is there a clear line, a 
quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire. He has to sit up to spit in 
the wastebasket. There is a twinge in a tooth on his mouth's left side. 


MARIO INCANDENZAS FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY 
ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR 


In mid-October Y.D.A.U., Hal had invited Mario for a post-prandial stroll, and they 
were strolling the E.T.A. grounds between the West Courts and the hillside's tree-line, 
Hal with his gear bag. Mario could sense that Hal wanted to be able to go off by himself 
briefly, so he contrived (Mario did) to be very interested in some sort of leaf-and-twig 
ensemble off the path, and let Hal sort of melt away down the path. The whole area 
running along the tree-line and the thickets of like shrubbery and stickery bushes and 
heaven knew what all was covered with fallen leaves that were dry but had not yet 
quite all the way lost their color. The leaves were underfoot. Mario kind of tottered 
from tree to tree, pausing at each tree to rest. It was @ 1900h., not yet true twilight, but 
the only thing left of the sunset was a snout just over Newton, and the places under 
long shadows were cold, and a certain kind of melancholy sadness was insinuating itself 
into the grounds' light. The staggered lamps by the paths hadn't come on yet, however. 

A lovely scent of illegally burned leaves wafting up from East Newton mixed with the 
foody smells from the ventilator turbines out of the back of the dining hall. Two gulls 
were in one place in the air over the dumpsters over by the rear parking lot. Leaves 
crackled underfoot. The sound of Mario walking in dry leaves was like: crackle crackle 



crackle stop; crackle crackle crackle stop. 

An Empire Waste Displacement displacement vehicle whistled past overhead, rising in 
the start of its arc, its one blue alert-light atwinkle. 

He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the 
West Courts' fencing. From deeper inside the thickets on the lip of the hillside came a 
tremendous crackling and thrashing of underbrush and trailing willow-branches, and 
who should heave into unexpected view but the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, a sixteen-year-old 
out of Montclair NJ, #1 Singles on the Girls 16's-A squad and two hundred kilos if she 
was a kilo. Southpaw, one-hander off the backhand side, a serve Donnie Stott likes to 
clock with radar, and chart. Mario's filmed the U.S.S. Millicent Kent for staff-analysis on 
several occasions. They exchange hearty Hi's. One of only a couple female E.T.A.s with 
visible veins in her forearms, object of a fiercely-wagered-on bench-press challenge 
against Schacht, Freer, and Petropolis Kahn that M. Pemulis had organized last spring, in 
which she'd topped Kahn and Freer refused to show and Schacht finally beat her but 
doffed his cap. Out for a staff-ordered weight-management post-dinner stroll, squeezing 
Penn 5's in both hands, in E.T.A. sweat pants and with an enormous violet bow either 
Scotch-taped or glued to the blunt rounded top of her hair. She told Mario she'd just 
seen the strangest thing farther back deeper in the thickets off the lip. Her hair was tall 
and rounded off in the shape of a kind of pill, not unlike a papal hat or a British 
constable's tall hat. Mario said the bow looked terrific, and what a surprise to come face 
to face like this out here in the chill dusk. Bridget Boone had said the U.S.S. Millicent 
Kent's coiffure looked like a missile protruding from its silo in preparation for launch. 
The last of the sun's snout was setting just over the tip of the U.S.S. Millicent's hair, 
which was almost osseously hard-looking, composed of dense woven nests of reticulate 
fibers like a dry loofa sponge, which she said over the summer a home-perm had 
misfired and left her hair a system of reticulate nests, and was only now loosening up 
enough even to attach a bow to. Mario said that well the bow set her off to a T, was all 
he had to say on the matter. (He hadn't literally said 'chill dusk.') The U.S.S.M.K. said 
she'd been amusing herself beating her way through one of the brambly thickets Mrs. 
Incandenza had — when she'd still spent time outdoors at all — planted to discourage 
part-time employees from short-cutting up the hillside to E.T.A., and had come upon a 
Husky Vl-brand telescoping tripod, new and dully silvery-looking and set up on its three 
legs, right in the middle of the thicket. For no visible reason and with no footprints or 
visible evidence of path-beating anywhere around except the U.S.S. Millicent's own. The 
U.S.S. Millicent Kent stowed a tennis ball in each hip pocket and took Mario's claw and 
said here to walk this way and she'd show him real quick, and get his like feedback on 
the issue, and plus have a witness when they got back and she told people about it. 
Mario said the Husky VI came with its own pan head and cable release. With the girl 
supporting him with one hand and beating an easement through the brush with the 
other they proceeded deeper into the thicket on the lip. The outdoor light was now the 
same hue as U.S.S.M.K.'s hairbow. She said she swore to God it was around here 
someplace. Mario said his late dad had used a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky 
back in his early days of making art-films, when he also used a homemade dolly and 
sandbags and halogen spots instead of kliegs. Several different species and types of 



birds were twittering. 

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that off the record she'd always felt he had the 
longest lushest prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents, three if you counted 
Australia. Mario thanked her kindly, calling her Ma'am and trying to fake a Southern 
accent. 

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent said she wasn't sure what were her old footprints from 
finding the thicket with the tripod and what were their more recent footprints from 
trying to find the old footprints, and that she was worried because it was starting to get 
dark and they might not be able to find it and then Mario wouldn't believe she'd seen 
something as batshit-sounding as a gleaming silvery tripod all set up for no reason in the 
middle of nowheresville. 

Mario said he was pretty sure that Australia was a continent. Walking, he came up to 
around the bottom of U.S.S. Millicent's ribcage. 

Mario heard crackling and thrashing from some other thicket nearby but was certain it 
wasn't Hal, since Hal very rarely made a lot of motion-noise either outside or in-. 

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that though she was an admittedly great player, 
w/ an overwhelming haul-ass-up-to-the-net-and-loom-over-it-like-a-titan game in the 
Betty Stove/Venus Williams power-game tradition, and headed for an almost limitless 
future in the Show, she'd confide in him in private out here that she'd never really loved 
competitive tennis, that her real love and passion was modern interpretive dance, at 
which she admittedly had less unconsciously native gifts and talents to bring to bear, 
but which she loved, and had spent just about all her off-court time as a little girl 
practicing in a leotard in front of a double-width mirror in her room at home in 
suburban Montclair NJ, but that tennis was what she had limitless talent at and got 
emotional strokes and tuition-waiver boarding-school offers in, and that she'd been 
desperate to get into a boarding school. Mario asked if she could recall if the Husky-VI 
tripod had been the TL one with waffle-gridded rubber tips on the legs and a 360° pan 
head or the SL one with unwaffled tips and only a 180° pan head that swiveled in an arc 
instead of a full circle. The U.S.S. Millicent revealed that she'd accepted a scholarship to 
E.T.A. at age nine for the sole reason of getting away from her father. She referred to 
her father as her Old Man, which you can just tell she capitalizes. Her mother had left 
home when the U.S.S. Millicent was only five, running off very abruptly with a man sent 
by what had then been called Con-Edison to do a free home-energy-efficiency 
assessment. It had been six years since she'd laid an eyeball on her Old Man, but to the 
best of her recall he was almost three meters tall and morbidly obese, which had been 
why every mirror and bathtub in the house had been double-width. One older sister 
who'd been deeply involved in synchronized swimming had got pregnant and married in 
high school soon after her mother's departure. 

All this time there's been more crackling and crashing off up the hillside. Mario has 
trouble on any kind of declined grade. Some sort of bird's sitting in the top branch of a 
little tree and looking at them without saying anything. Mario thinks suddenly of a joke 
he remembers hearing Michael Pemulis tell: 

'If two people get married in West Virginia and then pull up stakes and move to 
Massachusetts and then if they decide they want to get a divorce, what's the biggest 



problem getting a divorce?' 

The U.S.S.M.K. says her other older sister had at just fifteen joined the Ice Capades of 
all things, and was in the back-up-like chorus where the biggest artistic challenge was 
not bumping into people and either falling or making them fall. 

'Getting a divorce from your sister, because in West Virginia Pemulis said a lot of 
people who get married are brother and sister.' 

'Hold my hand.' 

'He was only joking, though.' 

By now the light was about the same color as the ash and clinkers in the bottom of a 
Weber Grill. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent was leading them in a set of slightly diminishing 
circles. Then, she said, at age eight she came home early from after-school drills at the 
U.S.T.A. Jr. Facility in Passaic NJ looking forward to slipping into the old leotard and 
getting in some modern interpretive dancing up in her room, only to come home 
suddenly and find her father wearing her leotard. Which needless to say didn't fit very 
well. And with the small front portion of his huge bare feet squeezed into a pair of 
strapless pumps Mrs. Kent had left behind in her haste. In the dining room he'd moved 
all the furniture over to the side of, in front of the really wide mirror, in a grotesquely 
tiny and bulging violet leotard, capering. Mario says violet's really the U.S.S. Millicent's 
color. She says that was the exact creepy word for it: capering. Pirouetting and 
rondelling. Simpering, as well. The crotch of her leotard looked like a slingshot, it was so 
deformed. He hadn't heard her come in. U.S.S. Millicent asked Mario if he'd ever seen a 
girl's yin-yang before. Obscene mottled hirsute flesh had pooched and spilled out over 
every centimeter of the leotard's perimeter, she recalled. She'd had a voluptuous figure 
even at eight, she told Mario, but the Old Man was in a whole different-sized ballpark 
altogether. Mario kept saying Golly Ned, all he could think of to say. His flesh jiggled and 
bounced as he capered. It was repellent, she said. There was no sign of a Husky VI or any 
other model of tripod in any of the thickets and boscages. Her literal term for it was 'yin- 
yang.' But her Old Man wasn't just a cross-dressing transvestite, she said; it turned out 
they always had to be a relative's female clothes. She said she always used to wonder 
why her sisters' one-pieces and figure-skating skirts always looked so askewly baggy and 
elastic-shot, since the sisters didn't exactly wear tiny little malnourished sizes 
themselves. The Old Man didn't hear her come in and he capered and jeteed for several 
more minutes until she happened to catch his simpering eye in the mirror, she said. 
That's when she knew she had to get away, she said. And Mario's own old man's 
Admissions lady had called out of the blue that very evening, she said. Like it had been 
fate. Serendipity. Kismet. 

'Yin-yang,' Mario offered, nodding. The U.S.S. Millicent's hand was large and hot and 
at the level of sogginess of a bathmat that's been used several times in a row in quick 
succession. 

Her second-oldest sister, many years later, had informed the U.S.S.M.K. that the first 
time anybody'd had any inklings about the Old Man was an episode when the older 
sister was very small and Mrs. K. had sewed her a special costume complete with gold- 
lame bow & arrow for playing Cupid in the school Valentine's Day pageant, and the 
sister's school had got out early one day after an asbestos scare and she'd come 



unexpectedly home and found the Old Man in the basement rumpus room in tiny wings 
and hideously distended diaper striking a pose from a rather well-known Titian oil in the 
Met's High Renaissance Wing, and had struggled with denial and own-perceptions- 
doubting for quite some time thereafter, until a hysterical episode during rehearsals for 
an Ice Capades Valentine's Day number brought all the feelings surging up and broke the 
denial, and the Ice Capades' Employee Assistance Office counselling staff helped her 
start to work it all through. 

At which point U.S.S. Millicent stopped them in an unprickly thicket of what later 
turned out to be poison sumac and turned with a strange glint in the one eye that 
wasn't in pine-shadow and crushed Mario's large head to the area just below her 
breasts and said she needed to confess that Mario's eyelashes and vest with extendable 
police lock he used for staying upright in one place had for quite some time now driven 
her right around the bend with sensual feeling. What Mario perceived as a sudden 
radical drop in the prevailing temperature was in fact the U.S.S. Millicent Kent's sexual 
stimulation sucking tremendous quantities of ambient energy out of the air surrounding 
them. Mario's face was so squashed against the U.S.S. Millicent's thorax that he had to 
contort his mouth way out to the left to breathe. U.S.S.M.K.'s hairbow became detached 
and fluttered down through Mario's sightline like a giant crazed violet moth. U.S.S.M.K. 
was trying to undo Mario's corduroys but was frustrated by the complex system of 
snaps and fasteners at the bottom of his police lock's Velcro vest, which overlapped his 
trouser's own fasteners, and Mario tried to reconfigure his mouth somehow to both 
breathe and warn the U.S.S.M.K. that he was incredibly ticklish in the area of the 
bellybutton and directly below. He could now start to hear his brother Hal somewhere 
to the above and east, calling Mario's name at a moderate volume. The U.S.S. Millicent 
Kent was saying there was no way Mario could be any more nervous than she was about 
what was happening between them. It's true that the sounds of Mario sucking air out of 
a severely leftward-contorted mouth could have been interpretable as the heavy 
breathing of sexual stimulation. It was when the U.S.S. Millicent wrapped one arm 
around his shoulder for leverage and forced her other hand up under the hem of the 
tight vest and then down inside the trousers and briefs, rooting for a penis, that Mario 
became so ticklish that he began to double up, clearing his face of U.S.S. Millicent's front 
and laughing out loud in such a distinctive high-pitched way that Hal had no trouble 
beelining right upon them, compromised though his navigational systems were after 
fifteen or so secret minutes alone in the fragrant pines. Mario later said it was just like 
when there was a word on the tip of your tongue that try as you might you can't 
remember until the exact second you stop trying, and in it pops, right into your head: it 
was when the three of them were walking together back up the hillside toward the tree¬ 
line's lip, not trying to do anything but get back to Comm.-Ad. by the most direct route 
in the dark, that they stumbled upon the cinematic tripod, a dully glinting TL waffle- 
tipped Husky, in the middle of what wasn't such a very tall or thick thicket at all. 



30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


Steeply said 'Choosing Boston as your Ops center, after all, which to us signifies: the 
place of the supposed Entertainment's origin.' 

Marathe made a gesture of being willing to take time and play along, if Steeply wished 
it. 'But also the city Boston U.S.A. has logic. Your closest city to the Convexity. Closest 
therefore to Quebec. Within as you say the distance of spit.' His wheelchair squeaked 
very slightly whenever he moved. An automobile horn somewhere between the city and 
themselves blew a sustained blast. It grew always colder down on the desert floor; they 
could feel this. He felt gratitude for his windbreaker. 

Steeply flicked some ashes from his cigarette with a coarse thumb-gesture that was 
not yet feminine. 'But we're not any more sure that they actually do have copies. Also, 
does this quote "anti"-Entertainment the film's director supposedly made to counter the 
lethality: does it really also exist; this really could be some sort of game for you and the 
F.L.Q., 47 to hold out the promise of the anti-Entertainment as a chip for concessions. As 
some kind of remedy or antidote.' 

'Of this anti-film that antidotes the seduction of the Entertainment we have no 
evidence except craziness of rumors.' 

Steeply used a technical interviewer's device of pretending to occupy himself with 
small physical chores of preening and hygiene, delaying, to have Marathe elaborate 
himself more fully. The lights of the city Tucson with their movements and twinkling 
made a globe of light such as on ceilings at les salles de danser in Val d'Or, Quebec. 
Marathe's wife was dying slowly of ventricular restenosis. 48 He thought: die twice. 

Marathe said: 'And also why do they never send you into the field as yourself. Steeply? 
This is to say in appearance. The last time you were — what is it I hope to say — a 
Negro, for almost one year, no?' 

U.S.A. persons' shrugs are always as if trying to lift a heavy thing. 'Haitian,' Steeply 
said. 'I was Haitian. Some negroid tendencies in the persona, maybe.' Marathe listened 
to Steeply be silent. A U.S.A. coyote sounds more like a high-strung dog. The 
automobile's horn continued, sounding to the men forlorn and somehow nautical out 
below in the dark. The feminine manner to examine the fingernails was to raise the 
whole hand's back into view instead of malely curling the nails in over the upturned 
palm; Marathe recalled knowing this from a very young age. Steeply would pick at the 
corners of his lip, then for an interval change to examining the fingernails. His silences 
seemed always comfortable and contained. He was a competent operative. More cold 
air came, odd eddied breezes up in over the shelf from the desert's floor, puffs of 
sudden air as if from the turning of a volume's pages. His bare arms had the plucked- 
chicken look of chilled and bare skin in his grotesque sleeveless dress. Marathe had not 
been aware of when during the falling of night Steeply had removed the absurd 
sunglasses, but decided the exact moment of this did not matter for reporting every 



word and gesture back to M. Fortier. Again the coyote, and also another farther off, 
perhaps to answer. The sounds were like that of a domestic dog being given low voltage. 
Les Assassins' M. Fortier and M. BrouNTme and some others of his comrades-on-wheels 
believed Remy Marathe to be eidetic, near-perfect in recall and detail. Marathe, who 
could remember several incidents of crucial observations he had failed to later recall, 
knew this was not true. 


30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


Several times also Marathe called U.S.A. to Steeply 'Your walled nation' or 'Your 
murated nation.' 


An oiled guru sits in yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top. He's maybe forty. He's in 
full lotus on top of the towel dispenser just above the shoulder-pull station in the weight 
room of the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield MA. Saucers of muscle protrude from him 
and run together so that he looks almost crustacean. His head gleams, his hair jet-black 
and extravagantly feathered. His smile could sell things. Nobody knows where he comes 
from or why's he's allowed to stay, but he's always in there, sitting yogic about a meter 
off the rubberized floor of the weight room. His tank top says TRANSCEND in silkscreen; 
on the back it's got DEUS PROVIDEBIT in Day-Glo orange. It's always the same tank top. 
Sometimes the color of the Spandex leggings changes. 

This guru lives off the sweat of others. Literally. The fluids and salts and fatty acids. 
He's like a beloved nut. He's an E.T.A. institution. You do like maybe some sets of 
benches, some leg-curls, inclined abs, crunches, work up a good hot shellac of sweat; 
then, if you let him lick your arms and forehead, he'll pass on to you some little nugget 
of fitness-guru wisdom. His big one for a long time was: 'And the Lord said: Let not the 
weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.' His advice on conditioning 
and injury-prevention tends to be pretty solid, is the consensus. His tongue is little and 
rough but feels good, like a kitty's. It isn't like a faggy or sexual thing. Some of the girls 
let him, too. He's harmless as they come. He supposedly went way back with Dr. 
Incandenza, the Academy's founder, in the past. 

Some of the newer kids think he's a creep and want him out of there. What kind of 
guru wears Spandex and lives off others' perspiration? they complain. God only knows 
what he does in there when the weight room's closed at night, they say. 

Sometimes the newer kids who won't even let him near them come in and set the 



resistance on the shoulder-pull at a weight greater than their own weight. The guru on 
the towel dispenser just sits there and smiles and doesn't say anything. They hunker, 
then, and grimace, and try to pull the bar down, but, like, lo: the overweighted 
shoulder-pull becomes a chin-up. Up they go, their own bodies, toward the bar they're 
trying to pull down. Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man 
who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. And I like how 
the guru on the towel dispenser doesn't laugh at them, or even shake his head sagely on 
its big brown neck. He just smiles, hiding his tongue. He's like a baby. Everything he sees 
hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just 
sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle. 


It was yrstruly and C and Poor Tony that crewed that day and everything like that. The 
AM were wicked bright and us a bit sick however we scored our wake ups boosting 
some items at a sidewalk sale in the Harvard Squar where it were warm upping and the 
snow coming off onnings and then later Poor Tony ran across an old Patty citizen type of 
his old aquaintance from like the Cape and Poor Tony got over and pretended like he 
would give a blow job On The House and we got the citizen to get in his ride with us and 
crewed on him good and we got enough $ off the Patty type to get straightened out for 
true all day and crewed on him hard and C wanted we should elemonade the Patty's 
map for keeps and everything like that and take his ride to this understanding slope strip 
shop he knows in Chinatown but Poor Tony turns white as a shit and said by no means 
and put up an arguement and everything like that and we just left the type there in his 
vehicle off Mem Dr we broke the jaw for insentive not to eat no cheese and C insisted 
and was not 2Bdenied and took off one ear which there was a mess and everything like 
that and then C throws the ear away after in a dumster so yrstrulys' like so what was the 
exact pernt to that like. The dumster was with the dumsters out by Steves' donuts in the 
Enfield Squar. We go back to the Brighton Projects to cop and Roy Tony was always 
there on his bench in the Playground in late AM but now all the Project Nigers was 
awake and out in the Playground and it was tense but it was day time and everything 
like that and we cop half a bundle from Roy Tony and we go down to the library at 
Copley where we stash our personnel works when we crewed and went into the 
mensroom where there was severel works on the floor allready that early and got 
straight in the stall and C and yrstruly had a beef about who shot three and who got two 
and we made Poor Tony give us up his third bag and then but we had to cop for that 
nite and tomorrow AM still which was XMas and had to cop in advance, its' a never 
ending strugle its' a full time job to stay straight and there is no vacation for XMas at 
anytime. Its' a fucking bitch of a life dont' let any body get over on you diffrent. And 
back we go to the Harvard Squar however on arrival Poor Tony wanted he should hang 
for lunch time with his red leather fags in the Bow&Arrow and pretty much I can 
tolerate fags when alone but together yrstruly I cant' fucking stand fags and yrstruly and 
C said fuck this shit and we screwed out and go up to the Central Squar where it was 
cool offing and the onnings re freezing and everything like that and snowing and 
boosted NyQuil at the CVS Drug where we go to the mop aile and employ a mophandle 



in tilting the mirror over the NyQuil aile and boosted NyQuil in Cs' coat and got messed 
up on NyQuil and scored a bookbag off a foran slope studn type kid on the Redline 
platform but it only had books and disks and the diskcase was fucking plastic and into a 
dumster with it it goes but also at this time we come up and run into Kely Vinoy that 
was working her corner by the dumster by Cheap-0 records in the Squar by the email 
place and shes 1 dopesick having a conversession with Eckwus and an other man and 
Eckwus said he said Stokely Darkstar just got freetested again at the Fenway and 
confirmed a big Boot 8.8 hes' got the Virus for sure and Purpleboy said he said Darkstar 
said how if he was going down he didnt 1 give a shit and wasnt' going to give a shit if he 
gave some others the Virus thru trancemission and the Word was out&about dont' 
share Stokely Darkstars 1 works dont' use works off Stokely Darkstar no matter how sick 
you are even if your' dyng for it get other works. Like C said any thing would count in 
your mind when your' sick and had copped and was minus works and Darkstar had 
works. We all every crew with heads left have personnel works for only ourselves that 
we use except blownout old hose like Kely and Purpleboy there Man takes there $ and 
there works and Hes 1 the only one can give them there shots and keep Kely just this side 
of dopesick 24-7 for insentive for her to make him more $ and everything like that, 
theres' nothing wurse than a Pimp and Boston Pimps are the wurst there' 10X wurse 
than NYC Pimps that are supperst to be so hartless in NYC where yrstruly petaled ass in 
the Columbus Squar for a time of my youth like Stokely Darkstar before departing for 
green pastures, and we had a conversession but were' coming down and it was getting 
dark and snowing for a White XMas and if we didnt' crew before like 2200 Roy Tonys' 
Nigers would be too drunk to keep them from beefing with us and thered' be a beef and 
everything like that if we go to cop after 2200 and who needs a grief so back we Redline 
to the Harvard Squar and all the foran studns are in the bars and we locate Poor Tony 
smoking hash with fags back of Au Bon Pain and say lets roll a foran studn stuck here for 
XMas in the bars and cop before 2200 and so we all go on the ice from the frozen 
melted snow to the Bow&Arrow in the Squar with Poor Tony and Lolasister and Susan T. 
Cheese who I fucking cant' stand and got in there and made Susan T. Cheese buy beers 
and we wait and no studns are leaving alone to roll but a older type individual who any 
body could see is no studn but is legless on shots alone at the bar fucking shatered 
slumped over is getting ready to depart for green pastures and Poor Tony tells Lolasister 
to screw she crews with Poor Tony some times but not if its' wet work and with Cs' 
involvement its' always wet work, and yrstruly I inform Susan T. Cheese she new better 
than not to screw as well and the older individual de parts shatered and holding onto 
walls in a hiclass and promising coat for the possibility of $ and pernts his old nose this 
way and that and everything like that thru the Bow&Arrow window C wipes the steam 
off, and has a conversession with a Santaclaus ringing a big bell for the kettle and were' 
like Jesus its' a never ending strugle to wait and cop but after awhile finally after stifing 
the Santaclaus we watch he picks a direction finally at last up Mass Ave toward the 
Central Squar on foot, and Poor Tony beats it around the block to get up in front of him 
around the block on the ice in his fucking heels and feather snake around his neck and 
gets him some how Poor Tony always knows how over to the dumsters' alley by Bay 
Bank off Sherman St, and yrstruly and C crew on the individual and roll him and C 



messes up his older map to a large degree and we leave him in no condition to eat 
cheese in a snow drift of materil under the dumster, and C again wants to siphon out a 
vehicle on Mass Av and set him on fire but he has 400 $ on his person and then some 
and a coat with a fury collar and a watch we realy scored and C even gosofar to take the 
non studns' shoes which they dont 1 fit, and in the dumster they go. 

And but so but back we go to the Brighton Projects but its 1 post 2200 its' too late Roy 
Tony hasnt' got his pissboys out hes' not open for comerce and yet it is like a Niger 
Convenssion in the Playground of the Brighton Projects with there glass pipes and there 
Crown Royal in purple bags and everything like that in the Playground of the Projects 
and if they smell were' holding this kindof $ amounts they will crew on us in numbers 
there' animals at nite with there purple velvet bags and p-dope and Redi Rok crack, one 
large Niger in a Patriots hat has a hart incident and downhegoes on the black top by the 
swing set right in front of us and none of his brothers unquot gosofar to do any thing he 
lays there there' animals at nite and we screw out with rickytick speed from the 
Brighton Projects, and we converse. And Poor Tony wants to just go over the line to the 
Enfield Squar and try and just cop p-dope from Delphina down by the Empire hangers or 
else what else hang with the fags at Steves' donuts and hear who else is holding weight 
in Enfield or Allston and everything like that, but Delphinas' p is from bunk the Word is 
out&about that its' all Manitol and kwai9 you might as well fucking cop XLax or 
Schweppes and C dopeslaps Poor Tony and C wants to Redline down to Chinatown but 
Poor Tony turns white as a shit and says Chinatowns' too dear in $ and everything like 
that, even for like bundles. Dr. Wo is 200 $ but atleast its' always good and but we have 
400 $ and then some and C pernts out we can fucking well afford Wos' well known 
exellent skeet for once at XMas and Poor Tony stamps a hiheel and says but how weve' 
got enough $ to stay straight and get Lolasister straight for XMas and all lay up and not 
have to never ending strugle at XMas and two or more days after that if we dont' blow it 
on XMas Eve in Chinatown instead of waiting which is a good pernt but when has any 
body known C to ever wait he gets dopesick faster than us and everything like that and 
is all piss and vinegar for Wo and starting with the Shivers and with the noses' mucis all 
ready and everything like that and C is not 2Bdenied and we say we are screwing down 
to Chinatown and if Poor Tony dont' want to come he can take a like a giant breath and 
hold it in the Squar until we get back and well' cop for him, and Poor Tony says he might 
be a dicksucking fag but hes' not a starry eyed' moroon. 

And so offwego and everything like that with 400 $ on the Orangeline, and thru a 
fucked up circumstances yrstruly and C almost end up raping a older type nurse in a 
white nurses' uniform and coat on the train but we dont' and but Poor Tony seems 
white and detracted on the train playng with his feather snake and says he says he 
seems in his mind maybe to recall an involvment in some type deal where Dr. Wo might 
of got slightly got over on and burnt and that maybe down in Chinatown we could air on 
the side of low profiles and try to cop some where else except from the Wos'. Except Dr. 
Wo is who we know. C is Wos' former aquaintance from crewing with slopes on the 
North shore for Whity Sorkin in the days of his youth. C is not 2Bdenied. And so at the 
Orangeline Tstop we grab a fat cab to about two blocks from Hung Toys and screw out 
of the cab at a light and the thing with fat cabbies is they cant' run after you and Poor 



Tony is pisser to watch tearassing it down the street in hiheels with a feather stoal. Poor 
Tony runs right by the front of Hung Toys, this is by pryor agreement to wait for us low 
profile down the street and yrstruly and C go in Hung Toys where they dont' open till 
2300 and sell tea unquot like 100 Proof tea till all hours and everything like that and 
never get Inspected because Dr. Wo has arrangements with Chinatowns' Finest. XMas is 
noncelebrated in Chinatown. Dr. Wo a good thing about Wo is hes' always there in Hung 
Toys at known times. Here theres 1 all old slope racial type ladies sitting in booths eating 
noddles and drinking quot tea out of white cups the size of a shotglass and everything 
like that. With small slope kids tearassing it all over and older men in like jew caps and 
skinny beerds out of just the middle of there chin but Dr. Wo is only middle aged and 
wears iron glasses and a tie and looks more like a banker for a slope but he is 100 % 
business and icecold all the way down for slope type comerce plus hes' connected 
bigtime and not to be fucked or got over on if some body has a head left and yrstruly I 
cant' believe Poor Tony would ever take part of tryng to crew on Wo who he knows thru 
C in even the smallest comerce and if he did C says he sure never heard about it nor saw 
any of the skeet or anything like that, and why. Cs' the one that knows Wo. We arranged 
Poor Tony to wait for us out side and try to be low profile. Its' sub 0 snow and hes' in a 
leather spring coat and stoal and brown wig thats' not as good as a hat and hell' freeze 
his low profile balls off and C was tryng to smile and he told Dr. Wo we needed three 
bundles and Dr. Wo was smiling in his slope manner said the boosting life must surely 
be exellent and C laughed and said most exellent Cs' tight with slopes he does the 
talking and everything like that, and he says were' going to lay up low profile for the 
XMas vacation and not crew because I had a rape type situation from an older nurse last 
nite on the T and almost got pinched by the Ts' Finest and Dr. Wo nods in a special 
subservant manner he uses for non slopes who hes' realy polite with but hes' a dictater 
to his slopes when we see him with his subservant slopes but with us were' allike most 
polite and everything like conversession and its' nice but expensive but it feels nice at 
the time but Wo finishes his so called tea and Wo goes back behind the curtains in the 
back of Hung Toys thats' a giant brightred curtain with purple mountains or hills and 
clouds that are flyng snakes with leather wings that is one curtain yrstruly would want 
to boost for personnel hanging use that no body that isnt' a slope and isnt' in with Wo 
cant' never go behind it but you can see when he opens it and goes behind the curtain it 
looks like merly more old slope ladies sitting on packing cases with slope writing eating 
more noddles in bowls they hold about like a millmeter from their yellow maps and 
everything like that. Slopes rarly stop shovling in the old noddles. Stokely Darkstar calls 
them maggoteaters and subservant slopes keep going in and out of the curtain while 
Wos' back there a longer than avrege time and Cs' got the Shivers and starting to jones 
and dope-fiends are full of super station and he says to yrstruly he says the fuck he says 
maybe what if Poor Tony realy did take part with burning Wo and what if a slope sees 
Poor Tony out side and is one of these slopes going in and out of the curtain maybe 
telling Wo, like ratting out Poor Tony as our aquaintance, and my muds is starting and 
were' jonesing super statiously over PT and wheres' Wo behind the curtain and 
everything like that, tryng to smile and conversession ultralow, drinking quot tea thats' 
like schnapps only wurse and green. And we jones and Dr. Wo comes back finally at last 



out smiling subservantly with all the wonderful skeet three bundles in a newspaper who 
could fucking read it but the pictures are of slope VIPs' in suits and Wo sits down, and 
Wo never sits down at the booth with the skeet it isnt' done in his comerce, and Wos' 
hands are folded over our skeet in the thing and Wo smiling says he asks C if weve' seen 
goodold Poor Tony or Susan T. Cheese around we crew with Poor Tony in boosting life 
did we not he said. C he says PT is a fucking dicksucking fag queer and a proven 
cheeseater and wed 1 fucked up his map and Cheese and Lolasisters' map in a beef and 
didnt' crew with fags since aprox the autum period. C is pouring mucis and tryng to 
smile cusually. Dr. Wo laughed in a harty fashion and said exellent and Wo leaned over 
our skeet sayng if we should happenbychance to see Poor Tony or them to please give 
Poor Tony his quite best regards and wish him prosparity and a thousand blisses. And 
everything like that. And we promote the newspaper of skeet and Wo promotes our $ 
and very politely outwego and I admit it yrstruly wanted we should burn Poor Tony and 
rickytick the fuck out of Chinatown but we go over down more by the China Pearl Place 
and Poor Tony is sortof hunched behind a lightpoal with his gray teeth chatting in his 
dress and thin coat tryng to be low profile in his red coat and heels around a million + 
slopes that all are subservants of Wo. And later after screwing out we didnt' tell him of 
what Wo said about sitting down and asking about him and Cheeses' blisses and we 
screw to the Orangeline to our hot air blowergrate we use at nite at the library behind 
the Copley Squar and we get our personnel works out from behind the brickworks 
behind the bush by the hot blowergrate where we stash our works and were' eggerly 
into the first bundle and were' cooking up and notice Poor Tony doesnt' the least bitch 
when yrstruly and C tie off first in line seeing as were' the ones that copped it and Poor 
Tonys' gotto wait as usal, except I notice he doesnt' bitch even a little, normally Poor 
Tony keeps up this usal wine yrstruly learned how to not notice, but when he doesnt' 
wine now that were' jonesing and the skeets' right there I notice hes' cusually looking 
like every place but at the skeet which is unusal and C jonesing and with the Shivers 
cooking up tryng to keep his lighter lit in the hot airs' wind and snow of nite, and I admit 
it yrstruly I get a wicked cold inside feeling even with all this hot air from the 
blowergrate blowing up from under us and making our hair blow around and Tonys' 
feather snake pernt upword I yrstruly get a cold feeling of super station once more, you 
get wicked super stations in this fucked up kindof shit life because its' a never ending 
chase and you get too tired to go by much more than never ending habit and super 
station and everything like that so but I dont' say any thing but yrstruly I have a cold 
super station about Poor Tony not wining while he makes like he has to cusually piss and 
takes a piss and the piss steams up around the lower ares of the bush with his back 
turned away and isnt' looking around with interst or anything like that you never turn 
your back on the skeet when its' partly your skeet which is wicked unusal which C is so 
eggerly dopesick he doesnt' notice any thing past keeping the lighter lit. And so I admit it 
I yrstruly did yrstruly purplously let C tie off and boot up first while I still cooked up, I did 
cook up unusally slow, fucking with the getting the snowmelt hot in the spoon and 
everything like that yrstruly I let the lighter go out and took more time with the cotton 
and C had the Shivers wurst of us and cooks up the fastest and would of got it anyway. 
Later with Cs' map elemonaded Poor Tony later conceited admitting Susan T. Cheese 



helped a Worcester fag get over on Wo for a fronted bundle in autum is why. And all 
three bundles Wo give us in slope news was Hotshots. Laced. It started the instantly C 
undid the belt and booted up we knew allready, yrstruly I and PT thearized it was Drano 
with the blue like glittershit and everything like that taken out by subservant slopes it 
had that Drano like effect on C and everything like that it was laced what ever it was C 
started with the screaming in a loud hipitch fashion instantly after he unties and boots 
and downhegoes flopping with his heels pouning on the metal of the blower-grate and 
hes' at his throat with his hands tearing at him self in the most fucked up fashions and 
Poor Tony is hiheeling rickytick over over C zipping up sayng he screams sweety C but 
and stuffing the feather snake from his necks' head in Cs' mouth to shut him up from 
hipitch screaming in case Bostons' Finest can hear involvment and blood and bloody 
materil is coming out Cs' mouth and Cs' nose and its' allover the feathers its' a sure sign 
of Drano, blood is and Cs' eyes get beesly and bulge and hes' cryng blood into the 
feathers in his mouth and tryng to hold onto my glove but Cs' arms are going allover and 
one eye it like allofa sudden pops outof his map, like with a Pop you make with fingers in 
your mouth with all this blood and materil and a blue string at the back of the eye and 
the eye falls over the side of Cs' map and hangs there looking at the fag Poor Tony. And 
C turned lightblue and bit thru the snakes' head and died for keeps and shit his pants 
instanly with shit so bad the hot air blowergrate is blowing small bits of fart and blood 
and missty shit up into our maps and Poor Tony backs offof over C and puts his hands 
over his madeup map and looks at C thru his fingers. And yrstruly I take the belt off it 
goes without saying, and dont' even rethink or dream about tryng maybe a diffrent bag 
out of a diffrent bundle from C for how could Wo know what bundle wed' cook up outof 
first so all three bundles must be Hot so I dont' even dream even tho yrstrulys' Shiverng 
and muds sick allready and now in payback Wo has our only $ to get straight with for 
XMas. It might sound fucking low but the reason we had to leave the decesed body C in 
one of the librarys' dumsters is the reason is because the Copley Squars' Finest know it 
is our personnel hot air blowergrate and if we leave C there its' a sure pinch for us as 
known aquaintance and a period of Kicking The Bird in holding in a cell but the dumster 
was empty of materil and Cs' head made a fucked up sound when it hit the empty 
bottom and Poor Tony cried and wined and said he said he had no inkling that beast Wo 
was that vindicative and poorold decesed C and how this was it hes' going to get clean 
from heronout and get a straightjob dancing in a Patty type Club in the Fenway and 
everything like that on and on piss and wine. I didnt' say any thing. I had to rethink on 
the T to the Squar if yrstruly I should elemonade Poor Tonys' map for keeps for payback 
on how he purplously lets C shoot up first and wouldof let yrstruly shoot first even 
knowing, or make that cheese move and go back down the Orangeline to Wo and try 
and get enough bags to get true straight eating cheese to Wo about the wherehouse 
that Poor Tony and Susan T. Cheese and Lolasister with Eckwus crashed at now. Or like 
what. Yrstruly I almost was cryng. It was when Poor Tony took off his hiheels and 
wanted yrstruly I should boost him like over the edge of Cs' bodies' dumster to get back 
what was left of his feather stoal out of Cs' mouth that yrstruly I thought I decided what 
to do. But the connected slope Wo wasnt' even there in front of the Hung Toys curtain 
in the early XMas AM, and then Poor Tony departed for green pastures and ate cheese. 



and it took yrstruly two days of Kicking The Bird in the hall out side my Mumsters 1 
apartment that for payback she locked the door before I yrstruly can get in a Detox to 
atleast cop some methedoan and get three squars to stay down in yrstruly to start to 
thearize on what to try and do after I could standup straight and walk upright again 
once more. 


3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. 


Hal could hear the phone console ringing as he dropped his gear bag and took the 
room key from around his neck. The phone itself had been Orin's and its plastic case was 
transparent and you could see the phone's guts. 

'Mmyellow.' 

'Why do I always get the feeling I'm interrupting you in the middle of some like 
vigorous self-abuse session?' It was Orin's voice. 'It's always multiple rings. Then you're 
always a little breathless when you do.' 

'Do what.' 

'A certain sweaty urgency to your voice. Are you one of the 99% of adolescent males, 
Hallie?' 

Hal never liked talking on the phone after he'd gotten high in secret down in the Pump 
Room. Even if there was water or liquid handy to keep the cotton at bay. He didn't know 
why this was so. It just made him uneasy. 

'You're sounding hale and fit, 0.' 

'You can tell me, you know. No shame in it. Let me tell you, boy, I did myself raw for 
years on end on that hill.' 

Hal estimated over 60% of what he told Orin on the phone since Orin had abruptly 
started calling again this spring was a lie. He had no idea why he liked lying to Orin on 
the phone so much. He looked at the clock. 'Where are you?' 

'Home. Snug and toasty. It's 90+ out.' 

'That would be Fahrenheit I'm assuming.' 

'This city is made of all glass and light. The windows are like high-beams coming at 
you. The air has that spilled-fuel shimmer to it.' 

'So to what do we owe.' 

'Sometimes I wear sunglasses even in the house. Sometimes at the stadium I hold my 
hand up and look at it and I swear I can see right through it. Like that thing with the 
flashlight and your hand.' 

'Hands seem to be sort of a theme to this call, thus far.' 



'On the way in from the lot off the street here I saw a pedestrian in a pith helmet 
stagger and like claw at the air and pitch forward onto his face. Another Phoenician 
felled by the heat I think to myself.' 

It occurred to Hal that although he lied about meaningless details to Orin on the 
phone it had never occurred to him to consider whether Orin was ever doing the same 
thing. This induced a spell of involuted marijuana-type thinking that led quickly, again, 
to Hal's questioning whether or not he was really all that intelligent. 'SATs are six weeks 
away and Pemulis is less and less helpful on the math, if you want to know what I'm 
doing all day.' 

'The man's face made a sizzling noise when it hit the pavement. Like bacon-caliber 
sizzling. He's still lying there, I see out the window. He's not moving anymore. 
Everyone's avoiding him, going around him. He looks too hot to touch. A little Hispanic 
kid made off with his hat. Have y'all had snow yet? Describe snow for me again, Hallie, 
I'm begging you.' 

'So you go around with this image of me sitting around during the day masturbating, is 
what you're saying.' 

'I've actually been thinking of maneuvering for the whole Kleenex concession at E.T.A., 
as a venture.' 

'That of course would mean actually contacting C.T. and the Moms.' 

'Me and this forward-looking reserve QB have been making inquiries. 

Putting out feelers. Volume discounts, preferred-vendor status. Maybe a sideline in 
unscented lubricants. Any thoughts?' 

' 0 .?' 

'I'm sitting here actually missing New Orleans, kid. It'd be just coming up on Advent I 
think. The Quarter always gets really quaint and demure during Advent. It almost never 
rains down there during Advent for some reason. People remark on it, the phenomena.' 

'You sound somehow a little off to me, 0.' 

'I'm heat-crazed. I might be dehydrated. What's that word? Everything's looked all 
beige and powdery all day. Trash bags have been swelling up and spontaneously 
combusting out in the dumpsters. These sudden rains of coffee grounds and orange 
peels. The Displacement guys in the barges have to wear asbestos gloves. Also I met 
somebody. Hallie, a possibly very special somebody.' 

'Uh oh. Dinnertime. Triangle's a-clangin' over in West.' 

'Hey Haliie though? Hang on. Kidding aside for a second. What all do you know about 
Separatism?' 

Hal stopped for a moment. 'You mean in Canada?' 

'Is there any other kind?' 


Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House 49 was founded in the Year of the 
Whopper by a nail-tough old chronic drug addict and alcoholic who had spent the bulk 
of his adult life under the supervision of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections 
before discovering the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at M.D.C.-Walpole and 
undergoing a sudden experience of total self-surrender and spiritual awakening in the 



shower during his fourth month of continuous AA sobriety. This recovered addict/ 
alcoholic — who in his new humility so valued AA's tradition of anonymity that he 
refused even to use his first name, and was known in Boston AA simply as the Guy Who 
Didn't Even Use His First Name — opened Ennet House within a year of his parole, 
determined to pass on to other chronic drug addicts and alcoholics what had been so 
freely given to him in the E-Tier shower. 

Ennet House leases a former physicians' dormitory in the Enfield Marine Public Health 
Hospital Complex, managed by the United States Veterans Administration. Ennet House 
is equipped to provide 22 male and female clients a nine-month period of closely 
supervised residency and treatment. 

Ennet House was not only founded but originally renovated, furnished, and decorated 
by the nameless local AA ex-con, who — since sobriety doesn't exactly mean instant 
sainthood — used to lead select teams of early-recovery dope fiends on after-hours 
boosting expeditions at area furniture and housewares establishments. 

This legendary anonymous founder was an extremely tough old Boston AA galoot who 
believed passionately that everyone, no matter how broad the trail of slime they 
dragged in behind them, deserved the same chance at sobriety through utterly total 
surrender he'd been granted. It's a kind of extremely tough love found almost 
exclusively in tough old Boston galoots. 50 He sometimes, the founder, in the House's 
early days, required incoming residents to attempt to eat rocks — as in like rocks from 
the ground — to demonstrate their willingness to go to any lengths for the gift of 
sobriety. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health's Division of Substance Abuse 
Services eventually requested that this practice be discontinued. 

Ennet was not any part of the nameless Ennet House founder's name, by the way. 

The rock thing — which has become a grim bit of mythopoeia now trotted out to 
illustrate how cushy the present Ennet residents have it — was probably not as whacko 
as it seemed to Division of S.A.S., since many of the things veteran AA's ask newcomers 
to do and believe seem not much less whacko than trying to chew feldspar. E.g. be so 
strung out you can feel your pulse in your eyeballs, have the shakes so badly you make a 
spatter-painting on the wall every time somebody hands you a cup of coffee, have the 
life-forms out of the corner of your eye be your only distraction from the chainsaw¬ 
racing chatter in your head, sitting there, and have some old lady with cat-hair on her 
nylons come at you to hug you and tell you to make a list of all the things you're grateful 
for today: you'll wish you had some feldspar handy, too. 

In the Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard- 
Easy-To-lnstall Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or 
Mobile, 51 the nameless founder's death of a cerebral hemorrhage at age sixty-eight 
went unremarked outside the Boston AA community. 


FROM INTERNAL INTERLACE-SYSTEM E-MAIL MEMO 

CAH-NNE22-3575634-22, CLAIMS ADJUSTMENT HEADQUARTERS, STATE FARM 
INSURANCE COMPANIES, INC., BLOOMINGTON IL 26 JUNE 
YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND 



FROM: murrayf @clmshqnne22.626INTCOM TO: powellg/sanchezm/parryk @ 
clmhqnne.626INTCOM 

MESSAGE: guys, get a load, my def. of a bad day. metro boston region 22 this spring, 
comp claim, witnesses deposed by boston wrkmans comp, establish claimant Impaired 
and the emerg. Room rept. lists a blood-alcohol of .3+, so be pleased to know we're 
clear on the 357-5 liability end. but basic facts below confirmed by witnesses and CYD 
accident rept. here's just the first page, get a load: 

murrayf ©clmshqnne22.626INTCOM 626YDPAH0112317/p. 1 
Dwayne R. Glynn 
176 N. Faneuil Blvd. 

Stoneham, Mass. 021808754/4 
June 21, YODPFTAH 
Workmans Accident Claims Office 
State Farm Insurance 
1 State Farm Plaza 
Normal, III. 617062262/6 
Dear Sir: 

I am writing in response to your request for additional information. In block #3 of the 
accident reporting form, I put "trying to do the job alone", as the cause of my accident. 
You said in your letter that I should explain more fully and I trust that the following 
details will be sufficient. 

I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, March 27, I was working alone 
on the roof of a new six story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I 
had about 900 kg. of brick left over. Rather than laboriously carry the bricks down by 
hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which fortunately was 
attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I 
went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back 
to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 900 
kg of bricks. You will note in block #11 of the accident reporting form that I weigh 75 kg. 

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of 
mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the 
side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down. This 
explains the fractured skull and the broken collar bone. 

Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent not stopping until the fingers of my 
right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulleys. Fortunately, by this time, I had 
regained my presence of mind, and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of 
considerable pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the 
ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel from the force of hitting the ground. 

Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 30 kg. I 
refer you again to my weight of 75 kg in block #11. As you could imagine, still holding 
the rope, I began a rather rapid descent from the pulley down the side of the building. In 
the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two 



fractured ankles and the laceration of my legs and lower body. 

The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my impact with the brick- 
strewn ground below. I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in 
considerable pain, unable to stand or move and watching the empty barrel six stories 
above me, I again lost my presence of mind and unfortunately let go of the rope, 
causing the barrel to begin a 
endtranslNTCOM626 


HAL INCANDENZA'S FIRST EXTANT WRITTEN COMMENT ON ANYTHING EVEN 
REMOTELY FILMIC, SUBMITTED IN MR. OGILVIE'S SEVENTH-GRADE 'INTRODUCTION to 
ENTERTAINMENT STUDIES' (2 TERMS, REQUIRED), ENFIELD TENNIS ACADEMY, 21 
FEBRUARY IN THE YEAR OF THE PERDUE WONDERCHICKEN, @ FOUR YEARS AFTER THE 
DEMISE OF BROADCAST TELEVISION, ONE YEAR AFTER DR. JAMES 0. INCANDENZA 
PASSED FROM THIS LIFE, A SUBMISSION RECEIVING JUST A B/B+, DESPITE OVERALL 
POSITIVE FEEDBACK, MOSTLY BECAUSE ITS CONCLUDING H WAS NEITHER SET UP BY THE 
ESSAY'S BODY NOR SUPPORTED, OGILVIE POINTED OUT, BY ANYTHING MORE THAN 
SUBJECTIVE INTUITION AND RHETORICAL FLOURISH. 

Chief Steve McGarrett of ’Hawaii Five-0 1 and Captain Frank Furillo of 'Hill Street Blues' 
are useful for seeing how our North American idea of the hero changed from the B.S. 
1970s era of 'Hawaii Five-0' to the B.S. 1980s era of 'Hill Street Blues.' 

Chief Steve McGarrett is a classically modern hero of action. He acts out. It is what he 
does. The camera is always on him. He is hardly ever offscreen. He has just one case per 
week. The audience knows what the case is and also knows, by the end of Act One, who 
is guilty. Because the audience knows the truth before Steve McGarrett does, there is 
no mystery, there is only Steve McGarrett. The drama of 'Hawaii Five-0' is watching the 
hero in action, watching Steve McGarrett stalk and strut, homing in on the truth. 
Homing in is the essence of what the classic hero of modern action does. 

Steve McGarrett is not weighed down by administrative State-Police-Chief chores, or 
by females, or friends, or emotions, or any sorts of conflicting demands on his attention. 
His field of action is bare of diverting clutter. Thus Chief Steve McGarrett single- 
mindedly acts to refashion a truth the audience already knows into an object of law, 
justice, modern heroism. 

In contrast. Captain Frank Furillo is what used to be designated a 'post'-modern hero. 
Viz., a hero whose virtues are suited to a more complex and corporate American era. 
I.e., a hero of reaction. Captain Frank Furillo does not investigate cases or single- 
mindedly home in. He commands a precinct. He is a bureaucrat, and his heroism is 
bureaucratic, with a genius for navigating cluttered fields. In each broadcast episode of 
'Hill Street Blues,' Captain Frank Furillo is beset by petty distractions on all sides from 
the very beginning of Act One. Not one but eleven complex cases, each with suspects 
and snitches and investigating officers and angry community leaders and victims' 
families all clamoring for redress. Hundreds of tasks to delegate, egos to massage, 
promises to make, promises from last week to keep. Two or three cops' domestic 
troubles. Payroll vouchers. Duty logs. Corruption to be tempted by and agonized over. A 


Police Chief who's a political parody, a hyperactive son, an ex-wife who haunts the 
frosted-glass cubicle that serves as Frank Furillo's office (whereas Steve McGarrett's B.S. 
1970s office more closely resembled the libraries of landed gentry, hushed behind two 
heavy doors and wainscotted in thick, tropical oak), plus a coldly attractive Public 
Defendress who wants to talk about did this suspect get Mirandized in Spanish and can 
Frank stop coming too soon he came too soon again last night maybe he should get into 
some kind of stress counselling. Plus all the weekly moral dilemmas and double binds his 
even-handed bureaucratic heroism gets Captain Frank Furillo into. 

Captain Frank Furillo of 'Hill Street Blues' is a 'post'-modern hero, a virtuoso of triage 
and compromise and administration. Frank Furillo retains his sanity, composure, and 
superior grooming in the face of a barrage of distracting, unheroic demands that would 
have left Chief Steve McGarrett slumped, unkempt, and chewing his knuckle in 
administrative confusion. 

In further contrast to Chief Steve McGarrett, Captain Frank Furillo is rarely filmed tight 
or full-front. Fie is usually one part of a frenetic, moving pan by the program's camera. In 
contrast, 'Hawaii Five-0' 's camera crew never even used a dolly, favoring a steady 
tripodic close-up on McGarrett's face that today seems more reminiscent of romantic 
portraiture than filmed drama. 

What kind of hero comes after McGarrett's Irishized modern cowboy, the lone man of 
action riding lonely herd in paradise? Furillo's is a whole different kind of loneliness. The 
'post'-modern hero was a heroic part of the herd, responsible for all of what he is part 
of, responsible to everyone, his lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow's face. The 
jut-jawed hero of action ('Hawaii Five-0') becomes the mild-eyed hero of reaction ('Hill 
Street Blues,' a decade later). 

And, as we have observed thus far in our class, we, as a North American audience, 
have favored the more Stoic, corporate hero of reactive probity ever since, some might 
be led to argue 'trapped' in the reactive moral ambiguity of 'post-' and 'post-post'- 
modern culture. 

But what comes next? What North American hero can hope to succeed the placid 
Frank? We await, I predict, the hero of non- action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond 
calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras 
whose blood sings with retrograde amines. 


ENORMOUS, ELECTROLYSIS-RASHED 'JOURNALIST' 'HELEN' STEEPLY'S ONLY PUTATIVE 
PUBLISHED ARTICLE BEFORE BEGINNING HER SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINALS 
PUNTER ORIN J. INCANDENZA, AND HER ONLY PUTATIVE PUBLISHED ARTICLE TO HAVE 
ANYTHING OVERTLY TO DO WITH GOOD OLD METROPOLITAN BOSTON, 10 AUGUST IN 
THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FOUR YEARS AFTER OPTICAL 
THEORIST, ENTREPRENEUR, TENNIS ACADEMICIAN, AND AVANT-GARDE FILMMAKER 
JAMES 0. INCANDENZA TOOK HIS OWN LIFE BY PUTTING HIS HEAD IN A MICROWAVE 
OVEN 

Moment Magazine has learned that the tragic fate of the second North American 
citizen to receive a Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart has, sadly, been kept from the North 



American people. The woman, a 46-year-old Boston accountant with irreversible 
restenosis of the heart, responded so well to the replacement of her defective heart 
with a Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart that within weeks she was able to resume the 
active lifestyle she had so enjoyed before stricken, pursuing her active schedule with the 
extraordinary prosthesis portably installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse. The heart's 
ventricular tubes ran up to shunts in the woman's arms and ferried life-giving blood 
back and forth between her living, active body and the extraordinary heart in her purse. 

Her tragic, untimely, and, some might say, cruelly ironic fate, however, has been the 
subject of the all too frequent silence needless tragedies are buried beneath when they 
cast the callous misunderstanding of public officials in the negative light of public 
knowledge. It took the sort of searching and fearless journalistic doggedness readers 
have come to respect in Moment to unearth the tragically negative facts of her fate. 

The 46-year-old recipient of the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart was actively window 
shopping in Cambridge, Massachusetts' fashionable Harvard Square when a transvestite 
purse snatcher, a drug addict with a criminal record all too well known to public officials, 
bizarrely outfitted in a strapless cocktail dress, spike heels, tattered feather boa, and 
auburn wig, brutally tore the life sustaining purse from the woman's unwitting grasp. 

The active, alert woman gave chase to the purse snatching 'woman' for as long as she 
could, plaintively shouting to passers by the words 'Stop her! She stole my heart!' on the 
fashionable sidewalk crowded with shoppers, reportedly shouting repeatedly, 'She stole 
my heart, stop her!' In response to her plaintive calls, tragically, misunderstanding 
shoppers and passers by merely shook their heads at one another, smiling knowingly at 
what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative lifestyle's relationship 
gone sour. A duo of Cambridge, Massachusetts, patrolmen, whose names are being 
withheld from Moment's dogged queries, were publicly heard to passively quip, 
'Happens all the time,' as the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the wake of 
the fleet transvestite, shouting for help for her stolen heart. 

That the prosthetic crime victim gave spirited chase for over four blocks before 
collapsing onto her empty chest is testimony to the impressive capacity of the Jarvik IX 
replacement procedure, was the anonymous comment of a public medical official 
reached for comment by Moment. 

The drug crazed purse snatcher, informed officials passively speculated, may have 
found even his hardened conscience moved by the life saving prosthesis the ill gotten 
woman's Aigner purse revealed, which runs on the same rechargeable power cell as an 
electric man's razor, and may well have continued to beat and bleed for a period of time 
in the rudely disconnected purse. The purse snatcher's response to this conscience 
appears to have been cruelly striking the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart repeatedly 
with a stone or small hammer-like tool, where its remains were found some hours later 
behind the historic Boston Public Library in fashionable Copley Square. 

Is medical science's awe inspiring march forward, however, always doomed to include 
such tragic incidents of ignorance and callous loss, one might ask. Such seems to be the 
stance of North American officials. If indeed so, the victims' fate is frequently kept from 
the light of public knowledge. 

And the facts of the case's outcome? The 46-year-old deceased woman's formerly 



active, alert brain was removed and dissected six weeks later by a Brigham and 
Women's City of Boston Hospital medical student reportedly so moved by her terse toe 
tag's account of the victim's heartless fate that he confessed to Moment a temporary 
inability to physically wield the power saw of his assigned task. 


ALPHABETICAL TALLY OF SEPARATISTEUR / ANTI-O.N.A.N. GROUPS WHOSE 
OPPOSITION TO INTERDEPENDENCE / RECONFIGURATION is DESIGNATED BY R.C.M.P. 
AND U.S.O.U.S. AS TERRORIST / EXTORTIONIST IN CHARACTER 
(Q=Quebecois, E=Environmental, S=Separatist, V=Violent, W=Extremely Violent) 

— Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (Q, S, W) 

— Le Bloc Quebecois (Q, S, E) 

— Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx (E, V) 

— Les Fils de Montcalm (Q, E) 

— Les Fils de Papineau (Q, S, V) 

— Le Front de la Liberation de la Quebec (Q, S, W) 

— Le Parti Quebecois (Q, S, E) 


WHY - THOUGH IN THE EARLY DAYS OF INTERLACE'S INTERNETTED TELEPUTERS 
THAT OPERATED OFF LARGELY THE SAME FIBER-DIGITAL GRID AS THE PHONE 
COMPANIES, THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING (A.K.A. 'VIDEOPHONY') ENJOYED AN 
INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY - CALLERS THRILLED AT THE IDEA OF 
PHONE-INTERFACING BOTH AURALLY AND FACIALLY (THE LITTLE FIRST-GENERATION 
PHONE-VIDEO CAMERAS BEING TOO CRUDE AND NARROW-APERTURED FOR ANYTHING 
MUCH MORE THAN FACIAL CLOSE-UPS) ON FIRST-GENERATION TELEPUTERS THAT AT 
THAT TIME WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HIGH-TECH TV SETS, THOUGH OF COURSE THEY 
HAD THAT LITTLE 'INTELLIGENT-AGENT' HOMUNCULAR ICON THAT WOULD APPEAR AT 
THE LOWER-RIGHT OF A BROADCAST/CABLE PROGRAM AND TELL YOU THE TIME AND 
TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE OR REMIND YOU TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE 
MEDICATION OR ALERT YOU TO A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING ENTERTAINMENT- 
OPTION NOW COMING UP ON CHANNEL LIKE 491 OR SOMETHING, OR OF COURSE NOW 
ALERTING YOU TO AN INCOMING VIDEO-PHONE CALL AND THEN TAP-DANCING WITH A 
LITTLE ICONIC STRAW BOATER AND CANE JUST UNDER A MENU OF POSSIBLE OPTIONS 
FOR RESPONSE, AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE HOMUNCULAR ICONS - BUT 
WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND 
CURVE FOR 'VIDEOPHONY' SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE 
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE 
TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS 
OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECIDING 
THAT S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOW-TECH BELL-ERA VOICE- 
ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A 
GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, 
PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND- 



FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE 
MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES' RETIREMENT SYSTEM'S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND 
WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR'S MISTRESS'S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANICALLY 
PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE-TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR... AND BUT SO WHY THE 
ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONING? 

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, 
(3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer 
high-tech. 

(1) It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone 
interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone 
consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but 
wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never 
noticed it before, the delusion — it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be 
countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone 
conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying 
complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even 
close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation — utilizing a 
hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece 
(rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6 2 ) or 36 little pinholes — let you enter 
a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look 
around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your 
cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a 
whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of 
conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right 
there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the 
retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the 
phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never 
haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly 
divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let's say performed a close tactile blemish- 
scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate 
was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish- 
scan. It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and aurally supported: the phone-line's 
other end's voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored right into your ear, 
enabling you to imagine that the voice's owner's attention was similarly compressed 
and focused... even though your own attention was not, was the thing. This bilateral 
illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional 
standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention 
without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion 
appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to 
trust other people at the same time. 

Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to 
compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to 
compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit 
succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking 



rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously 
blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the 
video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress. 

Even worse, of course, was the traumatic expulsion-from-Eden feeling of looking up 
from tracing your thumb's outline on the Reminder Pad or adjusting the old Unit's angle 
of repose in your shorts and actually seeing your videophonic interfacee idly strip a 
shoelace of its gumlet as she talked to you, and suddenly realizing your whole infantile 
fantasy of commanding your partner's attention while you yourself got to fugue-doodle 
and make little genital-adjustments was deluded and insupportable and that you were 
actually commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying, here. The whole 
attention business was monstrously stressful, video callers found. 

(2) And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you 
worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who 
doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, 
surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. 
But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality 
about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having 
the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes 
and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door. 

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers' faces looked on their 
TP screen, during calls. Not their callers' faces, but their own, when they saw them on 
video. It was a three-button affair: after all, to use the TP's cartridge-card's Video- 
Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and 
see how your face had actually looked to the other person during the call. This sort of 
appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved al¬ 
most universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a 
TP screen. It wasn't just 'Anchorman's Bloat,' that well-known impression of extra 
weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs' high-def 
viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking 
about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just 
unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and 
ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of 
entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual 
access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms 
untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage's appearance, 
with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing 
their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 
1960. 

The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psychological 
consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or l /PD) was, of course, the advent 
of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated 
toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks 
who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid addi¬ 
tional nets. 



Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the 
most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone- 
consumer and — thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered 
by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly 
attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly 
overintense expression of complete attention — was quickly supplanted by the more 
inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-FBI 
software) actually casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin 
mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable 
mask was more than worth it, considering the stress- and VFD-reduction benefits, and 
the convenient Velcro straps for the back of the mask and caller's head cost peanuts; 
and for a couple fiscal quarters phone/cable companies were able to rally l/PD-afflicted 
consumers' confidence by working out a horizontally integrated deal where free 
composite-and-masking services came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks, 
when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP's phone-console, 
admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging 
there empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken- 
identity snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the hurried selection 
and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks 
— but all in all the masks seemed initially like a viable industry response to the vanity, - 
stress,-and-Nixonian-facial-image problem. 

(2 and maybe also 3) But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy oil 
sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an 
almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it 
becomes possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def- 
videophonic-mask thing spiralled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to 
evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you're good-looking or not — e.g. try 
looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy 
with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else 
you know is good-looking or not — but it turned out that consumers' instinctively 
skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and 
then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking 
than they themselves were in person. High-def mask-entrepreneurs ready and willing to 
supply not just verisimilitude but aesthetic enhancement — stronger chins, smaller eye- 
bags, air-brushed scars and wrinkles — soon pushed the original mimetic-mask- 
entrepreneurs right out of the market. In a gradually unsubtlizing progression, within a 
couple more sales-quarters most consumers were now using masks so undeniably 
better-looking on videophones than their real faces were in person, transmitting to one 
another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves, that 
enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly 
reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were 
now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and 
would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers' phobia) the same illusion- 
shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup 



give people the first time they ever see them without makeup. 

The social anxieties surrounding the phenomenon psych-consultants termed 
Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking (or OMM) intensified steadily as the tiny 
crude first-generation videophone cameras' technology improved to where the aperture 
wasn't as narrow, and now the higher-end tiny cameras could countenance and transmit 
more or less full-body images. Certain psychologically unscrupulous entrepreneurs 
began marketing full-body polybutylene and -urethane 2-D cutouts — sort of like the 
headless muscleman and bathing-beauty cutouts you could stand behind and position 
your chin on the cardboard neck-stump of for cheap photos at the beach, only these 
full-body videophone-masks were vastly more high-tech and convincing-looking. Once 
you added variable 2-D wardrobe, hair- and eye-color options, various aesthetic 
enlargements and reductions, etc., costs started to press the envelope of mass-market 
affordability, even though there was at the same time horrific social pressure to be able 
to afford the very best possible masked 2-D body-image, to keep from feeling compara¬ 
tively hideous-looking on the phone. How long, then, could one expect it to have been 
before the relentless entrepreneurial drive toward an ever-better mousetrap conceived 
of the Transmittable Tableau (a.k.a. TT), which in retrospect was probably the really 
sharp business-end of the videophonic coffin-nail. With TTs, facial and bodily masking 
could now be dispensed with altogether and replaced with the video-transmitted image 
of what was essentially a heavily doctored still-photograph, one of an incredibly fit and 
attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who actually resembled you the 
caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number, the photo's face 
focused attentively in the direction of the videophonic camera from amid the 
sumptuous but not ostentatious appointments of the sort of room that best reflected 
the image of yourself you wanted to transmit, etc. 

The Tableaux were simply high-quality transmission-ready photographs, scaled down 
to diorama-like proportions and fitted with a plastic holder over the videophone 
camera, not unlike a lens-cap. Extremely good-looking but not terrifically successful 
entertainment-celebrities — the same sort who in decades past would have swelled the 
cast-lists of infomercials — found themselves in demand as models for various high-end 
videophone Tableaux. 

Because they involved simple transmission-ready photography instead of computer 
imaging and enhancement, the Tableaux could be mass-produced and commensurately 
priced, and for a brief time they helped ease the tension between the high cost of 
enhanced body-masking and the monstrous aesthetic pressures videophony exerted on 
callers, not to mention also providing employment for set-designers, photographers, 
airbrushers, and infomercial-level celebrities hard-pressed by the declining fortunes of 
broadcast television advertising. 

(3) But there's some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability- 
curve of advances in consumer technology. The career of videophony conforms neatly 
to this curve's classically annular shape: First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like 
advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, 
however, has certain unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the 
market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people's stressfully vain repulsion 



at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial 
verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations 
seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer- 
recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the 
present case, the stress-and-vanity-compensations 1 own evolution saw video-callers 
rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced 
physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting 
attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another's TPs. And, behind these lens-cap 
dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again 
stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their 
celebrity-dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish- 
scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive 
face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end's Tableau reassured them that 
they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn't have to exert. 

And of course but these advantages were nothing other than the once-lost and now- 
appreciated advantages of good old Bell-era blind aural-only telephoning, with its 6 and 
(6 2 ) pinholes. The only difference was that now these expensive silly unreal stylized 
Tableaux were being transmitted between TPs on high-priced video-fiber lines. How 
much time, after this realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via 
phone, interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before 
high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old 
telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while 
culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde 
transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and 
the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another. In 
other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve's end, a kind 
of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness 
continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky 
facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate 
PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era's tacky equivalents of people with 
leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric zirconium 
jewelry, NoCoat LinguaScrapers, and c. Most communications consumers put their 
Tableaux-dioramas at the back of a knick-knack shelf and covered their cameras with 
standard black lens-caps and now used their phone consoles' little mask-hooks to hang 
these new little plasticene address-and-phone diaries specially made with a little 
receptacle at the top of the binding for convenient hanging from former mask-hooks. 
Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave 
home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon's endurance 
can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia 
served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and 
-delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern. 


Four times per annum, in these chemically troubled times, the Organization of North 



American Nations Tennis Association's Juniors Division sends a young toxicologist with 
cornsilk hair and a smooth wide button of a nose and a blue O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer to 
collect urine samples from any student at any accredited tennis academy ranked higher 
than 64 continentally in his or her age-division. Competitive junior tennis is meant to be 
good clean fun. It's October in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. An 
impressive percentage of the kids at E.T.A. are in their divisions' top 64. On urine-sample 
day, the juniors form two long lines that trail out of the locker rooms and up the stairs 
and then run agnate and coed across the E.T.A. Comm.-Ad. Bldg, lobby with its royal- 
blue shag and hardwood panelling and great glass cases of trophies and plaques. It takes 
about an hour to get from the middle of the line to your sex's locker room's stall-area, 
where either the blond young toxicologist or on the girls' side a nurse whose severe 
widow's peak tops her square face with a sort of bisected forehead dispenses a plastic 
cup with a pale-green lid and a strip of white medical tape with a name and a monthly 
ranking and 10-15-Y.D.A.U. and Enf.T.A. neatly printed in a six-pt. font. 

Probably about a fourth of the ranking players over, say, fifteen at the Enfield Tennis 
Academy cannot pass a standard North American GC/MS 52 urine scan. These, 
seventeen-year-old Michael Pemulis's nighttime customers, now become also, four 
times yearly, his daytime customers. Clean urine is ten adjusted dollars a cc. 

'Get your urine here!' Pemulis and Trevor Axford become quarterly urine vendors; 
they wear those papery oval caps ballpark-vendors wear; they spend three months 
collecting and stashing the urine of sub-ten-year-old players, warm pale innocent 
childish urine that's produced in needly little streams and the only G/M scan it couldn't 
pass would be like an Ovaltine scan or something; then every third month Pemulis and 
Axford work the agnate unsupervised line that snakes across the blue lobby shag, selling 
little Visine bottles of urine out of an antique vendor's tub for ballpark wieners, snagged 
for a song from a Fenway Park wienerman fallen on hard offseason times, a big old box 
of dull dimpled tin with a strap in Sox colors that goes around the back of the neck and 
keeps the vendor's hands free to make change. 

'Urine!' 

'Clinically sterile urine!' 

'Piping hot!' 

'Urine you'd be proud to take home and introduce to the folks!' 

Trevor Axford handles cash-flow. Pemulis dispenses little conical-tipped Visine bottles 
of juvenile urine, bottles easily rendered discreet in underarm, sock or panty. 

'Urine trouble? Urine luck!' 

Quarterly sales breakdowns indicate slightly more male customers than female 
customers, for urine. Tomorrow morning, E.T.A. custodial workers — Kenkle and Brandt, 
or Dave ('Fall Down Very') Flarde, the well-loved old janitor laid off from Boston College 
for contracting narcolepsy, or thick-ankled Irish women from the semi-tenements down 
the hill across Comm. Ave., or else sullen and shifty-eyed residents from Ennet Flouse, 
the halfway facility at the bottom of the hill's other side in the old VA HospitaI complex, 
hard-looking and generally sullen types who come and do nine months of menial-type 
work for the 32 hours a week their treatment-contract requires — will empty scores of 
little empty plastic Visine bottles from subdorm wastebaskets into the dumpster-nest 



behind the E.T.A. Employee parking lot, from which dumpsters Pemulis will then get 
Mario Incandenza and some of the nai'ver of the original ephebic urine-donators 
themselves to remove, sterilize, and rebox the bottles under the guise of a rousing game 
of Who-Can-Find,-Boil,-And-Box-The-Most-Empty-Visine-Bottles-ln-A-Three-Hour- 

Period-Without-Any-Kind-Of-Authority-Figure-Knowing-What-You're-Up-To, a game 
which Mario had found thumpingly weird when Pemulis introduced him to it three years 
ago, but which Mario's really come to look forward to, since he's found he has a real 
sort of mystical intuitive knack for finding Visine bottles in the sedimentary layers of 
packed dumpsters, and always seems to win hands-down, and if you're poor old Mario 
Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them. T. Axford then 
stashes and recycles the bottles, and packaging overhead is nil. He and Pemulis keep the 
wiener-tub stashed under a discarded Yarmouth sail in the back of the used tow truck 
they'd chipped in on with Hal and Jim Struck and another guy who's since graduated 
E.T.A. and now plays for Pepperdine, and paid to have reconditioned and the rusty chain 
and hook that hung from the tow truck's back-tilted derrick replaced with a gleamingly 
new chain and thick hook — which get used really only twice a year, spring and late fall, 
for brief intervals of short-distance hauling during the all-weather Lung's dismantling 
and erection, plus occasionally pulling a paralyzed rear-wheel-drive student or employee 
vehicle either back onto or all the way up the E.T.A. hillside's long 70° driveway during 
bad snowstorms — and the whole thing derusted and painted in E.T.A.'s proud red and 
gray school colors, with the complex O.N.A.N. heraldic ensign — a snarling full-front 
eagle with a broom and can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other 
and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a swatch of star- 
studded cloth — rather ironically silk-screened onto the driver's-side door and the good 
old pre-Tavis E.T.A. traditional motto TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT... unironically emblazoned 
on the passenger door, and which they all share use of, though Pemulis and Axford get 
slight priority, because the truck's registration and basic-liability insurance get paid for 
out of quarterly urine-revenues. 

Hal's older brother Mario — who by Dean of Students' fiat gets to bunk in a double 
with Hal in subdorm A on the third floor of Comm.-Ad. even though he's too physically 
challenged even to play low-level recreational tennis, but who's keenly interested in 
video- and film-cartridge production, and pulls his weight as part of the E.T.A. 
community recording assigned sections of matches and drills and processional stroke¬ 
filming sessions for later playback and analysis by Schtitt and his staff — is filming the 
congregated line and social interactions and vending operation of the urine-day lobby, 
using his strap-attached head-mounted camera and thoracic police-lock and foot- 
treadle, apparently getting footage for one of the short strange Himself-influenced 
conceptual cartridges the administration lets him occupy his time making and futzing 
around with down in the late founder's editing and f/x facilities off the main sub- 
Comm.-Ad. tunnel; and Pemulis and Axford do not object to the filming, nor do they 
even do that hand-to-temple face-obscuring thing when he aims the head-mounted 
Bolex their way, since they know nobody will end up seeing the footage except Mario 
himself, and that at their request he'll modulate and scramble the vendors' and 
customers' faces into undulating systems of flesh-colored squares, by means of his late 



father's reconfigururing matte-panel in the editing room, since facial scrambling will 
heighten whatever weird conceptual effect Mario's usually after anyway, though also 
because Mario's notoriously fond of undulating flesh-colored squares and will jump at 
any opportunity to edit them in over people's faces. 

They do brisk business. 

Michael Pemulis, wiry, pointy-featured, phenomenally talented at net but about two 
steps too slow to get up there effectively against high-level pace — so in compensation 
also a great offensive-lob man — is a scholarship student from right nearby in Allston 
MA — a grim section of tract housing and vacant lots, low-rise Greek and Irish housing 
projects, gravel and haphazard sewage and indifferent municipal upkeep, a lot of 
depressed petrochemical light industry all along the Spur, an outlying district zoned for 
sprawl; an old joke in Enfield-Brighton goes ' "Kiss me where it smells" she said so I took 
her to Allston' — where he discovered a knack playing Boys Club tennis in cut-off shorts 
and no shirt and a store-strung stick on scuzzy courts with blacktop that discolored your 
yellow balls and nets made of spare Feeny Park fencing that sent net-cord shots 
spronging all the way out into traffic. An Inner City Development Program tennis prodigy 
at ten, recruited up the hill at eleven, with parents who wanted to know how much 
E.T.A.'d pay up front for rights to all future possible income. Cavalier about practice but 
a bundle of strangled nerves in tournaments, the rap on Pemulis is that he's way lower- 
ranked than he could be with a little hard work, since he's not only E.T.A.'s finest 
Eschatonic 53 marksman off the lob but Schtitt says is the one youth here now who 
knows truly what is it to punch the volley. Pemulis, whose pre-E.T.A. home life was 
apparently hackle-raising, also sells small-time drugs of distinguished potency at 
reasonable retail prices to a large pie-slice of the total junior-tournament-circuit market. 
Mario Incandenza is one of those people who wouldn't see the point of trying 
recreational chemicals even if he knew how to go about it. He just wouldn't get it. His 
smile, below the Bolex camera strapped to his large but sort of withered-looking head, is 
constant and broad as he films the line's serpentine movement against glass shelves full 
of prizes. 

M. M. Pemulis, whose middle name is Mathew (sic), has the highest Stanford-Binet of 
any kid on academic probation ever at the Academy. Hal Incandenza's most valiant 
efforts barely get Pemulis through Mrs. I's triad of required Grammars 54 and Soma R.-L.- 
0. Chawaf's heady Literature of Discipline, because Pemulis, who claims he sees every 
third word upside-down, actually just has a born tech-science wienie's congenital 
impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal systems. His early 
tennis promise quick-peaking and it's turned out a bit dilettantish, Pemulis's real 
enduring gift is for math and hard science, and his scholarship is the coveted James 0. 
Incandenza Geometrical Optics Scholarship, of which there is only one, and which each 
term Pemulis manages to avoid losing by just one dento-dermal layer of overall G.P.A., 
and which gives him sanctioned access to all the late director's lenses and equipment, 
some of which turn out to be useful to unrelated enterprises. Mario's the only other 
person sharing the optic-and-editing labs off the main tunnel, and the two have the kind 
of transpersonal bond that shared interests and mutual advantage can inspire: if Mario's 
not helping Pemulis fabricate the products of independent-optical-study work M.P. isn't 



really much into doing — you should see the boy with a convex lens, Avril likes to say 
within Mario's hearing; he's like a fish in brine — then Pemulis is giving Mario, who's a 
film-nut but no great tech-mind, serious help with cinemo-optical praxis, the physics of 
focal-length and reflective compounds — you should see Pemulis with an emulsion 
curve, yawning blasely under his bill-reversed yachting hat and scratching an armpit, 
juggling differentials like a boy born to wear a pocket-protector and high-water 
corduroys and electrician's tape on his hornrims' temples, asking Mario if he knows 
what you call three Canadians copulating on a snowmobile. Mario and his brother Hal 
both consider Pemulis a good friend, though friendship at E.T.A. is nonnegotiable 
currency. 

Hal Incandenza for a long time identified himself as a lexical prodigy who — though 
Avril had taken pains to let all three of her children know that her nonjudgmental love 
and pride depended in no way on achievement or performance or potential talent — 
had made his mother proud, plus a really good tennis player. Hal Incandenza is now 
being encouraged to identify himself as a late-blooming prodigy and possible genius at 
tennis who is on the verge of making every authority-figure in his world and beyond 
very proud indeed. He's never looked better on court or on monthly O.N.A.N.T.A. paper. 
He is erumpent. He has made what Schtitt termed a 'leap of exponents' at a post- 
pubescent age when radical, plateaux-hopping, near-J.-Wayne-and-Show-caliber 
improvement is extraordinarily rare in tennis. He gets his sterile urine gratis, though he 
could well afford to pay: Pemulis depends on him for verbal-academic support, and 
dislikes owing favors, even to friends. 

Hal is, at seventeen, as of 10/Y.D.A.U., judged ex cathedra the fourth-best tennis 
player under age eighteen in the United States of America, and the sixth-best on the 
continent, by those athletic-organizing bodies duly charged with the task of ranking. 
Hal's head, closely monitored by deLint and Staff, is judged still level and focused and 
unswollen/-bludgeoned by the sudden eclat and rise in general expectations. When 
asked how he's doing with it all, Hal says Fine and thanks you for asking. 

If Hal fulfills this newly emergent level of promise and makes it all the way up to the 
Show, Mario will be the only one of the Incandenza children not wildly successful as a 
professional athlete. No one who knows Mario could imagine that this fact would ever 
even occur to him. 

Orin, Mario, and Hal's late father was revered as a genius in his original profession 
without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he 
himself, at least not while he was alive, which is perhaps bona-fidely tragic but also, as 
far as Mario's concerned, ultimately all right, if that's the way things unfolded. 

Certain people find people like Mario Incandenza irritating or even think they're 
outright bats, dead inside in some essential way. 

Michael Pemulis's basic posture with people is that Mrs. Pemulis raised no dewy-eyed 
fools. He wears painter's caps on-court and sometimes a yachting cap turned around 
180°, and, since he's not ranked high enough to get any free-corporate-clothing offers, 
plays in T-shirts with things like ALLSTON HS WOLF SPIDERS and CHOOSY MOTHERS and 
THE FIENDS IN HUMAN SHAPE Y.D.A.U. TOUR or like an ancient CAN YOU BELIEVE IT THE 
SUPREME COURT JUST DESECRATED OUR FLAG on them. His face is the sort of spiky- 



featured brow-dominated Feenian face you see all over Irish Allston and Brighton, its 
chin and nose sharp and skin the natal brown color of the shell of a quality nut. 

Michael Pemulis is nobody's fool, and he fears the dealer's Brutus, the potential eater 
of cheese, the rat, the wiretap, the pubescent-looking Finest sent to make him look 
foolish. So when somebody calls his room's phone, even on video, and wants to buy 
some sort of substance, they have to right off the bat utter the words 'Please commit a 
crime,' and Michael Pemulis will reply 'Gracious me and mine, a crime you say?' and the 
customer has to insist, right over the phone, and say he'll pay Michael Pemulis money to 
commit a crime, or like that he'll harm Michael Pemulis in some way if he refuses to 
commit a crime, and Michael Pemulis will in a clear and I.D.able voice make an 
appointment to see the caller in person to 'plead for my honor and personal safety,' so 
that if anybody eats cheese later or the phone's frequency is covertly accessed, 
somehow, Pemulis will have been entrapped. 55 

Secreting a small Visine bottle of urine in an armpit in line also brings it up to plausible 
temperature. At the entrance to the male stall-area, the ephebic-looking O.N.A.N.T.A. 
toxicologist rarely even looks up from his clipboard, but the square-faced nurse can be a 
problem over on the female side, because every so often she'll want the stall door open 
during production. With Jim Struck handling published-source plagiarism and 
compressed iteration and Xerography, Pemulis also offers, at reasonable cost, a small 
vade mecum ish pamphlet detailing several methods for dealing with this contingency. 


WINTER B.S. 1960 — TUCSON AZ 


Jim not that way Jim. That's no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the 
waist and yanking at the handle so the door jerks up and out jerky and hard and you 
crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let's see you bend at the healthy knees. Let's 
see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and pull just as 
exactly gently as will make it come to you. Experiment, Jim. See just how much force 
you need to start the door easy, let it roll up out open on its hidden greasy rollers and 
pulleys in the ceiling's set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all garage doors as the well- 
oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in, heat roiling out, hot. Needless and 
dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is a shover and a thruster, son. 
She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She's never learned that 
treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your own body 
in the most efficient way. It's Marlon Brando's fault, Jim. Your mother back in California 
before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife 



and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big 
moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail and put her 
hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, 
believe you me. She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? 
Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like 
two whole generations' relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and 
bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage 
door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed down. You'll 
know Brando when you watch him, and you'll have learned to fear him. Brando, Jim, 
Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o. Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning 
back on his chair's rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching against 
everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, 
yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and tossing them 
crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket and just lie there, ill-used. With the over- 
clumsy impetuous movements and postures of a moody infant. Your mother is of that 
new generation that moves against life's grain, across its warp and baffles. She may 
have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she didn't understand him, is what's ruined her for 
everyday arts like broilers and garage doors and even low-level public-park knock- 
around tennis. Ever see your mother with a broiler door? It's carnage, Jim, it's to cringe 
to see it, and the poor dumb thing thinks it's tribute to this slouching slob-type she 
loved as he roared by. Jim, she never intuited the gentle and cunning economy behind 
this man's quote harsh sloppy unstudied approach to objects. The way he'd oh so clearly 
practiced a chair's back-leg tilt over and over. The way he studied objects with a 
welder's eye for those strongest centered seams which when pressured by the 
swinishest slouch still support. She never... never sees that Marlon Brando felt himself 
as body so keenly he'd no need for manner. She never sees that in his quote careless 
way he actually really touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him. Of his own 
body. The world he only seemed to manhandle was for him sentient, feeling. And no 
one... and she never understood that. Sour sodding grapes indeed. You can't envy 
someone who can be that way. Respect, maybe. Maybe wistful respect, at the very 
outside. She never saw that Brando was playing the equivalent of high-level quality 
tennis across sound stages all over both coasts, Jim, is what he was really doing. Jim, he 
moved like a careless fingerling, one big muscle, muscularly naive, but always, notice, a 
fingerling at the center of a clear current. That kind of animal grace. The bastard wasted 
no motion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care. His was a tennis player's dictum: 
touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will 
move or stay still or move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and yield up their 
innermost seams to you. Teach you all their tricks. He knew what the Beats know and 
what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and 
body, and everything will be done by what's around you. I know you don't understand. 
Yet. I know that goggle-eyed stare. I know what it means all too well, son. It's no matter. 
You will. Jim, I know what I know. 

I'm predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player. I 
was near-great. You will be truly great. You will be the real thing. I know I haven't taught 



you to play yet, I know this is your first time, Jim, Jesus, relax, I know. It doesn't affect 
my predictive sense. You will overshadow and obliterate me. Today you are starting, 
and within a very few years I know all too well you will be able to beat me out there, 
and on the day you first beat me I may well weep. It'll be out of a sort of selfless pride, 
an obliterated father's terrible joy. I feel it, Jim, even here, standing on hot gravel and 
looking: in your eyes I see the appreciation of angle, a prescience re spin, the way you 
already adjust your overlarge and apparently clumsy child's body in the chair so it's at 
the line of best force against dish, spoon, lens-grinding appliance, a big book's stiff bend. 
You do it unconsciously. You have no idea. But I watch, very closely. Don't ever think I 
don't, son. 

You will be poetry in motion, Jim, size and posture and all. Don't let the posture- 
problem fool you about your true potential out there. Take it from me, for a change. The 
trick will be transcending that overlarge head, son. Learning to move just the way you 
already sit still. Living in your body. 

This is the communal garage, son. And this is our door in the garage. I know you know. 

I know you've looked at it before, many times. Now... now see it, Jim. See it as body. The 
dull-colored handle, the clockwise latch, the bits of bug trapped when the paint was wet 
and now still protruding. The cracks from this merciless sunlight out here. Original color 
anyone's guess, boyo. The concave inlaid squares, how many, bevelled at how many 
levels at the borders, that pass for decoration. Count the squares, maybe... let's see you 
treat this door like a lady, son. Twisting the latch clockwise with one hand that's right 
and... I guess you'll have to pull harder, Jim. Maybe even harder than that. Let me ... 
that's the way she wants doing, Jim. Have a look. Jim, this is where we keep this 1956 
Mercury Montclair you know so well. This Montclair weighs 3,900 pounds, give or take. 
It has eight cylinders and a canted windshield and aerodynamic fins, Jim, and has a 
maximum flat-out road-speed of 95 m.p.h. per. I described the shade of the paint job of 
this Montclair to the dealer when I first saw it as bit-lip red. Jim, it's a machine. It will do 
what it's made for and do it perfectly, but only when stimulated by someone who's 
made it his business to know its tricks and seams, as a body. The stimulator of this car 
must know the car, Jim, feel it, be inside much more than just the... the compartment. 
It's an object, Jim, a body, but don't let it fool you, sitting here, mute. It will respond. If 
given its due. With artful care. It's a body and will respond with a well-oiled purr once I 
get some decent oil in her and all Mercuryish at up to 95 big ones per for just that driver 
who treats its body like his own, who feels the big steel body he's inside, who quietly 
and unnoticed feels the nubbly plastic of the grip of the shift up next to the wheel when 
he shifts just as he feels the skin and flesh, the muscle and sinew and bone wrapped in 
gray spiderwebs of nerves in the blood-fed hand just as he feels the plastic and metal 
and flange and teeth, the pistons and rubber and rods of the amber-fueled Montclair, 
when he shifts. The bodily red of a well-bit lip, parping along at a silky 80-plus per. Jim, a 
toast to our knowledge of bodies. To high-level tennis on the road of life. Ah. Oh. 

Son, you're ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you're almost five- 
eleven, a possible pituitary freak. Son, you're a body, son. That quick little scientific- 
prodigy's mind she's so proud of and won't quit twittering about: son, it's just neural 
spasms, those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head 



is still just body, Jim. Commit this to memory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against 
my shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you're a machine a body an object, Jim, no 
less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for the front 
yard's gravel or sweet Jesus this nasty fat spider flexing in its web over there up next to 
the rake-handle, see it? See it? Latrodectus mactans, Jim. Widow. Grab this racquet and 
move gracefully and feelingly over there and kill that widow for me, young sir Jim. Go 
on. Make it say 'K.' Take no names. There's a lad. Here's to a spiderless section of 
communal garage. Ah. 

Bodies bodies everywhere. A tennis ball is the ultimate body, kid. We're coming to the 
crux of what I have to try to impart to you before we get out there and start actuating 
this fearsome potential of yours. Jim, a tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly round. 
Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible to whim, 
spin, to force — used well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless 
itself. Pure potential. Have a look at a ball. Get a ball from the cheap green plastic 
laundry basket of old used balls I keep there by the propane torches and use to practice 
the occasional serve, Jimbo. Attaboy. Now look at the ball. Heft it. Feel the weight. Here, 
I'll... tear the ball... open. Whew. See? Nothing in there but evacuated air that smells like 
a kind of rubber hell. Empty. Pure potential. Notice I tore it open along the seam. It's a 
body. You'll learn to treat it with consideration, son, some might say a kind of love, and 
it will open for you, do your bidding, be at your beck and soft lover's call. The thing truly 
great players with hale bodies who overshadow all others have is a way with the ball 
that's called, and keep in mind the garage door and broiler, touch. Touch the ball. Now 
that's ... that's the touch of a player right there. And as with the ball so with that big thin 
slumped overtall body, sir Jimbo. I'm predicting it right now. I see the way you'll apply 
the lessons of today to yourself as a physical body. No more carrying your head at the 
level of your chest under round slumped shoulders. No more tripping up. No more 
overshot reaches, shattered plates, tilted lampshades, slumped shoulders and caved-in 
chest, the simplest objects twisting and resistant in your big thin hands, boy. Imagine 
what it feels like to be this ball, Jim. Total physicality. No revving head. Complete 
presence. Absolute potential, sitting there potentially absolute in your big pale slender 
girlish hand so young its thumb's unwrinkled at the joint. My thumb's wrinkled at the 
joint, Jim, some might say gnarled. Have a look at this thumb right here. But I still treat it 
as my own. I give it its due. You want a drink of this, son? I think you're ready for a drink 
of this. No? Nein? Today, Lesson One out there, you become, for better or worse, Jim, a 
man. A player. A body in commerce with bodies. A helmsman at your own vessel's tiller. 
A machine in the ghost, to quote a phrase. Ah. A ten-year-old freakishly tall bow-tied 
and thick-spectacled citizen of the... I drink this, sometimes, when I'm not actively 
working, to help me accept the same painful things it's now time for me to tell you, son. 
Jim. Are you ready? I'm telling you this now because you have to know what I'm about 
to tell you if you're going to be the more than near-great top-level tennis player I know 
you're going to be eventually very soon. Brace yourself. Son, get ready. It's glo... 
gloriously painful. Have just maybe a taste, here. This flask is silver. Treat it with due 
care. Feel its shape. The near-soft feel of the warm silver and the calfskin sheath that 
covers only half its flat rounded silver length. An object that rewards a considered 



touch. Feel the slippery heat? That's the oil from my fingers. My oil, Jim, from my body. 
Not my hand, son, feel the flask. Heft it. Get to know it. It's an object. A vessel. It's a 
two-pint flask full of amber liquid. Actually more like half full, it seems. So it seems. This 
flask has been treated with due care. It's never been dropped or jostled or crammed. It's 
never had an errant drop, not drop one, spilled out of it. I treat it as if it can feel. I give it 
its due, as a body. Unscrew the cap. Hold the calfskin sheath in your right hand and use 
your good left hand to feel the cap's shape and ease it around on the threads. Son... son, 
you'll have to put that what is that that Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices Second 
Edition down, son. Looks heavy anyway. A tendon-strainer. Fuck up your pronator teres 
and surrounding tendons before you even start. You're going to have to put down the 
book, for once, young Sir Jimbo, you never try to handle two objects at the same time 
without just aeons of diligent practice and care, a Brando-like dis... and well no you 
don't just drop the book, son, you don't just just don't drop the big old Guide to Indices 
on the dusty garage floor so it raises a square bloom of dust and gets our nice white 
athletic socks all gray before we even hit the court, boy, Jesus I just took five minutes 
explaining how the key to being even a potential player is to treat the things with just 
exactly the... here lemme have this... that books aren't just dropped with a crash like 
bottles in the trashcan they're placed, guided, with senses on Full, feeling the edges, the 
pressure on the little floor of both hands' fingers as you bend at the knees with the 
book, the slight gassy shove as the air on the dusty floor... as the floor's air gets 
displaced in a soft square that raises no dust. Like soooo. Not like so. Got me? Got it? 
Well now don't be that way. Son, don't be that way, now. Don't get all oversensitive on 
me, son, when all I'm trying to do is help you. Son, Jim, I hate this when you do this. 
Your chin just disappears into that bow-tie when your big old overhung lower lip quivers 
like that. You look chinless, son, and big-lipped. And that cape of mucus that's coming 
down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don't, just don't, it's revolting, son, you don't 
want to revolt people, you have to learn to control this sort of oversensitivity to hard 
truths, this sort of thing, take and exert some goddamn control is the whole point of 
what I'm taking this whole entire morning off rehearsal with not one but two vitally 
urgent auditions looming down my neck so I can show you, planning to let you move the 
seat back and touch the shift and maybe even... maybe even drive the Montclair, God 
knows your feet'll reach, right Jimbo? Jim, hey, why not drive the Montclair? Why not 
you drive us over, starting today, pull up by the courts where today you'll — here, look, 
see how I unscrew it? the cap? with the soft very outermost tips of my gnarled fingers 
which I wish they were steadier but I'm exerting control to control my anger at that chin 
and lip and the cape of snot and the way your eyes slant and goggle like some sort of 
mongoloid child's when you're threatening to cry but just the very tips of the fingers, 
here, the most sensitive parts, the parts bathed in warm oil, the whorled pads, I feel 
them singing with nerves and blood I let them extend... further than the warm silver hip¬ 
flask's cap's very top down its broadening cone where to where the threads around the 
upraised little circular mouth lie hidden while with the other warm singing hand I gently 
grip the leather holster so I can feel the way the whole flask feels as I guide... guide the 
cap around on its silver threads, hear that? stop that and listen, hear that? the sound of 
threads moving through well-machined grooves, with great care, a smooth barbershop 



spiral, my whole hand right through the pads of my fingertips less... less unscrewing, 
here, than guiding, persuading, reminding the silver cap's body what it's built to do, 
machined to do, the silver cap knows, Jim, I know, you know, we've been through this 
before, leave the book alone, boy, it's not going anywhere, so the silver cap leaves the 
flask's mouth's warm grooved lips with just a snick, hear that? that faintest snick? not a 
rasp or a grinding sound or harsh, not a harsh brutal Brando-esque rasp of attempted 
domination but a snick a... nuance, there, ah, oh, like the once you've heard it never 
mistakable ponk of a true-hit ball, Jim, well pick it up then if you're afraid of a little dust, 
Jim, pick the book up if it's going to make you all goggle-eyed and chinless honestly 
Jesus why do I try I try and try just wanted to introduce you to the broiler's garage and 
let you drive, maybe, feeling the Montclair's body, taking my time to let you pull up to 
the courts with the Montclair's shift in a neutral glide and the eight cylinders thrumming 
and snicking like a healthy heart and the wheels all perfectly flush with the curb and 
bring out my good old trusty laundry... laundry basket of balls and racquets and towels 
and flask and my son, my flesh of my flesh, white slumped flesh of my flesh who wanted 
to embark on what I predict right now will be a tennis career that'll put his busted-up 
used-up old Dad back square in his little place, who wanted to maybe for once be a real 
boy and learn how to play and have fun and frolic and play around in the unrelieved 
sunshine this city's so fuck-all famous for, to enjoy it while he can because did your 
mother tell you we're moving? That we're moving back to California finally this spring? 
We're moving, son. I'm harking one last attempted time to that celluloid siren's call. I'm 
giving it the one last total shot a man's obligation to his last waning talent deserves, Jim, 
we're headed for the big time again at last for the first time since she announced she 
was having you, Jim, hitting the road, celluloid-bound, so say adios to that school and 
that fluttery little moth of a physics teacher and those slumped chinless slide-rule- 
wielding friends of no now wait I didn't mean it I meant I wanted to tell you now, ahead 
of time, your mother and I, to give you plenty of notice so you could adjust this time 
because oh you made it so unmisinterpretably clear how this last move to this trailer 
park upset you so, didn't you, to a mobile home with chemical toilet and bolts to hold it 
in place and widow-webs everyplace you look and grit settling on everything like dust 
out here instead of the Club's staff quarters I got us removed from or the house it was 
clearly my fault we couldn't afford anymore. It was my fault. I mean who else's fault 
would it be? Am I right? That we moved your big soft body with allegedly not enough 
notice and that east-side school you cried over and that Negro research resource 
librarian there with the hair out to here that... that lady with the upturned nose on 
tiptoe all the time I have to tell you she seemed so consummate east-side Tucsonian all 
self-consciously not of this earth's grit urging us to quote nurture your optical knack 
with physics with her nose upturned so you could see up in there and on her toes like 
something skilled overhead had sunk a hook between her big splayed fingerling's 
nostrils and were reeling skyward up toward the aether little by little I'll bet those 
heelless pumps are off the floor altogether by now son what do you say son what do 
you think... no, go on, cry, don't inhibit yourself, I won't say a word, except it's getting to 
me less all the time when you do it. I'll just warn you, I think you're overworking the 
tears and the... it's getting less effec... effective with me each time you use it though we 



know we both know don't we just between you and me we know it'll always work on 
your mother, won't it, never fail, she'll every time take and bend your big head down to 
her shoulder so it looks obscene, if you could see it, pat-patting on your back like she's 
burping some sort of slumping oversized obscene bow-tied infant with a book straining 
his pronator teres, crying, will you do this when you're grown? Will there be episodes 
like this when you're a man at your own tiller? A citizen of a world that won't go pat- 
pat-there-there? Will your face crumple and bulge like this when you're six-and-a-half 
grotesque feet tall, six-six-plus like your grandfather may he rot in hell's rubber vacuum 
when he finally kicks on the tenth tee and with your flat face and no chin just like him on 
that poor dumb patient woman's fragile wet snotty long-suffering shoulder did I tell you 
what he did? Did I tell you what he did? I was your age Jim here take the flask no give it 
here, oh. Oh. I was thirteen, and I'd started to play well, seriously, I was twelve or 
thirteen and playing for years already and he'd never been to watch, he'd never come 
once to where I was playing, to watch, or even changed his big flat expression even once 
when I brought home a trophy I won trophies or a notice in the paper TUCSON NATIVE 
QUALIFIES FOR NATIONAL JR CH'SHIPS he never acknowledged I even existed as I was, 
not as I do you, Jim, not as I take care to bend over backwards way, way out of my way 
to let you know I see you recognize you am aware of you as a body care about what 
might go on behind that big flat face bent over a homemade prism. He plays golf. Your 
grandfather. Your grand-pappy. Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the 
contempt? Billiards on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying 
sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets. This is almost empty. This 
is just about it, son. What say we rain-check this. What say I put the last of this out of its 
amber misery and we go in and tell her you're not feeling up to snuff enough again and 
we're rain-checking your first introduction to the Game till this weekend and we'll head 
over this weekend and do two straight days both days and give you a really extensive 
intensive intro to a by all appearances limitless future. Intensive gentleness and bodily 
care equals great tennis, Jim. We'll go both days and let you plunge right in and get wet 
all over. It's only five dollars. The court fee. For one lousy hour. Each day. Five dollars 
each day. Don't give it a thought. Ten total dollars for an intensive weekend when we 
live in a glorified trailer and have to share a garage with two DeSotos and what looks like 
a Model A on blocks and my Montclair can't afford the kind of oil she deserves. Don't 
look like that. What's money or my rehearsals for the celluloid auditions we're moving 
700 miles for, auditions that may well comprise your old man's last shot at a life with 
any meaning at all, compared to my son? Right? Am I right? Come here, kid. C'mere 
c'mere c'mere c'mere. That's a boy. That's my J.O.I, of a guy of a joy of boy. That's my 
kid, in his body. He never came once, Jim. Not once. To watch. Mother never missed a 
competitive match, of course. Mother came to so many it ceased to mean anything that 
she came. She became part of the environment. Mothers are like that, as I'm sure you're 
aware all too well, am I right? Right? Never came once, kiddo. Never lumbered over all 
slumped and soft and cast his big grotesque long-even-at-midday shadow at any court I 
performed on. Till one day he came, once. Suddenly, once, without precedent or 
warning, he... came. Ah. Oh. I heard him coming long before he hove into view. He cast 
a long shadow, Jim. It was some minor local event. It was some early-round local thing 



of very little consequence in the larger scheme. I was playing some local dandy, the kind 
with fine equipment and creased white clothing and country-club lessons that still can't 
truly play, even, regardless of all the support. You'll find you often have to endure this 
type of opponent in the first couple rounds. This gleaming hapless lox of a kid was some 
client of my father's son... son of one of his clients. So he came for the client, to put on 
some sham show of fatherly concern. He wore a hat and coat and tie at 95° plus. The 
client. Can't recall the name. There was something canine about his face, I remember, 
that his kid across the net had inherited. My father wasn't even sweating. I grew up with 
the man in this town and never once saw him sweat, Jim. I remember he wore a boater 
and the sort of gregariously plaid uniform professional men had to wear on the 
weekends then. They sat in the indecisive shade of a scraggly palm, the sort of palm 
that's just crawling with black widows, in the fronds, that come down without warning, 
that hide lying in wait in the heat of midday. They sat on the blanket my mother always 
brought — my mother, who's dead, and the client. My father stood apart, sometimes in 
the waving shade, sometimes not, smoking a long filter. Long filters had come into 
fashion. He never sat on the ground. Not in the American Southwest he didn't. There 
was a man with a healthy respect for spiders. And never on the ground under a palm. He 
knew he was too grotesquely tall and ungainly to stand up in a hurry or roll screaming 
out of the way in a hurry in case of falling spiders. They've been known to be willing to 
drop right out of the trees they hide in, in the daytime, you know. Drop right on you if 
you're sitting on the ground in the shade. He was no fool, the bastard. A golfer. They all 
watched. I was right there on the first court. This park no longer exists, Jim. Cars are 
now parked on what used to be these rough green asphalt courts, shimmering in the 
heat. They were right there, watching, their heads going back and forth in that 
windshield-wiper way of people watching quality tennis. And was I nervous, young sir 
J.O.I.? With the one and only Himself there in all his wooden glory there, watching, half 
in and out of the light, expressionless? I was not. I was in my body. My body and I were 
one. My wood Wilson from my stack of wood Wilsons in their trapezoid presses was a 
sentient expression of my arm, and I felt it singing, and my hand, and they were alive, 
my well-armed hand was the secretary of my mind, lithe and responsive and senza 
errori, because I knew myself as a body and was fully inside my little child's body out 
there, Jim, I was in my big right arm and scarless legs, safely ensconced, running here 
and there, my head pounding like a heart, sweat purled on every limb, running like a 
veldt-creature, leaping, frolicking, striking with maximum economy and minimum effort, 
my eyes on the ball and the corners both, I was two, three, a couple shots ahead of both 
me and the hapless canine client's kid, handing the dandy his pampered ass. It was 
carnage. It was a scene out of nature in its rawest state, Jim. You should have been 
there. The kid kept bending over to get his breath. The smoothly economical frolicking I 
was doing contrasted starkly compared to the heavily jerky way he was being forced to 
stomp around and lunge. His white knit shirt and name-brand shorts were soaked 
through so you could see the straps of his jock biting into the soft ass I was handing him. 
He wore a flitty little white visor such as fifty-two-year-old women at country clubs and 
posh Southwestern resorts wear. I was, in a word, deft, considered, prescient. I made 
him stomp and stagger and lunge. I wanted to humiliate him. The client's long sharp 



face was sagging. My father had no face, it was sharply shadowed and then illuminated 
in the wagging fronds' shadow he half stood in but was wreathed in smoke from the 
long filters he fancied, long plastic filtered holders, yellowed at the stem, in imitation of 
the President, as courtiers once spluttered with the King... veiled in shade and then lit 
smoke. The client didn't know enough to keep quiet. He thought he was at a ball game 
or something. The client's voice carried. Our first court was right near the tree they sat 
under. The client's legs were out in front of them and protruded from the sharp star of 
frond-shade. His slacks were lattice-shadowed from the pattern of the fence his son and 
I played just behind. He was drinking the lemonade my mother had brought for me. She 
made it fresh. He said I was good. My father's client did. In that emphasized way that 
made his voice carry. You know, son? Good godfrey Incandenza old trout but that lad of 
yours is good. Unquote. I heard him say it as I ran and whacked and frolicked. And I 
heard the tall son of a bitch's reply, after a long pause during which the world's whole 
air hung there as if lifted and left to swing. Standing at the baseline, or walking back to 
the baseline, to either serve or receive, one of the two, I heard the client. His voice 
carried. And then later I heard my father's reply, may he rot in a green and empty hell. I 
heard what... what he said in reply, sonbo. But not until after I'd fallen. I insist on this 
point, Jim. Not until after I'd started to fall. Jim, I'd been in the middle of trying to run 
down a ball way out of mortal reach, a rare blind lucky dribbler of a drop-shot from the 
over-groomed lox across the net. A point I could have more than afforded to concede. 
But that's not the way I... that's not the way a real player plays. With respect and due 
effort and care for every point. You want to be great, near-great, you give every ball 
everything. And then some. You concede nothing. Even against loxes. You play right up 
to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a 
hankie at it, embarking. You enter a trance. You feel the seams and edges of everything. 
The court becomes a... an extremely unique place to be. It will do everything for you. It 
will let nothing escape your body. Objects move as they're made to, at the lightest 
easiest touch. You slip into the clear current of back and forth, making delicate X's and 
L's across the harsh rough bright green asphalt surface, your sweat the same 
temperature as your skin, playing with such ease and total mindless effortless effort and 
and and entranced concentration you don't even stop to consider whether to run down 
every ball. You're barely aware you're doing it. Your body's doing it for you and the 
court and Game's doing it for your body. You're barely involved. It's magic, boy. Nothing 
touches it, when it's right. I predict it. Facts and figures and curved glass and those 
elbow-straining books of yours' lightless pages are going to seem flat by comparison. 
Static. Dead and white and flat. They don't begin to... It's like a dance, Jim. The point is I 
was too bodily respectful to slip up and fall on my own, out there. And the other point is 
I started to fall forward even before I started to hear him reply, standing there: Yes, But 
He'll Never Be Great. What he said in no way made me fall forward. The unlovely 
opponent had dribbled one just barely over the too-low public-park net, a freak 
accident, a mishit drop-shot, and another man on another court in another early-round 
laugher would have let it dribble, conceded the affordable, not tried to wave a hankie 
from the vessel of his limit. Not race on all eight healthy scarless cylinders desperately 
forward toward the net to try to catch the goddamn thing on the first bounce. Jim, but 



any man can slip. I don't know what I slipped on, son. There were spiders well-known to 
infest the palms' fronds all along the courts' fences. They come down at night on 
threads, bulbous, flexing. I'm thinking it could have been a bulbous goo-filled widow I 
stepped and slipped on, Jim, a spider, a mad rogue spider come down on its thread into 
the shade, flabby and crawling, or that leapt suicidally right from an overhanging frond 
onto the court, probably making a slight flabby hideous sound when it landed, crawling 
around on its claws, blinking grotesquely in the hot light it hated, that I stepped on 
rushing forward and killed and slipped on the mess the big loathsome spider made. See 
these scars? All knotted and ragged, like something had torn at my own body's knees 
the way a slouching Brando would just rip a letter open with his teeth and let the 
envelope fall on the floor all wet and rent and torn? All the palms along the fence were 
sick, they had palm-rot, it was the A.D. year 1933, of the Great Bisbee Palm-Rot 
epidemic, all through the state, and they were losing their fronds and the fronds were 
blighted and the color of really old olives in those old slim jars at the very back of the 
refrigerator and exuded a sick sort of pus-like slippery discharge and sometimes 
abruptly fell from trees curving back and forth through the air like celluloid pirates' 
paper swords. God I hate fronds, Jim. I'm thinking it could have been either a daytime 
latrodectus or some pus from a frond. The wind blew cruddy pus from the webbed 
fronds onto the court, maybe, up near the net. Either way. Something poisonous or 
infected, at any rate, unexpected and slick. All it takes is a second, you're thinking, Jim: 
the body betrays you and down you go, on your knees, sliding on sandpaper court. Not 
so, son. I used to have another flask like this, smaller, a rather more cunning silver flask, 
in the glove compartment of my Montclair. Your devoted mother did something to it. 
The subject has never been mentioned between us. Not so. It was a foreign body, or a 
substance, not my body, and if anybody did any betraying that day I'm telling you sonny 
kid boy it was something / did, Jimmer, I may well have betrayed that fine young lithe 
tan unslumped body, I may very well have gotten rigid, overconscious, careless of it, 
listening for what my father, who I respected, I respected that man, Jim, is what's sick, I 
knew he was there, I was conscious of his flat face and filter's long shadow, I knew him, 
Jim. Things were different when I was growing up, Jim. I hate... Jesus I hate saying 
something like this, this things-were-different-when-l-was-a-lad-type cliche shit, the sort 
of cliche fathers back then spouted, assuming he said anything at all. But it was. 
Different. Our kids, my generation's kids, they... now you, this post-Brando crowd, you 
new kids can't like us or dislike us or respect us or not as human beings, Jim. Your 
parents. No, wait, you don't have to pretend you disagree, don't, you don't have to say 
it, Jim. Because I know it. I could have predicted it, watching Brando and Dean and the 
rest, and I know it, so don't splutter. I blame no one your age, boyo. You see parents as 
kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed 
the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-red. Kids today... you kids today 
somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just 
bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and 
empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliche like you take us for 
granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... imagine our absence. We're so present it's 
ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world. Jim, I could imagine that 



man's absence. Jim, I'm telling you you cannot imagine my absence. It's my fault, Jim, 
home so much, limping around, ruined knees, overweight, under the Influence, burping, 
nonslim, sweat-soaked in that broiler of a trailer, burping, farting, frustrated, miserable, 
knocking lamps over, overshooting my reach. Afraid to give my last talent the one shot it 
demanded. Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a 
hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he'd say over the newspaper. I'm... I'm just 
afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN. It's... po¬ 
tential may be worse than none, Jim. Than no talent to fritter in the first place, lying 
around guzzling because I haven't the balls to... God I'm I'm so sorry. Jim. You don't 
deserve to see me like this. I'm so scared, Jim. I'm so scared of dying without ever being 
really seen. Can you understand? Are you enough of a big thin prematurely stooped 
young bespectacled man, even with your whole life still ahead of you, to understand? 
Can you see I was giving it all I had? That I was in there, out there in the heat, listening, 
webbed with nerves? A self that touches all edges, I remember she said. I felt it in a way 
I fear you and your generation never could, son. It was less like falling than being shot 
out of something, is the way I recall it. It did not did not happen in slow motion. One 
minute I was at a dead and beautiful forward run for the ball, the next minute there 
were hands at my back and nothing underfoot like a push down a stairway. A rude whip¬ 
lashing shove square in the back and my promising body with all its webs of nerves puls¬ 
ing and firing was in full airborne flight and came down on my knees this flask is empty 
right down on my knees with all my weight and inertia on that scabrous hot sandpaper 
surface forced into what was an exact parody of an imitation of contemplative prayer, 
sliding forward. The flesh and then tissue and bone left twin tracks of brown red gray 
white like tire tracks of bodily gore extending from the service line to the net. I slid on 
my flaming knees, rushed past the dribbling ball and toward the net that ended my 
slide. Our slide. My racquet had gone pinwheeling off Jim and my racquetless arms out 
before me sliding Jim in the attitude of a mortified monk in total prayer. It was given me 
to hear my father pronounce my bodily existence as not even potentially great at the 
moment I ruined my knees forever, Jim, so that even years later at USC I never got to 
wave my hankie at anything beyond the near- and almost-great and would-have-been- 
great -if, and later could never even hope to audition for those swim-trunk and 
Brylcreem beach movies that snake Avalon is making his mint on. I do not insist that the 
judgment and punishing fall are... were connected, Jim. Any man can slip out there. All it 
takes is a second of misplaced respect. Son, it was more than a father's voice, carrying. 
My mother cried out. It was a religious moment. I learned what it means to be a body, 
Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell kneeling and slid 
toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open. I may have to 
burp, belch, son, son, telling you what I learned, son, my... my love, too late, as I left my 
knees' meat behind me, slid, ended in a posture of supplication on my knees' disclosed 
bones with my fingers racquetless hooked through the mesh of the net, across which, 
the net, the sopped dandy had dropped his pricey gut-strung Davis racquet and was 
running toward me with his visor askew and his hands to his cheeks. My father and the 
client he was there to perform for dragged me upright to the palm's infected shade 
where she knelt on the plaid beach-blanket with her knuckles between her teeth, Jim, 



and I felt the religion of the physical that day, at not much more than your age, Jim, 
shoes filling with blood, held under the arms by two bodies big as yours and dragged off 
a public court with two extra lines. It's a pivotal, it's a seminal, religious day when you 
get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment, Jim. I got to notice what I'm 
sure you've noticed long ago, I know, I know you've seen me brought home on 
occasions, dragged in the door, under what's called the Influence, son, helped in by 
cabbies at night. I've seen your long shadow grotesquely backlit at the top of the 
house's stairs I helped pay for, boy: how the drunk and the maimed both are dragged 
forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, 
eyes on the aether. 


4 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


From Cambridge's Latinate Inman Square, Michael Pemulis, nobody's fool at all, rides 
one necessary bus to Central Square and then an unnecessary bus to Davis Square and a 
train back to Central. This is to throw off the slightest possible chance of pursuit. At 
Central he catches the Red Line to Park St. Station, where he's parked the tow truck in 
an underground lot he can more than afford. The day is autumnal and mild, the east 
breeze smelling of urban commerce and the vague suede smell of new-fallen leaves. The 
sky is pilot-light blue; sunlight reflects complexly off the smoked-glass sides of tall 
centers of commerce all around Park St. downtown. Pemulis wears button-fly chinos 
and an E.T.A. shirt beneath a snazzy blue Brioni sport-coat, plus the bright-white 
yachting cap that Mario Incandenza calls his Mr. Howell hat. The hat looks rakish even 
when turned around, and it has a detachable lining. Inside the lining can be kept 
portable quantities of just about anything. Having indulged in 150 mg. of very mild 
'drines, post-transaction. Wearing also gray-and-blue saddle oxfords w/o socks, it's such 
a mild autumn day. The streets literally bustle. Vendors with carts instead of tubs sell 
hot pretzels and tonics and those underboiled franks Pemulis likes to have them put the 
works on. You can see the State House and Common and Courthouse and Public 
Gardens, and beyond all that the cool smooth facades of Back Bay brownstones. The 
echoes in the underground Park PL garage — PARK — are pleasantly complex. Traffic 
westward on Commonwealth Avenue is light (meaning things can move) all the way 
through Kenmore Square and past Boston U. and up the long slow hill into Allston and 
Enfield. When Tavis and Schtitt and the players and ground crew and Testar and 
ATHSCME teams inflate the all-weather Lung for the winter over Courts 16-32, the 
domed Lung's nacelle is visible against the horizon all the way down by the Brighton 



Ave.-Comm. Ave. split in lower Allston. 

The incredibly potent DMZ is apparently classed as a para-methoxylated amphetamine 
but really it looks to Pemulis from his slow and tortured survey of the MED.COM's 
monographs more like more similar to the anticholinergic-deliriant class. Way more 
powerful than mescaline or MDA or DMA or TMA or MDMA or DOM or STP or the I.V.- 
ingestible DMT (or Ololiuqui or datura's scopolamine, or Fluothane, or Bufotenine (a.k.a. 
'Jackie-O.'), or Ebene or psilocybin or Cylert 56 ; DMZ resembling chemically some 
miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid, but significantly different from LSD-25 
in that its effects are less visual and spatially-cerebral and more like temporally-cerebral 
and almost ontological, with some sort of manipulated-phenylkylamine-like speediness 
whereby the ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically (and 
euphorically, is where the muscimole-affective resemblance shows its head) altered. 57 
The incredibly potent DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, an obscure mold 
that grows only on other molds, by the same ambivalently lucky chemist at Sandoz 
Pharm. who'd first stumbled on LSD, as a relatively ephebic and clueless organic 
chemist, while futzing around with ergotic fungi on rye. DMZ's discovery was the tail- 
end of the B.S. 1960s, just about the same time Dr. Alan Watts was considering T. 
Leary's invitation to become 'Writer in Resonance' at Leary's Utopian LSD-25 colony in 
Millbrook NY on what is now Canadian soil. A substance even just the accidental- 
synthesis of which sent the Sandoz chemist into early retirement and serious unblinking 
wall-watching, the incredibly potent DMZ has a popular-lay-chemical-underground 
reputation as the single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube. It is also now the 
hardest recreational compound to acquire in North America after raw Vietnamese 
opium, which forget it. 

DMZ is sometimes also referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as Madame 
Psychosis, after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on M.I.T.'s student- 
run radio station WYYY-109, 'Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band,' which Mario 
Incandenza and E.T.A. stats-wienie and Eschaton game-master Otis P. Lord listen to 
almost religiously. 

The day-shift Ennet House kid at the booth who raises the portcullis to let him onto 
the grounds had a couple times in October approached Pemulis about a potential 
transaction. Pemulis has a rigid policy about not transacting with E.T.A. employees who 
come up the hill from the halfway house, since he knows some of them are at the place 
on Court Order, and knows for a fact they pull unscheduled Urines all over the place 
down there, and types like the Ennet House types are just the sorts of people Pemulis's 
talents let him get away from in terms of like social milieu and mixing and transacting; 
and his basic attitude with these low-rent employees is one of unfoolish discretion and 
like why tempt fate. 

The East Courts are empty and ball-strewn when Pemulis pulls in; most of them are 
still at lunch. Pemulis, Troeltsch, and Schacht's triple-room is in subdorm B in the back 
north part of the second floor of West House and so superjacent to the Dining Hall, from 
which through the floor Pemulis can hear voices and silverware and can smell exactly 
what they're having. The first thing he does is boot up the phone console and try Inc and 
Mario's room over in Comm.-Ad., where Hal is sitting in windowlight with the Riverside 



Homlet he told Mario he'd read and help with a conceptual film-type project based on 
part of, his uncushioned captain's chair partly under an old print of a detail from the 
minor and soft-core Alexandrian mosaic Consummation of the Levirates, eating an 
AminoPal® energy-bar and waiting very casually, the phone with its antenna already out 
lying ready on the arm of the chair and two folio-size Baron's SAT-prep guides and a 
spine-shot copy of the B.S. 1937 Tilden on Spin and his keys on their neck-chain lying on 
the Lindistarne carpet by his shoe, waiting in a very casual posture. Hal deliberately 
waits till the audio console's third ring, like a girl at home on Saturday night. 

'Mmyellow.' 

'The turd emergeth.' Pemulis's clear and digitally condensed voice on the line. 'Repeat. 
The turd emergeth.' 

'Please commit a crime,' is Hal Incandenza's immediate reply. 

'Gracious me,' Pemulis says into the phone tucked under his jaw, carefully de- 
Velcroing the lining of his Mr. Howell hat. 


TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA, AN 11.5-MINUTE 
DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT CARTRIDGE DIRECTED, RECORDED, EDITED, AND - 
ACCORDING TO THE ENTRY FORM - WRITTEN BY MARIO INCANDENZA, IN RECEIPT OF 
NEW-NEW-ENGLAND REGIONAL HONORABLE MENTION IN INTERLACE 
TELENTERTAINMENT'S ANNUAL 'NEW EYES, NEW VOICES' YOUNG FILMMAKERS' 
CONTEST, APRIL IN THE YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU 2007 MIMETIC-RESOLUTION- 
CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARD-EASY-TO-INSTALL UPGRADE FOR 

INFERNATRON/INTERLACE TP SYSTEMS FOR HOME, OFFICE OR MOBILE (SIC), ALMOST 
EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES 0. INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE 

Here is how to put on a big red tent of a shirt that has ETA across the chest in gray. 

Please ease carefully into your supporter and adjust the elastic straps so the straps do 
not bite into your butt and make bulged ridges in your butt that everyone can see once 
you've sweated through your shorts. 

Here is how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left 
leg feels like a log. 

Here is how to win, later. 

This is a yellow iron-mesh Ball-Hopper full of dirty green dead old balls. Take them to 
the East Courts while the dawn is still chalky and no one's around except the mourning 
doves that infest the pines at sunrise, and the air is so sopped you can see your summer 
breath. Hit serves to no one. Make a mess of balls along the base of the opposite fence 
as the sun hauls itself up over the Harbor and a thin sweat breaks and the serves start to 
boom. Stop thinking and let it flow and go boom, boom. The shiver of the ball against 
the opposite fence. Hit about a thousand serves to no one while Himself sits and advises 
with his flask. Older men's legs are white and hairless from decades in pants. Here is the 
set of keys a stride's length before you in the court as you serve dead balls to no one. 
After each serve you must almost fall forward into the court and in one smooth motion 
bend and scoop up the keys with your left hand. This is how to train yourself to follow 
through into the court after the serve. You still, years after the man's death, cannot 



keep your keys anywhere but on the floor. 

This is how to hold the stick. 

Learn to call the racquet a stick. Everyone does, here. It's a tradition: The Stick. 
Something so much an extension of you deserves a sobriquet. 

Please look. You'll be shown exactly once how to hold it. This is how to hold it. Just like 
this. Forget all the near-Eastern-slice-backhand-grip bafflegab. Just say Hello is all. Just 
shake hands with the calfskin grip of the stick. This is how to hold it. The stick is your 
friend. You will become very close. 

Grasp your friend firmly at all times. A firm grip is essential for both control and 
power. Here is how to carry a tennis ball around in your stick-hand, squeezing it over 
and over for long stretches of time — in class, on the phone, in lab, in front of the TP, a 
wet ball for the shower, ideally squeezing it at all times except during meals. See the 
Academy dining hall, where tennis balls sit beside every plate. Squeeze the tennis ball 
rhythmically month after year until you feel it no more than your heart squeezing blood 
and your right forearm is three times the size of your left and your arm looks from 
across a court like a gorilla's arm or a stevedore's arm pasted on the body of a child. 

Here is how to do extra individual drills before the Academy's A.M. drills, before 
breakfast, so that after the thousandth ball hit just out of reach by Himself, with his 
mammoth wingspan and ghastly calves, urging you with nothing but smiles on to great 
and greater demonstrations of effort, so that after you've gotten your third and final 
wind and must vomit, there is little inside to vomit and the spasms pass quickly and an 
east breeze blows cooler past you and you feel clean and can breathe. 

Here is how to don red and gray E.T.A. sweats and squad-jog a weekly 40 km. up and 
down urban Commonwealth Avenue even though you would rather set your hair on fire 
than jog in a pack. Jogging is painful and pointless, but you are not in charge. Your 
brother gets to ride shotgun while a senile German blows BBs at your legs both of them 
laughing and screaming Schnell. Enfield is due east of the Marathon's Hills of 
Heartbreak, which are just up Commonwealth past the Reservoir in Newton. Urban 
jogging in a sweaty pack is tedious. Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm 
around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of 
a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived 
up to or lost. 

Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his 
own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of 
his promise in, and didn't seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than 
his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with 
respect to talent. 

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until 
everything runs on autopilot and talent's unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape 
yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. 

The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as 
having a prodigious talent to live up to. 

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy. Here is how to handle being seeded at 
tournaments, signifying that seeding committees composed of old big-armed men 



publicly expect you to reach a certain round. Reaching at least the round you're 
supposed to is known at tournaments as 'justifying your seed.' By repeating this term 
over and over, perhaps in the same rhythm at which you squeeze a ball, you can reduce 
it to an empty series of phonemes, just formants and fricatives, trochaically stressed, 
signifying zip. 

Here is how to beat unseeded, wide-eyed opponents from Iowa or Rhode Island in the 
early rounds of tournaments without expending much energy but also without seeming 
contemptuous. 

This is how to play with personal integrity in a tournament's early rounds, when there 
is no umpire. Any ball that lands on your side and is too close to call: call it fair. Here is 
how to be invulnerable to gamesmanship. To keep your attention's aperture tight. Here 
is how to teach yourself, when an opponent maybe cheats on the line-calls, to remind 
yourself that what goes around comes around. That a poor sport's punishment is always 
self-inflicted. 

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you. 

Here is how to spray yourself down exactly once with Lemon Pledge, the ultimate 
sunscreen, then discover that when you go out and sweat into it it smells like close- 
order skunk. 

Here is how to take nonnarcotic muscle relaxants for the back spasms that come from 
thousands of serves to no one. 

Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt 
every minute. 

This is the whirlpool, a friend. 

Here is how to set up the electric ball machine at dawn on the days Himself is away 
living up to what will be his final talent. 

Here is how to tie a bow tie. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's 
first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so 
pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them. 
Pretend you're engaged by the jagged angles and multiple exposures without 
pretending you have the slightest idea what's going on. Assume your brother's 
expression. 

Here is how to sweat. 

Here is how to hand a trophy to Lateral Alice Moore to put in the E.T.A. lobby's glass 
case under its system of spotlights and small signs. 

What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher. 

Here is how to pack carbohydrates into your tissues for a four-singles two-doubles 
match day in a Florida June. 

Please learn to sleep with perpetual sunburn. 

Expect some rough dreams. They come with the territory. Try to accept them. Let 
them teach you. 

Keep a flashlight by your bed. It helps with the dreams. 

Please make no extramural friends. Discourage advances from outside the circuit. Turn 
down dates. 

If you do exactly the rehabilitative exercises They assign you, no matter how silly and 



tedious, the ankle will mend more quickly. 

This type of stretch helps prevent the groin-pull. 

Treat your knees and elbow with all reasonable care: you will have them with you for 
a long time. 

Here is how to turn down an extramural date so you won't be asked again. Say 
something like I'm terribly sorry I can't come out to see 8 1/2 revived on a wall-size 
Cambridge Celluloid Festival viewer on Friday, Kimberly, or Daphne, but you see if I 
jump rope for two hours then jog backwards through Newton till I puke They'll let me 
watch match-cartridges and then my mother will read aloud to me from the O.E.D. until 
2200 lights-out, and c.; so you can be sure that henceforth Daphne/Kimberly/Jennifer 
will take her adolescent-mating-dance-type-ritual-socialization business somewhere 
else. Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. Be 
constantly focused and on alert: feral talent is its own set of expectations and can 
abandon you at any one of the detours of so-called normal American life at any time, so 
be on guard. 

Here is how to schnell. 

Here is how to go through your normal adolescent growth spurt and have every limb 
in your body ache like a migraine because selected groups of muscles have been worked 
until thick and intensile and they resist as the sudden growth of bone tries to stretch 
them, and they ache all the time. There is medication for this condition. 

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: 
be no one. 

It is easier than you think. 

Here is how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way 
Himself read scholars' reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and 
not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you 
are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone 
where you are. 

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please 
learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really 
invoke. 

This can be tricky. 

Here is how to get free sticks and strings and clothes and gear from Dunlop, Inc. as 
long as you let them spraypaint the distinctive Dunlop logo on your sticks' strings and 
sew logos on your shoulder and the left pocket of your shorts and use a Dunlop gear- 
bag, and you become a walking lunging sweating advertisement for Dunlop, Inc.; this is 
all as long as you keep justifying your seed and preserving your rank; the Dunlop, Inc. 
New New England Regional Athletic Rep will address you as 'Our gray swan'; he wears 
designer slacks and choking cologne and about twice a year wants to help you dress and 
has to be slapped like a gnat. 

Be a Student of the Game. Like most cliches of sport, this is profound. You can be 
shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. 
Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle or 
blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the cir- 



cuit. E.T.A. peers waiting for deLint to knock quietly at their door and ask to chat. 
Opponents. It's all educational. How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a 
function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be 
mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the 
whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are 
especially scary. 

See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To 
accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from 
yourself what you hope will not return. 

This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always. 

On this issue there is no counsel; you must make your best guess. For myself, I do not 
expect ever really to know. 

But in the interval, if it is an interval: here is Motrin for your joints, Noxzema for your 
burn. Lemon Pledge if you prefer nausea to burn, Contracol for your back, benzoin for 
your hands, Epsom salts and anti-inflammatories for your ankle, and extracurriculars for 
your folks, who just wanted to make sure you didn't miss anything they got. 


SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS OF THE RESIDENT-INTERFACE-DROP-IN-HOURS OF MS. 
PATRICIA MONTESIAN, M.A., C.S.A.C., 58 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND 
ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE (SIC), ENFIELD MA, 1300-1500H., WEDNESDAY, 4 
NOVEMBER - YEAR OFTHE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 

'But there's this way he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. 
More like in-way between drumming and like this scratching , picking , the way you see 
somebody picking at dead skin. And without any kind of rhythm, see, constant and 
never-stopping but with no kind of rhythm you could grab onto and follow and stand. 
Totally like whacked, insane. Like the kind of sounds you can imagine a girl hears in her 
head right before she kills her whole family because somebody took the last bit of 
peanut butter or something. You know what I'm saying? The sound of a fucking mind 
coming apart. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he 
wouldn't quit with the drumming at supper I sort of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I 
could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to 
get the fork out, though. Let me just say I'm ready to make amends at like anytime. For 
my part in it. I'm owning my part in it is what I'm saying. Can I ask am I going to get 
Restricted for this? Cause I have this Overnight tomorrow that Gene he approved 
already in the Overnight Log. If you want to look. But I'm not trying to get out of owning 
my part of the, like, occurrence. If my Higher Power who I choose to call God works 
through you saying I've got some kind of a punishment due, I won't try to get out of a 
punishment. If I've got one due. I just wanted to ask. Did I mention I'm grateful to be 
here?' 

'I'm not denying anything. I'm simply asking you to define "alcoholic." How can you ask 
me to attribute to myself a given term if you refuse to define the term's meaning? I've 
been a reasonably successful personal-injury attorney for sixteen years, and except for 
that one ridiculous so-called seizure at the Bar Association dinner this spring and that 



clot of a judge banning me from his courtroom — and let me just say that I can support 
my contention that the man masturbates under his robe behind the bench with detailed 
corroboration from both colleagues and Circuit Court laundry personnel — with the 
exception of less than a handful of incidents I've held my liquor and my head as high as 
many a taller advocate. Believe you me. How old are you, young lady? I am not in denial 
so to speak about anything empirical and objective. Am I having pancreas problems? 
Yes. Do I have trouble recalling certain intervals in the Kemp and Limbaugh administra¬ 
tions? No contest. Is there a spot of domestic turbulence surrounding my intake? Why 
yes there is. Did I experience yes some formication in detox? I did. I have no problem 
forthrightly admitting things I can grasp. Formicate, with an m, yes. But what is this you 
demand I admit? Is it denial to delay signature until the vocabulary of the contract is 
clear to all parties so bound? Yes, yes, you don't follow what I mean here, good! And 
you're reluctant to proceed without clarification. I rest. I cannot deny what I don't 
understand. This is my position.' 

'So I'm sitting there waiting for my meatloaf to cool and suddenly there's a simply 
sphincter-loosening shriek and here's Nell in the air with a steak-fork, positively aloft, 
leaping across the table, in flight, horizontal, I mean Pat the girl's body is literally parallel 
to the surface of the table, hurling herself at me, with this upraised fork, shrieking 
something about the sound of peanut butter. I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to 
pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both. To give you an idea. Of the savagery. 
Don't even ask me about the pain. Let's don't even get into that, I assure you. They 
offered me Percocet 59 at the emergency room, is all I'll say about the levels of pain 
involved. I told them I was in recovery and powerless over narcotics of any sort. Please 
don't even ask me how moved they were at my courage if you don't want me to get 
weepy. This whole experience has me right on the edge of a complete hysterical fit. So 
but yes, guilty, I may very well have been tapping on the table. Excuse me for occupying 
space. And then she ever so magnaminously says she'll apologize if I will. Well come 
again I said? Come again? I mean my God. I'm sitting there attached to the table by 
tines. I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist. I 
respectfully ask that she be kicked out of here on her enormous rear-end. Let her go 
back to whatever fork-wielding district she came from, with her Hefty bag full of gauche 
clothes. Honestly. I know part of this process is learning to live in a community. The give 
and take, to let go of personality issues, turn them over. Et cetera. But is it not also 
supposed to be and here I quote the handbook a safe and nurturing environment? I 
have seldom felt less nurtured than I did impaled on that table I have to say. The 
pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough. I can get bashed back at 
the Fenway. I did not come here to get bashed on some pretense of table-tapping. I'm 
dangerously close to saying either that... that specimen goes or I do.' 

'I'm awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any 
special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.' 

'I want understanding I have no denial I am drug addict. Me, I know that I am addicted 
since the period of before Miami. I am no trouble to stand up in the meetings and say I 
am Alfonso, I am drug addict, powerless. I am knowing powerlessness since the period 
of Castro. But I cannot stop even since I know. This I have fear. I fear I do not stop when 



I admit I am Alfonso, powerless. How does to admit I am powerless make me stop what 
the thing is I am powerless to stop? My head it is crazy from this fearing of no power. I 
am now hope for power, Mrs. Pat. I want to advice. Is hope of power the bad way for 
Alfonso as drug addict?' 

'Sorry to barge, there, P.M. Division called again about the thing with the vermin. The 
word was ultimatum that they said.' 

'Sorry if I'm bothering you about something that isn't a straightforward treatment 
interface thing. I'm up there trying to do my Chore. I've got the men's upstairs 
bathroom. There's something... Pat there's something in the toilet up there. That won't 
flush. The thing. It won't go away. It keeps reappearing. Flush after flush. I'm only here 
for instructions. Possibly also protective equipment. I couldn't even describe the thing in 
the toilet. All I can say is if it was produced by anything human then I have to say I'm 
really worried. Don't even ask me to describe it. If you want to go up and have a look. 
I'm a 100% confident it's still there. It's made it real clear it's not going anywhere.' 

'Alls I know is I put a Hunt's Pudding Cup in the resident fridge like I'm supposed to at 
1300 and da-da-da and at 1430 I come down all primed for pudding that I paid for 
myself and it's not there and McDade comes on all concerned and offers to help me 
look for it and da-da, except if you look I look and here's the son of a whore got this big 
thing of pudding on his chin.' 

'Yeah but except so how can I answer just yes or no to do I want to stop the coke? Do I 
think I want to absolutely I think I want to. I don't have a septum no more. My septum's 
been like fucking dissolved by coke. See? You see anything like a septum when I lift up 
like that? I've absolutely with my whole heart thought I wanted to stop and so forth. 
Ever since with the septum. So but so since I've been wanting to stop this whole time, 
why couldn't I stop? See what I'm saying? Isn't it all about wanting to and so on? And so 
forth? How can living here and going to meetings and all do anything except make me 
want to stop? But I think I already want to stop. How come I'd even be here if I didn't 
want to stop? Isn't being here proof I want to stop? But then so how come I can't stop, if 
I want to stop, is the thing.' 

'This kid had a harelip. Where it goes like, you know, thith. But his went way up. 
Further up. He sold bad speed but good pot. He said he'd cover our part of the rent if we 
kept his snakes supplied with mice. We were smoking up all our cash so what's to do. 
They ate mice. We had to go into pet stores and pretend to be real heavily into mice. 
Snakes. He kept snakes. Doocy. They smelled bad. He never cleaned the tanks. His lip 
covered his nose. The harelip. My guess he couldn't smell what they smelled like. Or 
something would have got done. He had a thing for Mildred. My girlfriend. I don't know. 
She probably has a problem too. I don't know. He had a thing for her. He'd keep saying 
shit like, with all these t-h's, he'd go Tho you want to fuck me, Mildred, or what? We 
don't hath t'eat each other or nothin. He'd say shit like this with me right there, 
dropping mice into these tanks, holding my breath. The mice had to be alive. All in this 
godawful voice like somebody's holding their nose and can't say 5. He didn't wash his 
hair for two years. We had like an in-joke on how long he wouldn't wash his hair and 
we'd make X's on the calendar every week. We had a lot of these in-type jokes, to help 
us stand it. We were wasted I'd say 90% of the time. Nine-0. 



But he never did the whole time we were there. Wash. When she said we had to leave 
or she was taking off and taking Harriet was when she said when I was at work he 
started telling her how to have sex with a chicken. He said he had sex with the chickens. 
It was a trailer out past the dumpster-dock in the Spur, and he kept a couple chickens 
under it. No wonder they ran like hell when anybody came. He'd been like sexually 
abusing fowls. He kept talking to her about it, with all t-h's, like You hath to like thcrew 
them on, but when you come they jutht thort of fly off of you. She said she drew the 
line. We left and went to Pine Street shelter and she stayed for a while till this guy with 
a hat said he had a ranch in New Jersey and off she goes, and with Harriet. Harriet's our 
daughter. She's going to be three. She says it free, though. I doubt now the kid'll ever 
say a single t-h her whole life. And I don't even know where in New Jersey. Does New 
Jersey even have ranches? I'd been in school with her since grade school. Mildred. We 
were like childhood sweethearts. And then this guy who got her old cot at the shelter I 
got lice from. He moves into her cot and then I start to get lice. I was still trying to 
deliver ice to machines at gas stations. Who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it?' 

'So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer? I 
have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone being told to pray for relief from cancer. 
Outside maybe certain very rural parts of the American South, that is. So what is this? 
You're ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and 
career and enter nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I'm prescribed 
prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don't know 
about? What exactly is the story here?' 

'Fine, fine. Fine. Just completely fine. No problem at all. Happy to be here. Feeling 
better. Sleeping better. Love the chow. In a word, couldn't be finer. The grinding? The 
tooth-grinding? A tic. A jaw-strengthener. Expression of all-around fineness. Likewise 
the thing with the eyelid.' 

'But I did too try. I been trying all month. I been on four interviews. They didn't none 
of them start till 11, and I'm like what's the point get up early sit around here I don't 
have to be down there till 11 ? I filled out applications everday. Where'm I suppose to 
go? You can't kick me out just for the moth— they don't call me back if I'm trying. Snot 
my fault. Go on and ask Clenette. Ask that Thrale girl and them if I ain't been trying. You 
can't. This is just so fucked up. 

'I said where'm I suppose to go to?' 

'I'm on a month's Full-House Restriction for using freaking mouth wash? Newsflash: 
news bulletin: mouthwash is for spitting out! It's like 2% proof!' 

'It's about somebody else's farting, why I'm here.' 

'I'll gladly identify myself if you'll first simply explain what it is I'm identifying myself as. 
This is my position. You're requiring me to attest to facts I do not possess. The term for 
this is "duress."' 

'So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?' Til come back when you're free.' 

'It's back. For a second there I hoped. I had hope. Then there it was again.' 

'First just let me say one thing.' 



LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


'Open me anothowone of those boy and I'll tell you the highlight of that season of my 
season tickets was I got to see that incwedible son of a bitch set his fiwst wecord in the 
flesh. It was y'bwother's Cub Scout twoop outing you wouldn't join because I 
wemember this you w'afwaid you'd lose the online time in fwont of the TP. 
Wemember? Well I'll always wemember this one day, boy. It was against Sywacuse, 
what, eight seasons back. The little son of a bitch had a long of seventy-thwee that day 
and a avewage of sixty-fwigging-nine. Seventy-thwee for Chwist's sake. Open me 
anothowone, boy, use the exowcise. I wecall the sky was cloudy. When he punted you 
spent a weal long time studying the sky. They weally hung. He had a long hang-time of 
eight-point-thwee seconds that day. That's sewious hanging, boy. Me I nevewit five in 
my day. Chwist. The whole twoop said they never heawd anything like the sound of the 
son of a bitch's seventy-thwee. Won Wichardson, you wemember Wonnie, the twoop- 
leadawhateva, petwoleum jelly salesman outta Bwookline, Wonnie's a wetired pilot 
from the Sewvice, from a bomma-squadwon, Wonnie we's down at t'pub that night 
Wonnie says he says that seventy-thwee sounded just like fucking bombs sounded, that 
kind of cwacking WHUMP, when they hit, to the boys in the squadwon in the planes 
when they let them go.' 

The radio show right before Madame Psychosis's midnight show on M.I.T.'s semi¬ 
underground WYYY is 'Those Were the Legends That Formerly Were,' one of those cruel 
tech-collegiate formats where any U.S. student who wants to can dart over from the 
super-collider lab or the Fourier Transforms study group for fifteen minutes and read 
on-air some parodic thing where he'd pretend to be his own dad apotheosizing some 
sort of thick-necked historic athletic figure the dad'd admired and had by implication 
compared with woeful distaste to the pencil-necked big-headed asthmatic little kid 
staring up through Coke-bottle lenses from his digital keyboard. The show's only rule is 
that you have to read your thing in the voice of some really silly cartoon character. 
There are other, rather more exotic patricidal formats for Asian, Latin, Arab, and 
European students on select weekend evenings. The consensus is Asian cartoon 
characters have the silliest voices. 

Albeit literally sophomoric, 'Those Were the Legends...' is a useful drama-therapy-type 
catharsis-op — M.l.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars: nerd, geek, 
dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless, dick-nose, 
pencil-neck; getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist's kill-jar broken over your 
large head by thick-necked kids on the playground — and the show pulls down solid FM 
ratings, though a lot of that's due to reverse-inertia, a Newton's-lll-like backward shove 
from the rabidly popular Madame Psychosis Hour, M-F OOOOh.-OlOOh., which it 



precedes. 

Y.D.A.U.'s WYYY late-shift student engineer, unfond of any elevator that follows a 
serpentine or vascular path, eschews the M.l.T. Student Union's elevator. He has an 
arrival routine where he skips the front entrances and comes in through the south side's 
acoustic meatus and gets a Millennial Fizzy® out of the vending machine in the 
sephenoid sinus, then descends creaky back wooden stairs from the Massa Intermedia's 
Reading Room down to about the Infundibular Recess, past the Tech Talk Daily CD-ROM 
student paper's production floor and the sick chemical smell of the Read-Only cartridge- 
press's developer, down past the epiglottal Hillel Club's dark and star-doored HQ, past 
the heavier door to the tiled lattice of hallways to the squash and racquetball courts and 
one volleyball court and the airy corpus callosum of 24 high-ceiling tennis courts 
endowed by an M.l.T. alum and now so little used they don't even know now where the 
nets are, down three more levels to the ghostly-clean and lithium-lit studios of FM 109- 
WYYY FM, broadcasting for the M.l.T. community and selected points beyond. The 
studio's walls are pink and laryngeally fissured. His asthma's better down here, the air 
thin and keen, the tracheal air-filters just below the flooring and the ventilators' air the 
freshest in the Union. 

The engineer, a work-study graduate student with bad lungs and occluded pores, 
settles alone at his panel in the engineer's booth, adjusts a couple needles' bob, and 
sound-checks the only paid personality on the nightly docket, the darkly revered 
Madame Psychosis, whose cameo shadow is just visible outside the booth's thick glass, 
her screen half-obscuring the on-air studio's bank of phones, checking cueing and transi¬ 
tion for the Thursday edition. She is hidden from all view by a jointed triptych screen of 
cream chiffon that glows red and green in the lights of the phone bank and the cueing 
panel's dials and frames her silhouette. Her silhouette is cleanly limned against the 
screen, sitting cross-legged in its insectile microphonic headset, smoking. The engineer 
always has to tighten his own headset's cranial band down from the 'Those Were' 
engineer's mammoth parietal breadth. He activates the intercom and offers to check 
Madame Psychosis's levels. He requests sound. Anything at all. He hasn't opened his can 
of pop. There is a long silence during which Madame Psychosis's silhouette doesn't look 
up from something she looks like she's collating at her little desk. 

After a while she makes some little sounds, little plosives to check for roaring sounds 
in exhalations, a perennial problem in low-budget FM. 

She makes a long s-sound. 

The student engineer takes a hit from his portable inhaler. 

She says 'He liked that sort of dreamy, dreaming music that had the rhythm of long 
things swinging.' 

The engineer's movements at the panel's dials resemble someone adjusting the heater 
and sound system while driving. 

'The Dow that can be told is not the eternal Dow,' she says. 

The engineer, age twenty-three, has extremely bad skin. 

'Attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object:' 

The windowless laryngeal studio is terribly bright. Nothing casts a shadow. Recessed- 
lit fluorescence with a dual-spectrum lithiumized corona, developed two buildings over 



and awaiting O.N.A.N. patent. The chilly shadowless light of surgical theaters, 
convenience stores at 0400. The pink wrinkled walls sometimes look more gynecological 
than anything else. 

'Like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and 
compromise.' 

The engineer shivers in the bright chill and lights a gasper of his own and tells Madame 
Psychosis through the intercom that the whole range of levels is fine. Madame Psychosis 
is the only WYYY personality who brings in her own headset and jacks, plus a triptych 
screen. Over the screen's left section are four clocks set for different Zones, plus a 
numberless disk someone hung for a joke, to designate the annularized Great 
Concavity's No-Time. The E.S.T. clock's trackable hand carves off the last few seconds 
from the five minutes of dead air Madame Psychosis's contract stipulates gets to 
precede her show. You can see her silhouette putting out the cigarette very methodi¬ 
cally. She cues tonight's synthesized bumper and theme music; the engineer flicks a 
lever and pumps the music up the coaxial medulla and through the amps and boosters 
packed into the crawlspaces above the high false ceiling of the corpus callosum's idle 
tennis courts and up and out the aerial that protrudes from the gray and bulbous 
surface of the Union's roof. Institutional design has come a ways from I. M. Pei. M.I.T.'s 
near-new Student Union, off the corner of Ames and Memorial Dr., 60 East Cambridge, is 
one enormous cerebral cortex of reinforced concrete and polymer compounds. 
Madame Psychosis is smoking again, listening, head cocked. Her tall screen will leak 
smoke for her show's whole hour. The student engineer is counting down from five on 
an outstretched hand he can't see how she sees. And as pinkie meets palm, she says 
what she's said for three years of midnights, an opening bit that Mario Incandenza, the 
least cynical person in the history of Enfield MA, across the river, listening faithfully, 
finds, for all its black cynicism, terribly compelling: 

Her silhouette leans and says 'And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void. 

'And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. 

'And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.' 

A toneless male voice is then cued in to say It's Sixty Minutes More Or Less With 
Madame Psychosis On YYY-109, Largest Whole Prime On The FM Band. The different 
sounds are encoded and pumped by the student engineer up through the building's 
corpus and out the roof's aerial. This aerial, low-watt, has been rigged by the station's 
EM-wienies to tilt and spin, not unlike a centrifugal theme-park-type ride, spraying the 
signal in all directions. Since the B.S. 1966 Hundt Act, the low-watt fringes of the FM 
band are the only part of the Wireless Spectrum still licensed for public broadcast. The 
deep-water green of FM tuners all over the campus's labs and dorms and barnacled 
clots of grad apartments align themselves slowly toward the spatter's center, moving 
toward the dial's right, a little creepily, like plants toward light they can't even see. 
Ratings are minor-league by the pre-InterLace broadcast standards of yore, but they are 
rock-solid consistent. Audience demand for Madame Psychosis has been, from the very 
start, inelastic. The aerial, inclined at about the angle of a 3-km. cannon, spins in a 
blurred ellipse — its rotary base is elliptical because that's the only shape the EM- 
wienies could rig a mold for. Obstructed on all sides by the tall buildings of East 



Cambridge and Commercial Drive and serious Downtown, though, only a couple thin 
pie-slices of signal escape M.l.T. proper, e.g. through the P.E.-Dept. gap of barely used 
lacrosse and soccer fields between the Philology and Low-Temp Physics complexes on 
Mem. Dr. and then across the florid-purple nighttime breadth of the historic Charles 
River, then through the heavy flow of traffic on Storrow Dr. on the Chuck's other side, so 
that by the time the signal laps at upper Brighton and Enfield you need almost 
surveillance-grade antennation to filter it in out of the EM-miasma of cellular and 
interconsole phone transmissions and TPs' EM-auras that crowd the FM fringes from 
every side. Unless, that is, your tuner is lucky enough to be located at the apex of a tall 
and more or less denuded hill, in Enfield, in which case you find yourself right in YYY's 
centrifugal line of fire. 

Madame Psychosis eschews chatty openings and contextual filler. Her hour is compact 
and no-nonsense. 

After the music fades, her shadow holds collated sheets up and riffles them slightly so 
the sound of paper is broadcast. 'Obesity,' she says. 'Obesity with hypogonadism. Also 
morbid obesity. Nodular leprosy with leonine fades.' The engineer can see her 
silhouette lift a cup as she pauses, which reminds him of the Millennial Fizzy in his 
bookbag. 

She says 'The acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. The enuretic, this year of all years. 
The spasmodically torticollic.' 

The student engineer, a pre-doctoral transuranial metallurgist working off massive 
G.S.L. debt, locks the levels and fills out the left side of his time sheet and ascends with 
his bookbag through a treillage of interneural stairways with Semitic ideograms and 
developer-smell and past snack bar and billiard hall and modem-banks and extensive 
Student Counseling offices around the rostral lamina, all the little-used many-staired 
neuroform way up to the artery-red fire door of the Union's rooftop, leaving Madame 
Psychosis, as is S.O.P., alone with her show and screen in the shadowless chill. She's 
mostly alone in there when she's on-air. Every so often there's a guest, but the guest 
will usually get introduced and then not say anything. The monologues seem both free- 
associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares. There's no telling what'll 
be up on a given night. If there's one even remotely consistent theme it's maybe film 
and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) 
expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and 
Dali/ Bunuel and -down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni's slower stuff 
and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for 
the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for 
goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of 
Fellini's 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and 
apres-garde digital cartridges, anticonfluential cinema, 61 Brutalism, Found Drama, etc. 
Also highly literate on U.S. sports, football in particular, which fact the student engineer 
finds dissonant. Madame takes one phone call per show, at random. Mostly she solos. 
The show kind of flies itself. She could do it in her sleep, behind the screen. Sometimes 
she seems very sad. The engineer likes to monitor the broadcast from a height, the 
Union's rooftop, summer sun and winter wind. The more correct term for an asthmatic's 



inhaler is 'nebulizer.' The engineer's graduate research specialty is the carbonated 
translithium particles created and destroyed billions of times a second in the core of a 
cold-fusion ring. Most of the lithioids can't be smashed or studied and exist mostly to 
explain gaps and incongruities in annulation equations. Once last year, Madame 
Psychosis had the student engineer write out the home-lab process for turning uranium 
oxide powder into good old fissionable U-235. Then she read it on the air between a 
Baraka poem and a critique of the Steeler defense's double-slot secondary. It's 
something a bright high-schooler could cook and took less than three minutes to read 
on-air and didn't involve one classified procedure or one piece of hardware not gettable 
from any decent chemical-supply outlet in Boston, but there was no small 
unpleasantness about it from the M.l.T. administration, which it's well-known M.l.T. is in 
bed with Defense. The hot-fuel recipe was the one bit of verbal intercourse the 
engineer's had with Madame Psychosis that didn't involve straight levels and cues. 

The Union's soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy pia-mater pink 
except in spots where it's eroded down to pasty gray, and everywhere textured, the 
bulging rooftop, with sulci and bulbous convolutions. From the air it looks wrinkled; 
from the roof's fire door it's an almost nauseous system of serpentine trenches, like 
water-slides in hell. The Union itself, the late A.Y. ('V.F.') Rickey's summum opus, is a 
great hollow brain-frame, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of Very 
High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be, though the 
vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and hung by twined blue cords from the 
second floor's optic chiasmae to flank the wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of 
getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use 
the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of 
the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there's 
not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of 
skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior 
frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus — a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, 
demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept, over the heated pro-mimetic protests of 
topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept, (which the M.l.T. administration, 
trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin 
injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, 
so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura) — which 
balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved 
cerebrum's edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, 
from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend 
down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the 
polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old 
oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero. 

Topside in the bitter river wind, wearing a khaki parka with a fake fur fringe, the 
student engineer makes his way and settles into the first intra-parietal sulcus that 
catches his fancy, makes a kind of nest in the soft trench — the convoluted latex is filled 
with those little non-FFIC Styrofoam peanuts everything industrially soft is filled with, 
and the pia-mater surface gives rather like one of those old bean bag-chairs of more 



innocent times — settles in and back with his Millennial Fizzy and inhaler and cigarette 
and pocket-size Heathkit digital FM-band receiver under a high-CO night sky that makes 
the stars' points look extra sharp. The Boston P.M. is 10°C. The postcentral sulcus he sits 
in is just outside the circumference of the YYY aerial's high-speed spin, so five m. 
overhead its tip's aircraft-light describes a blurred oval, vascularly hued. His FM 
receiver's power cells, tested daily against the Low-Temp Lab's mercuric resistors, are 
fresh, the wooferless tuner's sound tinny and crisp, so that Madame sounds like a 
faithful but radically miniaturized copy of her studio self. 

'Those with saddle-noses. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math 
majors also those with atrophic necks. Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the 
serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The tabescent 
and chachetic and anorexic. The Brag's-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The 
dermally wine-stained or carbuncular or steatocryptotic or God forbid all three. Marin- 
Amat Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The exzematically shunned. 
And the scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of 
Pityriasis Rosea. It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.' 

The pulsing aircraft-alert light of the aerial is magenta, a sharp and much closer star, 
now, with his fingers laced behind his head, reclined and gazing upward, listening, the 
centrifugal whirl's speed making its tip's light trail color across the eyes. The light's oval 
a bloody halo over the very barest of all possible heads. Madame Psychosis has done 
U.H.I.D. stuff before, once or twice. He is listening to her read four levels below the 
Oblangated Recess that becomes the heating shaft's nubbin of spine, ad-lib-style 
reading from one of the PR-circulars of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably 
Deformed, an agnostic-style 12-step support-group deal for what it calls the 
'aesthetically challenged.' 62 She sometimes reads circulars and catalogues and PR-type 
things, though not regularly. Some things take several successive shows to get through. 
Ratings stay solid; listeners hang in. The engineer's pretty sure he'd hang in even if he 
weren't paid to. He does like to settle into a sulcus and smoke slowly and exhale up past 
the blurred red ellipse of the aerial, monitoring. Madame's themes are at once 
unpredictable and somehow rhythmic, more like probability-waves for subhadronics 
than anything else. 63 The student engineer has never once seen Madame Psychosis 
enter or leave WYYY; she probably takes the elevator. It's 22 October in the O.N.A.N.ite 
year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. 


Like most marriages, Avril and the late James Incandenza's was an evolved product of 
concordance and compromise, and the scholastic curriculum at E.T.A. is the product of 
negotiated compromises between Avril's academic hard-assery and James's and Schtitt's 
keen sense of athletic pragmatics. It is because of Avril — who quit M.l.T. entirely and 
went down to half-time at Brandeis and even turned down an extremely plummy-type 
stipended fellowship at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute that first year to design and assume 
the helm of E.T.A.'s curriculum — that the Enfield Tennis Academy is the only athletic- 
focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium of 
the hard-ass classical L.A.S. tradition, 64 and thus one of the very few extant sports 



academies that makes a real stab at being a genuine pre-college school and not just an 
Iron Curtainish jock-factory. But Schtitt never let Incandenza forget what the place was 
supposed to be about, and so Avril's flinty mens-sana pedagogy wasn't diluted so much 
as ad-valoremized, pragmatically focused toward the corpore-potis -type goals kids were 
coming up the hill to give their childhoods for. Some E.T.A. twists Avril'd allowed into 
the classic L.A.S. path are e.g. that the seven subjects of the T and Q. are mixed and not 
divided into Quadrivial Upper-class v. Trivial Ephebic; that E.T.A. geometry classes pretty 
much ignore the study of closed figures (excepting rectangles) to concentrate (also 
except for Thorp's Trigonometry of Cubes, which is elective and mostly aesthetic) for 
two increasingly brutal semesters on the involution and expansion of bare angles; that 
the quadrivial requirement of astronomy has at E.T.A. become a two-term elementary 
optics survey, since vision issues are obviously more germane to the Game, and since all 
the hardware required for everything from aphotic to apochromatic lens work were and 
are right there in the lab off the Comm.-Ad. tunnel. Music's been pretty much bagged. 
Plus the triviumoid fetish for classical oratory has by now at E.T.A. been converted to a 
wide range of history and studio courses in various types of entertainment, mostly 
recorded film — again, way too much of Incandenza's lavish equipment lying around not 
to exploit, plus the legally willed and endowed-for-perpetuity presence on the academic 
payroll of Mrs. Pricket, Mr. Ogilvie, Mr. Disney R. Leith, and Ms. Soma Richardson-Levy- 
O'Byrne-Chawaf, the late founder/director's loyal sound engineer. Best Boy, production 
assistant, and third-favorite actress, respectively. 

Plus also the six-term Entertainment Requirement because students hoping to prepare 
for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers, 
albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza's line, one of the few philosophical 
points he had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt, who was 
pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant. 

Mario Incandenza has sat in on a back-row stool for every session of an E.T.A. 
Entertainment Dept, offering ever since he was finally three years ago December asked 
to disenroll from the Winter Hill Special School in Cambridgeport for cheerfully declining 
even to try to learn to really read, explaining he'd way rather listen and watch. And he is 
a fanatical listener/ observer. He treats the lavish Tatsuoka fringe-FM-band tuner in the 
living room of the Headmaster's House like kids of three generations past, listening the 
way other kids watch TP, opting for mono and sitting right up close to one of the 
speakers with his head cocked dog-like, listening, staring into that special pocket of 
near-middle distance reserved for the serious listener. He really does have to sit right up 
close to listen to 'Sixty Minutes +/- ...' when he's over at the HmH 65 with C.T. and 
sometimes Hal at his mother's late suppers, because Avril has some auditory thing 
about broadcast sound and gets the howling fantods from any voice that does not exit a 
living corporeal head, and though Avril's made it clear that Mario's free at any time to 
activate and align the Tatsuoka's ghostly-green tuner to whatever he wishes, he keeps 
the volume so low that he has to be lowered onto a low coffee table and lean in and 
almost put his ear up against the woofer's tremble and concentrate closely to hear YYY's 
signal over the conversation in the dining room, which tends to get sort of manically 
high-pitched toward the end of supper. Avril never actually asks Mario to keep it down; 



he does it out of unspoken consideration for her thing about sound. Another of her 
unspoken but stressful things involves issues of enclosure, and the HmH has no interior 
doors between rooms, and not even much in the way of walls, and the living and dining 
rooms are separated only by a vast multileveled tangle of house-plants in pots and on 
little stools of different heights and arrayed under hanging UV lamps of an intensity that 
tends to give the diners strange little patterns of tan that differ according to where 
someone usually sits at the table. Hal sometimes complains privately to Mario that he 
gets more than enough UV during the day thank you very much. The plants are 
incredibly lush and hale and sometimes threaten to block off the whole easement from 
dining to living room, and the rope-handled Brazilian machete C.T. had mounted on the 
wall by the tremulous china-case has stopped really being a joke. The Moms calls the 
houseplants her Green Babies, and she has a rather spectacular thumb, plant-wise, for a 
Canadian. 

'The leukodermatic. The xanthodantic. The maxillofacially swollen. Those with 
distorted orbits of all kinds. Get out from under the sun's cove-lighting is what this says. 
Come in from the spectral rain.' Madame Psychosis's broadcast accent is not Boston. 
There are r's, for one thing, and there is no cultured Cambridge stutter. It's the accent of 
someone who's spent time either losing a southern lilt or cultivating one. It's not flat 
and twangy like Stice's, and it's not a drawl like the people at Gainesville's academy. Her 
voice itself is sparely modulated and strangely empty, as if she were speaking from 
inside a small box. It's not bored or laconic or ironic or tongue-in-cheek. 'The basilisk- 
breathed and pyorrheic.' It's reflective but not judgmental, somehow. Her voice seems 
low-depth familiar to Mario the way certain childhood smells will strike you as familiar 
and oddly sad. 'All ye peronic or teratoidal. The phrenologically malformed. The 
suppuratively lesioned. The endocrinologically malodorous of whatever ilk. Run don't 
walk on down. The acervulus-nosed. The radically -ectomied. The morbidly diaphoretic 
with a hankie in every pocket. The chronically granulomatous. The ones it says here the 
ones the cruel call Two-Baggers — one bag for your head, one bag for the observer's 
head in case your bag falls off. The hated and dateless and shunned, who keep to the 
shadows. Those who undress only in front of their pets. The quote aesthetically 
challenged. Leave your lazarettes and oubliettes. I'm reading this right here, your closets 
and cellars and TP Tableaux, find Nurturing and Support and the Inner Resources to face 
your own unblinking sight, is what this goes on to say, a bit overheatedly maybe. Is it our 
place to say. It says here Hugs Not Ughs. It says Come don the veil of the type and token. 
Come learn to love what's hidden inside. To hold and cherish. The almost unbelievably 
thick-ankled. The kyphotic and lordotic. The irremediably cellulitic. It says Progress Not 
Perfection. It says Never Perfection. The fatally pulchritudinous: Welcome. The 
Actaeonizing, side by side with the Medusoid. The papuled, the macular, the albinic. 
Medusas and odalisques both: Come find common ground. All meeting rooms 
windowless. That's in ital: all meeting rooms windowless.' Plus the music she's cued for 
this inflectionless reading is weirdly compelling. You can never predict what it will be, 
but over time some kind of pattern emerges, a trend or rhythm. Tonight's background 
fits, somehow, as she reads. There's not any real forwardness to it. You don't sense it's 
straining to get anywhere. The thing it makes you see as she reads is something heavy 



swinging slowly at the end of a long rope. It's minor-key enough to be eerie against the 
empty lilt of the voice and the clinks of tines and china as Mario's relations eat turkey 
salad and steamed crosiers and drink lager and milk and vin blanc from Hull over behind 
the plants bathed in purple light. Mario can see the back of the Moms's head high above 
the table, and then over to the left Hal's bigger right arm, and then Hal's profile when he 
lowers it to eat. There's a ball by his plate. The E.T.A. players seem to need to eat six or 
seven times a day. Hal and Mario had walked over for 2100 supper at HmH after Hal had 
read something for Mr. Leith's class and then disappeared for about half an hour while 
Mario stood supported by his police lock and waited for him. Mario rubs his nose with 
the heel of his hand. Madame Psychosis has an unironic but generally gloomy outlook 
on the universe in general. One of the reasons Mario's obsessed with her show is that 
he's somehow sure Madame Psychosis cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and 
light she projects over the air, somehow. He has visions of interfacing with her and 
telling her she'd feel a lot better if she listened to her own show, he bets. Madame 
Psychosis is one of only two people Mario would love to talk to but would be scared to 
try. The word periodic pops into his head. 

'Hey Hal?' he calls across the plants. 

Like for months in the spring semester of Y.D.P.A.H. she referred to her own program 
as 'Madame's Downer-Lit Hour' and read depressing book after depressing book — 
Good Morning, Midnight and Moggie: A Girl of the Streets and Giovanni's Room and 
Under the Volcano, plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent — in a monotone, 
really slowly, night after night. Mario sits on the low little van der Rohe-knockoff coffee 
table with bowed legs (the table) with his head cocked right up next the speaker and his 
claws in his lap. His toes tend to point inward when he sits. The background music is 
both predictable and, within that predictability, surprising: it's periodic. It suggests 
expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it 
denies. It is heavily digital, but with something of a choral bouquet. But unhuman. Mario 
thinks of the word haunting, like in 'a haunting echo of thus-and-such.' Madame 
Psychosis's cued music — which the student engineer never chooses or even sees her 
bring in — is always terribly obscure 66 but often just as queerly powerful and compelling 
as her voice and show itself, the M.l.T. community feels. It tends to give you the feeling 
there's an in-joke that you and she alone are in on. Very few devoted WYYY listeners 
sleep well M-F. Mario has horizontal breathing-trouble sometimes, but other than that 
he sleeps like a babe. Avril Incandenza still sticks with the old L'lslet-region practice of 
taking just tea and nibbles at U.S. suppertime and waiting to eat seriously until right 
before bed. Cultured Canadians tend to think vertical digestion makes the mind unkeen. 
Some of Orin and Mario and Hal's earliest memories are of nodding off at the dining¬ 
room table and being gently carried by a very tall man to bed. This was in a different 
house. Madame Psychosis's cued musics stir very early memories of Mario's father. Avril 
is more than willing to take some good-natured guff about her inability to eat before 
like 2230h. Prandial music holds little charm or associations for Hal, who like most of the 
kids on double daily drills makes fists around his utensils and eats like a wild dog. 

'Nor are excluded the utterly noseless, nor the hideously wall- and crosseyed, nor 
either the ergotic of St. Anthony, the leprous, the varicelliformally eruptive or even the 



sarcoma'd of Kaposi.' 

Hal and Mario probably eat/listen late over at the HmH twice a week. Avril likes to see 
them outside the awkward formality of her position at E.T.A. C.T.'s the same at home 
and office. Both Avril and Tavis's bedrooms are on the second floor, as a matter of fact 
right next to each other. The only other room up there is Avril's personal study, with a 
big color Xerox of M. Hamilton as Oz's West Witch on the door and custom fiber-wiring 
for a tri-modem TP console. A stairway runs from her study down the backside of HmH, 
north, down to a tributary-tunnel leading to the main tunnel to Comm.-Ad., so Avril can 
commute over to E.T.A. below ground. The HmH tunnel connects with the main at a 
point between the Pump Room and Comm.-Ad., meaning Avril never like hunches idly 
past the Pump Room, which fact Hal obviously endorses. Late suppers at HmH for Hal 
are limited by deLint to twice a week tops because they get him excused from dawn 
drills, which also means late-night mischief possibilities. Sometimes they bring Canada's 
John ('No Relation 1 ) Wayne over with them, whom Mrs. I. likes and speaks to animatedly 
even though he rarely says anything the whole time he's there and also eats like a wild 
dog, sometimes neglecting utensils altogether. Avril also likes it when Axford comes; 
Axford has a hard time eating, and she likes to exhort him to eat. Very rarely anymore 
does Hal bring Pemulis or Jim Struck, to whom Avril is so faultlessly, brittlely polite that 
the dining room's tension raises hair. 

Whenever Avril parts ficus leaves to check, Mario's still hunched pigeon-toed and 
cocked in the same RCA-Victorish posture, with the little horizontal forehead-crease 
that means he's either listening or thinking hard. 

'The multiple amputee. The prosthetically malmatched. The snaggle-toothed, wattled, 
weak-chinned, and walrus-cheeked. The palate-clefted. The really large-pored. The 
excessively but not necessarily lycanthropically hirsute. The pin-headed. The 
convulsively Tourettic. The Parkinsonianly tremulous. The stunted and gnarled. The 
teratoid of overall visage. The twisted and hunched and humped and halitotic. The in 
any way asymmetrical. The rodential- and saurian- and equine-looking.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

The tri-nostriled. The invaginate of mouth and eye. Those with those dark loose bags 
under their eyes that hang halfway down their faces. Those with Cushing's Disease. 
Those who look like they have Down Syndrome even though they don't have Down 
Syndrome. You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. 
Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain. Crow's feet. Birthmark. 
Rhinoplasty that didn't take. Mole. Overbite. A bad-hair year.' 

The WYYY student engineer in his sulcus contemplates the moon, which looks sort of 
like a full moon that somebody's bashed in a little bit with a hammer. Madame 
Psychosis asks rhetorically whether the circular's left anyone out. The engineer finishes 
his Fizzy and makes ready to descend again for the hour's close, his skin turned toward 
the terrible cerebral chill off the Charles, which is windy and blue. Sometimes Madame 
Psychosis takes one random call to start '60 +/—.' Tonight the one caller she ends by 
taking has a cultured stutter and invites M.P. and the YYY community to consider the 
fact that the moon, which of course as any sot knows revolves around the earth, does 
not itself revolve. Is this true? He says it is. That it just stays there, hidden and disclosed 



by our round shadow's rhythms, but never revolving. That it never turns its face away. 

The little Heathkit can't receive signals inside the Cerebrum's subdural stairwells, 
during descent, but the student engineer can anticipate she'll make no direct reply. Her 
sign-off is more dead air. She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high 
school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them 
whether you adored them. It had sure made a difference to the engineer, though, who 
hadn't been invited to even one graduation party, with his inhaler and skin. 

The dessert Avril serves when Hal's over is Mrs. Clarke's infamous high-protein-gelatin 
squares, available in bright red or bright green, sort of like Jell-0 on steroids. Mario's 
wild for them. C.T. clears the table and loads the dishwasher, since he didn't cook, and 
Hal gets into his coat at like OlOlh. Mario's still listening to the WYYY nightly sign-off, 
which takes a while because they not only list the station's kilowattage specs but go 
through proofs for the formulae by which the specs are derived. C.T. always drops at 
least one plate out in the kitchen and then bellows. Avril always brings some hell-Jell-0 
squares in to Mario and adopts a mock-dry tone and tells Hal it's been reasonably nice 
to see him outside les batiments sanctifies. The whole thing to Hal sometimes gets 
ritualistic and almost hallucinatory, the postprandial farewell routine. Hal stands under 
the big framed poster of Metropolis and whumps his gloves together casually and tells 
Mario there's no reason for him to leave too; Hal's going to blast down the hill for a bit. 
Avril and Mario always smile and Avril asks casually what his plans are. 

Hal always whumps his gloves together and smiles up at her and says 'Make trouble.' 

And Avril always puts on a sort of mock-stern expression and says 'Do not, under any 
circumstances, have fun,' which Mario still always finds clutch-your-stomach funny, 
every time, week after week. 


Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is the sixth of seven exterior Units on 
the grounds of an Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex that, from the height 
of an ATHSCME 2100 industrial displacement fan or Enfield Tennis Academy's hilltop, 
resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet. The hospital building itself, a VA facility 
of iron-colored brick and steep slate roofs, is closed and cordoned, bright pine boards 
nailed across every possible access and aperture, with really stern government signs 
about trespassing. Enfield Marine was built during either WWII or Korea, when there 
were ample casualties and much convalescence. About the only people who use the 
Enfield Marine complex in a VA-related way now seem to be wild-eyed old Vietnam 
veterans in fatigue jackets de-sleeved to make vests, or else drastically old Korea vets 
who are now senile or terminally alcoholic or both. 

The hospital building itself stripped of equipment and copper wire, defunct, Enfield 
Marine stays solvent by maintaining several smaller buildings on the complex's grounds 
— buildings the size of like prosperous homes, which used to house VA doctors and 
support staff — and leasing them to different state-related health agencies and services. 
Each building has a Unit-number that increases with the Unit's distance from the 
defunct hospital and with its proximity, along a rutted cement roadlet that extends back 
from the hospital's parking lot, to a steep ravine that overlooks a particularly unpleasant 



part of Brighton MA's Commonwealth Avenue and its Green Line train tracks. 

Unit #1, right by the lot in the hospital's afternoon shadow, is leased by some agency 
that seems to employ only guys who wear turtlenecks; the place counsels wild-eyed 
Vietnam vets for certain very-delayed stress disorders, and dispenses various pacifying 
medications. Unit#2, right next door, is a methadone clinic overseen by the same MA 
Division of Substance Abuse Services that licenses Ennet House. Customers for the 
services of Units #1 and #2 arrive around sunup and form long lines. The customers for 
Unit #1 tend to congregate in like-minded groups of three or four and gesture a lot and 
look wild-eyed and generally pissed-off in some broad geopolitical way. The customers 
for the methadone clinic tend to arrive looking even angrier, as a rule, and their early- 
morning eyes tend to bulge and flutter like the eyes of the choked, but they do not 
congregate, rather stand or lean along #2's long walkway's railing, arms crossed, alone, 
brooding, solo acts, standoffish — 50 or 60 people all managing to form a line on a 
narrow walkway waiting for the same small building to unlock its narrow front door and 
yet still managing to appear alone and stand-offish is a strange sight, and if Don Gately 
had ever once seen a ballet he would, as an Ennet House resident, from his sunup 
smoking station on the fire escape outside the Five-Man bedroom upstairs, have seen 
the movements and postures necessary to maintain this isolation-in-union as balletic. 

The other big difference between Units#l and #2 is that the customers of #2 leave the 
building deeply changed, their eyes not only back in their heads but peaceful, if a bit 
glazed, but anyway in general just way better put-together than when they arrived, 
while #l's wild-eyed patrons tend to exit #1 looking even more stressed and historically 
aggrieved than when they went in. 

When Don Gately was in the very early part of his Ennet House residency he almost 
got discharged for teaming up with a bad-news methedrine addict from New Bedford 
and sneaking out after curfew across the E.M.P.H.H. complex in the middle of the night 
to attach a big sign on the narrow front door of Unit #2's methadone clinic. The sign said 
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
The first staffer at the methadone clinic doesn't get there to open up until 0800h., and 
yet it's been mentioned how #2's customers always begin to show up with twisting 
hands and bulging eyes at like dawn, to wait; and Gately and the speed freak from New 
Bedford had never seen anything like the psychic crises and near-riot among these semi- 
ex-junkies — pallid blade-slender chain-smoking homosexuals and bearded bruiser- 
types in leather berets, women with mohawks and multiple sticks of gum in, upscale 
trust-fund-fritterers with shiny cars and computerized jewelry who'd arrived, as they'd 
been doing like hyper-conditioned rats for years, many of them, arrived at sunup with 
their eyes protruding and with Kleenexes at their noses and scratching their arms and 
standing on first one foot and then the other, doing basically everything but truly 
congregating, wild for chemical relief, ready to stand in the cold exhaling steam for 
hours for that relief, who'd arrived with the sun and now seemed to be informed that 
the Commonwealth of MA was suddenly going to withdraw the prospect of that relief, 
until (and this is what really seemed to drive them right over the edge, out there in the 
lot) until Further Notice. Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. At the sound 
of the first windowpane breaking and the sight of a blown-out old whore trying to hit a 



leather-vested biker with an old pre-metric GRASS GROWS BY INCHES BUT IT DIES BY 
FEET sign from #2's clinic's pathetic front lawn, the methedrine addict began laughing so 
hard that she dropped the binoculars from the Ennet House upstairs fire escape where 
they were watching, at like 0630h., and the binoculars fell and hit the roof of one of the 
Ennet House counselors' cars right below in the little roadlet, with a ringing clunk, just as 
he was pulling in, the counselor, his name was Calvin Thrust and he was four years sober 
and a former NYC porn actor who'd gone through the House himself and now took 
absolutely zero in terms of shit from any of the residents, and his pride and joy was his 
customized 'Vette, and the binoculars made rather a nasty dent, and plus they were the 
House Manager's amateur-ornithology binoculars and had been borrowed out of the 
back office without explicit permission, and the long fall and impact didn't do them a bit 
of good, to say the least, and Gately and the methedrine addict got pinched and put on 
Full House Restriction and very nearly kicked out. The addict from New Bedford picked 
up the aminating needle a couple weeks after that anyway and was discovered by a 
night staffer simultaneously playing air-guitar and polishing the lids of all the donated 
canned goods in the House pantry way after lights out, stark naked and sheened with 
meth-sweat, and after the formality of a Urine she was given the old administrative boot 
— over a quarter of incoming Ennet House residents get discharged for a dirty Urine 
within their first thirty days, and it's the same at all other Boston halfway houses — and 
the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three hours of hitting the 
streets got picked up by New Bedford's Finest on an old default warrant and sent to 
Framingham Women's for a l-to-2 bit, and got found one morning in her bunk with a 
kitchen-rigged shiv protruding from her privates and another in her neck and a 
thoroughly eliminated personal map, and Gately's individual counselor Gene M. brought 
Gately the news and invited him to see the methedrine addict's demise as a clear case 
of There But For the Grace of God Goeth D. W. Gately. 

Unit #3, across the roadlet from #2, is unoccupied but getting reconditioned for lease; 
it's not boarded up, and the Enfield Marine maintenance guys go in there a couple days 
a week with tools and power cords and make a godawful racket. Pat Montesian hasn't 
yet been able to find out what sort of group misfortune #3 will be devoted to servicing. 

Unit #4, more or less equidistant from both the hospital parking lot and the steep 
ravine, is a repository for Alzheimer's patients with VA pensions. #4's residents wear 
jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect. The 
patients are frequently visible at #4's windows, in jammies, splayed and open-mouthed, 
sometimes shrieking, sometimes just mutely open-mouthed, splayed against the 
windows. They give everybody at Ennet House the howling fantods. One ancient retired 
Air Force nurse does nothing but scream 'Help!' for hours at a time from a second-story 
window. Since the Ennet House residents are drilled in a Boston-AA recovery program 
that places great emphasis on 'Asking For Help,' the retired shrieking Air Force nurse is 
the object of a certain grim amusement, sometimes. Not six weeks ago, a huge stolen 
HELP WANTED sign was found attached to #4's siding right below the retired shrieking 
nurse's window, and #4's director was less than amused, and demanded that Pat 
Montesian determine and punish the Ennet House residents responsible, and Pat had 
delegated the investigation to Don Gately, and though Gately had a pretty good idea 



who the perps were he didn't have the heart to really press and kick ass over something 
so much like what he'd done himself, when new and cynical, and so the whole thing 
pretty much blew over. 

Unit #5, kittycorner across the little street from Ennet House, is for catatonics and 
various vegetablish, fetal-positioned mental patients subcontracted to a Commonwealth 
outreach agency by overcrowded LTIs. Unit #5 is referred to, for reasons Gately's never 
been able to pinpoint, as The Shed. 67 It is, understandably, a pretty quiet place. But in 
nice weather, when its more portable inmates are carried out and placed in the front 
lawn to take the air, standing there propped-up and staring, they present a tableau it 
took Gately some time to get used to. A couple newer residents got discharged late in 
Gately's treatment for tossing firecrackers into the crowd of catatonics on the lawn to 
see if they could get them to jump around or display affect. On warm nights, one long- 
limbed bespectacled lady who seems more autistic than catatonic tends to wander out 
of The Shed wrapped in a bedsheet and lay her hands on the thin shiny bark of a silver 
maple in #5's lawn, stands there touching the tree until she's missed at bedcheck and 
retrieved; and since Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer's 
job at Ennet House he sometimes wakes up in his Staff cellar bedroom down by the pay 
phone and tonic machine and looks out the sooty ground-level window by his bed and 
watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. 
Ave.'s neon or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep 
school overhead on its hill, he'll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled 
empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of 
living-room chintz. 

Unit #6, right up against the ravine on the end of the rutted road's east side, is Ennet 
House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, three stories of whitewashed New England 
brick with the brick showing in patches through the whitewash, a mansard roof that 
sheds green shingles, a scabrous fire escape at each upper window and a back door no 
resident is allowed to use and a front office around on the south side with huge 
protruding bay windows that yield a view of ravine-weeds and the unpleasant stretch of 
Commonwealth Ave. The front office is the director's office, and its bay windows, the 
House's single attractive feature, are kept spotless by whatever residents get Front 
Office Windows for their weekly Chore. The mansard's lower slope encloses attics on 
both the male and female sides of the House. The attics are accessed from trapdoors in 
the ceiling of the second floor and are filled to the beams with trash bags and trunks, 
the unclaimed possessions of residents who've up and vanished sometime during their 
term. The shrubbery all around Ennet House's first story looks explosive, ballooning in 
certain unpruned parts, and there are candy-wrappers and Styrofoam cups trapped 
throughout the shrubs' green levels, and gaudy homemade curtains billow from the 
second story's female side's bedroom windows, which are open what seems like all year 
round. 

Unit #7 is on the west side of the street's end, sunk in hill-shadow and teetering right 
on the edge of the eroding ravine that leads down to the Avenue. #7 is in bad shape, 
boarded up and unmaintained and deeply slumped at the red roof's middle as if 
shrugging its shoulders at some pointless indignity. For an Ennet House resident. 



entering Unit #7 (which can easily be entered through the detachable pine board over 
an old kitchen window) is cause for immediate administrative discharge, since Unit #7 is 
infamous for being the place where Ennet House residents who want to secretly relapse 
with Substances sneak in and absorb Substances and apply Visine and Clorets and then 
try to get back across the street in time for 2330 curfew without getting pinched. 

Behind Unit #7 begins far and away the biggest hill in Enfield MA. The hillside is 
fenced, off-limits, densely wooded and without sanctioned path. Because a legit route 
involves walking north all the way up the rutted road through the parking lot, past the 
hospital, down the steep curved driveway to Warren Street and all the way back south 
down Warren to Commonwealth, almost half of all Ennet House residents negotiate #7's 
back fence and climb the hillside each morning, short-cutting their way to minimum- 
wage temp jobs at like the Provident Nursing Home or Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure 
Systems, etc., over the hill up Comm., or custodial and kitchen jobs at the rich tennis 
school for blond gleaming tennis kids on what used to be the hilltop. Don Gately's been 
told that the school's maze of tennis courts lies now on what used to be the hill's hilltop 
before the Academy's burly cigar-chomping tennis-court contractors shaved the curved 
top off and rolled the new top flat, the whole long loud process sending all sorts of 
damaging avalanche-type debris rolling down and all over Enfield Marine's Unit #7, 
something over which you can sure bet the Enfield Marine VA administration litigated, 
years back; and but Gately doesn't know that E.T.A.'s balding of the hill is why #7 can 
still stand empty and unrepaired: Enfield Tennis Academy still has to pay full rent, every 
month, on what it almost buried. 


6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


1610h. E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various 
resistance-systems. Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an extremely moist 
Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost vertical, his face purple and 
forehead pulsing. Troeltsch by the squat rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing 
military presses with a bare bar. Carol Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader 
nodding as Lyle bends and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the incline- 
bench in the shadow of the monster copper beech through the west window doing 
single-leg toe-raises, for the ankle. Ingersoll at the shoulder-pull, steadily upping the 
weight against Lyle's advice. Keith ('The Viking') Freer 68 and the steroidic fifteen-year-old 
Eliot Kornspan spotting each other on massive barbell-curls next to the water cooler's 
bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing to lean down and spit 



into an old NASA glass on the floor by the little shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking 
around with a clipboard he doesn't write anything down on, but watching people 
intently and nodding a lot. Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to 
his bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler's bench just off 
Kornspan's left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, 
wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at each other. 

'Three more! Get it up there!' 

'Hoooowaaaaa.' 

'Get that shit up there man!' 

'Gwwwhoooooowaaaaar' 

'It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!' 

'Huhl huhl huhl huhl gwwwww.' 

'Doit!' 

Pemulis makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad, then all 
sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon's popes. 

'Well suppose' — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — 'Suppose I were to give you a key 
ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of 
these keys will unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as 
a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?' 

Troeltsch calls over to Pemulis, 'Do the deLint-jerking-off face again!' Pemulis for a 
second lets his mouth gape slackly and his eyes roll way up and flutters his lids, moving 
his fist. 

'Well I'd try every darn one,' Rader tells Lyle. 

'Huhl. Huhl. Gwwwwwivww.' 

'Motherfucker! Fucker!' 

Pemulis's wince looks like a type of facial isometric. 

'Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!' 

Pemulis makes a shush-finger. 

Lyle never whispers, but it's just about the same. 'Then you are willing to make 
mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist 
you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the 
first key.' 

Pemulis pulls his lower lip down as far as it will go and contracts his cheek muscles. 
Cords stand out on Freer's neck as he screams at Kornspan. There's a little hanging mist 
of spittle and sweat. Kornspan looks like he's about to have a stroke. There are 90 kg. on 
the bar, which itself is 20 kg. 

'One more you fuck. Fucking take it.' 

'Fuck me. Fuck me you fuck. Gwwwwww.' 

'Take the pain.' 

Freer has one finger under the bar, barely helping. Kornspan's red face is leaping 
around on his skull. 

Carol Spodek's smaller bar goes silently up and down. 

Troeltsch comes over and sits down and saws at the back of his neck with the towel, 
looking up at Kornspan. 'I don't think all the curls I've ever done all together add up to 



110,' he said. 

Kornspan's making sounds that don't sound like they're coming from his throat. 

'Yes! Yiiissss!' roars Freer. The bar crashes to the rubber floor, making Pemulis wince. 
Every vein on Kornspan stands out and pulses. His stomach looks pregnant. He puts his 
hands on his thighs and leans forward, a string of something hanging from his mouth. 

'Way to fucking take it baby, 1 Freer says, going over to the box on the dispenser to get 
rosin for his hands, watching himself walk toward the mirror. 

Pemulis starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around 
confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near the side of Kornspan's mesomorphic 
head and whispers. 'Hey. Eliot. Hey.' 

Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way. 

Pemulis whispers: 'Pussy.' 


If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to 
spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state- 
funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once 
MA's Department of Social Services has taken a mother's children away for any period 
of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S., like at will, empowered by 
nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit — no 
matter why or when, or what's transpired in the meantime — there's nothing a mother 
can do. 

Or for instance that people addicted to a Substance who abruptly stop ingesting the 
Substance often suffer wicked papular acne, often for months afterward, as the 
accumulations of Substance slowly leave the body. The Staff will inform you that this is 
because the skin is actually the body's biggest excretory organ. Or that chronic 
alcoholics' hearts are — for reasons no M.D. has been able to explain — swollen to 
nearly twice the size of civilians' human hearts, and they never again return to normal 
size. That there's a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their 
wallet. That (both a relief and kind of an odd let-down) black penises tend to be the 
same general size as white penises, on the whole. That not all U.S. males are 
circumcised. 

That you can cop a sort of thin jittery amphetaminic buzz if you rapidly consume three 
Millennial Fizzies and a whole package of Oreo cookies on an empty stomach. (Keeping 
it down is required, however, for the buzz, which senior residents often neglect to tell 
newer residents.) 

That the chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back 
again and again to the enslaving Substance is tecato gusano, which apparently connotes 
some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed. 

That black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people, and 
then can get even more hostile and unpleasant when this realization seems to surprise 
you. 

That it is possible, in sleep, for some roommates to secure a cigarette from their 
bedside pack, light it, smoke it down to the quick, and then extinguish it in their bedside 



ashtray — without once waking up, and without setting anything on fire. You will be 
informed that this skill is usually acquired in penal institutions, which will lower your 
inclination to complain about the practice. Or that even Flents industrial-strength 
expandable-foam earplugs do not solve the problem of a snoring roommate if the 
roommate in question is so huge and so adenoidal that the snores in question also 
produce subsonic vibrations that arpeggio up and down your body and make your bunk 
jiggle like a motel bed you've put a quarter in. 

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory 
functions as males. That over 60% of all persons arrested for drug-and alcohol-related 
offenses report being sexually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining 40% 
reporting that they cannot remember their childhoods in sufficient detail to report one 
way or the other on abuse. That you can weave hypnotic Madame Psychosis-like 
harmonies around the minor-D scream of a cheap vacuum cleaner, humming to yourself 
as you vacuum, if that's your Chore. That some people really do look like rodents. That 
some drug-addicted prostitutes have a harder time giving up prostitution than they have 
giving up drugs, with their explanation involving the two habits' very different directions 
of currency-flow. That there are just as many idioms for the female sex-organ as there 
are for the male sex-organ. 

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are 
sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your 
life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but 
lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance 
of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker 
down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be 
allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or 
something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you. 

That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is: Unit, which is why 
Ennet House residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital's designations of its 
campus's buildings. 

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most 
nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather 
early on. 

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than 
that. 

That AA and NA and CA's 'God' does not apparently require that you believe in 
Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you. 69 That, pace macho bullshit, public male 
weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually feel good (reportedly). That 
sharing means talking, and taking somebody's inventory means criticizing that person, 
plus many additional pieces of Recoveryspeak. That an important part of halfway-house 
Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or toothbrush in communal 
bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prostitute can (reportedly) apply a condom to a 
customer's Unit so deftly he doesn't even know it's on until he's history, so to speak. 

That a double-layered steel portable strongbox w/ tri-tumblered lock for your razor 
and toothbrush can be had for under $35.00U.S./$38.50 O.N.A.N. via Home-Net 



Hardware, and that Pat M. or the House Manager will let you use the back office's old 
TP to order one if you put up a sustained enough squawk. 

That over 50% of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other 
recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too. That some male prostitutes become so 
accustomed to enemas that they cannot have valid bowel movements without them. 
That a majority of Ennet House residents have at least one tattoo. That the significance 
of this datum is unanalyzable. That the metro Boston street term for not having any 
money is: sporting lint. That what elsewhere's known as Informing or Squealing or 
Narcing or Ratting or Ratting Out is on the streets of metro Boston known as 'Eating 
Cheese,' presumably spun off from the associative nexus of rot. 

That nose-, tongue-, lip-, and eyelid-rings rarely require actual penetrative piercing. 
This is because of the wide variety of clip-on rings available. That nipple-rings do require 
piercing, and that clitoris- and glans-rings are not things anyone thinks you really want 
to know the facts about. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with 
sustained effort be abused. That female chicanos are not called chicanas. That it costs 
$225 U.S. to get a MA driver's license with your picture but not your name. That 
purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an 
abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and 
masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer, and sitting so close to 
Ennet House's old D.E.C. TP cartridge-viewer that the screen fills your whole vision and 
the screen's static charge tickles your nose like a linty mitten. 70 

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness 
is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see 
everything red. What a 'Texas Catheter' is. That some people really do steal — will steal 
things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM 
hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and 
exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of 
truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. 
That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to 
pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a 
sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you 
will surely die if you don't, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap 
and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but 
not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the 
craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while. That it is 
statistically easier for low-IQ. people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ. people. 
That the metro Boston street term for panhandling is: stemming, and that it is regarded 
by some as a craft or art; and that professional stem-artists actually have like little 
professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in parks or public-transport hubs, 
at night, where they get together and network and exchange feedback on trends and 
techniques and public relations, etc. That it is possible to abuse OTC cold-and allergy 
remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is over 50 proof. That boring activities 
become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if 
enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound 



of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one 
place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people 
think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, 
unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. 

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work. 

That addiction is either a disease or a mental illness or a spiritual condition (as in 'poor 
of spirit 1 ) or an O.C.D.-like disorder or an affective or character disorder, and that over 
75% of the veteran Boston AAs who want to convince you that it is a disease will make 
you sit down and watch them write DISEASE on a piece of paper and then divide and 
hyphenate the word so that it becomes DIS-EASE, then will stare at you as if expecting 
you to undergo some kind of blinding epiphanic realization, when really (as G. Day 
points tirelessly out to his counselors) changing DISEASE to DIS-EASE reduces a 
definition and explanation down to a simple description of a feeling, and rather a whiny 
insipid one at that. 

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they 
have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute 
Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That cats will in fact get 
violent diarrhea if you feed them milk, contrary to the popular image of cats and milk. 
That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That 99% of 
compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking 
consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to 
them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they 
spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the 
contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly 
with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one's mind. In short that 99% 
of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. 
That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That the 
metro-street term for really quite wonderful is: pisser. That everybody's sneeze sounds 
different. That some people's moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when 
they sneeze. That no one who has been to prison is ever the same again. That you do 
not have to have sex with a person to get crabs from them. That a clean room feels 
better to be in than a dirty room. That the people to be most frightened of are the 
people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself 
appear weak. That you don't have to hit somebody even if you really really want to. That 
no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. That nobody who's ever 
gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance 
and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever 
reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that 
they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever. That bit is a 
metro Boston street term for a jail sentence, as in 'Don G. was up in Billerica on a six- 
month bit.' That it's impossible to kill fleas by hand. That it's possible to smoke so many 
cigarettes that you get little white ulcerations on your tongue. That the effects of too 
many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating. 

That pretty much everybody masturbates. Rather a lot, it turns out. 



That the cliche 'I don't know who I am' unfortunately turns out to be more than a 
cliche. That it costs $330 U.S. to get a passport in a phony name. That other people can 
often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. 
That you can obtain a major credit card with a phony name for $1500 U.S., but that no 
one will give you a straight answer about whether this price includes a verifiable credit 
history and line of credit for when the cashier slides the phony card through the 
register's little verification-modem with all sorts of burly security guards standing 
around. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. 
That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That the term vig is street 
argot for the bookmaker's commission on an illegal bet, usually 10%, that's either 
subtracted from your winnings or added to your debt. That certain sincerely devout and 
spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find 
parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers. That cockroaches can, 
up to a certain point, be lived with. That 'acceptance' is usually more a matter of fatigue 
than anything else. That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal 
hygiene. 

That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. 

That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting 
the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in 
any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. 

That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused. 

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in 
the first place, afterward. 

That it is permissible to want. 

That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they 
are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse. 

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels. 

That God — unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts 
entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. 

That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly 
low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you. 

That the smell of Athlete's Foot is sick-sweet v. the smell of podiatric Dry Rot is sick- 
sour. 

That a person — one with the Disease/-Ease — will do things under the influence of 
Substances that he simply would not ever do sober, and that some consequences of 
these things cannot ever be erased or amended. 71 Felonies are an example of this. 

As are tattoos. Almost always gotten on impulse, tattoos are vividly, chillingly 
permanent. The shopworn 'Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure' would seem to have been 
almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. For a while, the new resident Tiny Ewell 
got first keenly interested and then weirdly obsessed with people's tattoos, and he 
started going around to all the residents and outside people who hung around Ennet 
House to help keep straight, asking to check out their tattoos and wanting to hear about 
the circumstances surrounding each tattoo. These little spasms of obsession — like first 
with the exact definition of alcoholic , and then with Morris H.'s special tollhouse cookies 



until the pancreatitis-flare, then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their 
bed up with — these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his 
enslaving Substance was taken away. The tattoo thing started out with Tiny's white- 
collar amazement at just how many of the folks around Ennet House seemed to have 
tattoos. And the tattoos seemed like potent symbols of not only whatever they were 
pictures of but also of the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses. 

Because the whole thing about tattoos is that they're permanent, of course, 
irrevocable once gotten — which of course the irrevocability of a tattoo is what jacks up 
the adrenaline of the intoxicated decision to sit down in the chair and actually get it (the 
tattoo) — but the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you 
consider only the adrenaline of the moment itself, not (in any depth) the irrevocability 
that produces the adrenaline. It's like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-class 
person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse 
and even consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of 
excitement. 

Tiny Ewell'll put this same abstract but not very profound idea in a whole number of 
varied ways, over and over, obsessively almost, and still fail to get any of the tattooed 
residents interested, although Bruce Green will listen politely, and the clinically 
depressed Kate Gompert usually won't have the juice to get up and walk away when 
Tiny starts in, which makes Ewell seek her out vis-a-vis tattoos, though she hasn't got a 
tattoo. 

But they don't have any problem with showing Tiny their tatts, the residents with tatts 
don't, unless they're female and the thing is in some sort of area where there's a 
Boundary Issue. 

As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First 
there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet types 
who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts, and will 
show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more of 
Ewell's own social stratum would show off their collection of Dynastic crockery or fine 
Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types, who'll show 
you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of self-conscious 
pride about the stoicism) that a Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward his old wounds' 
scars. Resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents running down 
the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long : sleeved shirts every day to his 
menial job at Store 24, even though the store's heat always loses its mind in the early 
A.M. and it's always wicked motherfucking hot in there, because the store's Pakistani 
manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Mass. 
Gigabucks lottery tickets from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over 
his arms. 72 McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoulderblade. Doony Glynn has 
the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about 
Adam's-apple height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head 
and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp, from the days of his 
Skinhead youth, which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three 
of April Cortelyu's barrettes for Tiny even to see. 



Actually, a couple weeks into the obsession Ewell broadens his dermo-taxonomy to 
include a third category. Bikers, of whom there are presently none in Ennet House but 
plenty around the area's AA meetings, in beards and leather vests and apparently 
having to meet some kind of weight-requirement of at least 200 kilos. Bikers is the 
metro Boston street term for them, though they seem to refer to themselves usually as 
Scooter-Puppies, a term which (Ewell finds out the hard way) non-Bikers are not invited 
to use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but when they show them to 
you they're disconcerting because they'll bare their tatts with the complete absence of 
affect of somebody just showing you like a limb or a thumb, not quite sure why you 
want to see or even what it is you're looking at. 

A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every 
professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers 
getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general descriptions, a Biker. 

W/r/t the Stoic-Regret group within Ennet House, it emerges that the male tattoos 
with women's names on them tend, in their irrevocability, to be especially disastrous 
and regretful, given the extremely provisional nature of most addicts' relationships. 
Bruce Green will have MILDRED BONK on his jilted right triceps forever. Likewise the 
DORIS in red-dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes 
apparently did love once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the 
caption FUCK NIGERS on a left biceps he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a 
resident. Chandler Foss has an undulating banner with a redly inscribed MARY on one 
forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly coked 
out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing 
BLESSED VIRGIN above the MARY with a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably 
ghastly results. Real tattoo artists (Ewell gets this on authority after a White Flag Group 
meeting from a Biker whose triceps' tattoo of a huge disembodied female breast being 
painfully squeezed by a disembodied hand which is itself tattooed with a disembodied 
breast and hand communicates real tattoo-credibility, as far as Tiny's concerned) real 
tatt-artists are always highly trained professionals. 

What's sad about the gorgeous violet arrow-pierced heart with PAMELA incised in a 
circle around it on Randy Lenz's right hip is that Lenz has no memory either of the 
tattoo-impulse and -procedure or of anybody named Pamela. Charlotte Treat has a 
small green dragon on her calf and another tattoo on a breast she's set a Boundary 
about letting Tiny see. Hester Thrale has an amazingly detailed blue and green tattoo of 
the planet Earth on her stomach, its poles abutting pubis and breasts, an equatorial 
view of which cost Tiny Ewell two weeks of doing Hester's weekly Chore. Overall 
searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer Belbin, who has four uncoverable black 
teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline and 
adrenalized grief, so that from more than two meters away she always looks like she has 
flies on her, Randy Lenz points out. The new black girl Didi N. has on the plane of her 
upper abdomen a tattered screaming skull (off the same stencil as McDade's, but w/o 
the flames) that's creepy because it's just a tattered white outline: Black people's 
tattoos are rare, and for reasons Ewell regards as fairly obvious they tend to be just 
white outlines. 



Ennet House alumnus and volunteer counselor Calvin Thrust is quietly rumored to 
have on the shaft of his formerly professional porn-cartridge-performer's Unit a tattoo 
that displays the magiscule initials CT when the Unit is flaccid and the full name CALVIN 
THRUST when hyperemic. Tiny Ewell has soberly elected to let this go unsubstantiated. 
Alumna and v.c. Danielle Steenbok once got the bright idea of having eyeliner-colored 
tattoos put around both eyes so she'd never again have to apply eyeliner, not banking 
on the inevitable fade that over time's turned the tattoos a kind of nauseous dark-green 
she now has to constantly apply eyeliner to cover up. Current female live-in Staffer 
Johnette Foltz has undergone two of the six painful procedures required to have the 
snarling orange-and-blue tiger removed from her left forearm and so now has a snarling 
tiger minus a head and one front leg, with the ablated parts looking like someone 
determined has been at her forearm with steel wool. Ewell decides this is what gives 
profundity to the tattoo-impulse's profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed means 
just exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another. There are Tingly and Diehl's 
identical palmate-cannabis-leaf-on-inner-wrist tattoos, though Tingly and Diehl are from 
opposite shores and never crossed paths before entering the House. 

Nell Gunther refuses to discuss tattoos with Tiny Ewell in any way or form. 

For a while. Tiny Ewell considers live-in Staffer Don Gately's homemade jailhouse 
tattoos too primitive to even bother asking about. 

He'd made a true pest of himself, though, Ewell did, when at the height of the 
obsession this one synthetic-narc-addicted kid came in who refused to be called 
anything but his street name. Skull, and lasted only like four days, but who'd been a 
walking exhibition of high-regret ink — both arms tattooed with spiderwebs at the 
elbows, on his fishy-white chest a naked lady with the same kind of overlush 
measurements Ewell remembered from the pinball machines of his Watertown 
childhood. On Skull's back a half-m.-long skeleton in a black robe and cowl playing the 
violin in the wind on a crag with THE DEAD in maroon on a vertical gonfalonish banner 
unfurling below; on one biceps either an icepick or a mucronate dagger, and down both 
forearms a kind of St. Vitus's dance of leather-winged dragons with the words —on both 
forearms -HOW DO YOU UK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH .'?, the typos of which. 
Tiny felt, only served to heighten Skull's whole general tatt-gestalt's intended effect, 
which Tiny presumed was primarily to repel. 

In fact Tiny E.'s whole displacement of obsession from bunks' hospital corners to 
people's tattoos was probably courtesy of this kid Skull, who on his second night in the 
newer male residents' Five-Man Room had shed his electrified muscle-shirt and was 
showing off his tattoos in a boneheaded regretless first-category fashion to Ken Erdedy 
while R. Lenz did headstands against the closet door in his jockstrap and Ewell and 
Geoffrey D. had their wallets' credit cards spread out on Ewell's drum-tight bunk and 
were trying to settle a kind of admittedly childish argument about who had the more 
prestigious credit cards — Skull flexing his pectorals to make the overdeveloped woman 
on his chest writhe, reading his forearms to Erdedy, etc. — and Geoffrey Day had looked 
up from his AmEx (Gold, to Ewell's Platinum) and shaken his moist pale head at Ewell 
and asked rhetorically what had ever happened to good old traditional U.S. tattoos like 
MOM or an anchor, which for some reason touched off a small obsessive explosion in 



EwelPs detox-frazzled psyche. 

Probably the most poignant items in Ewell's survey are the much-faded tattoos of old 
Boston AA guys who've been sober in the Fellowship for decades, the crocodilic elder 
statesmen of the White Flag and Allston Groups and the St. Columbkill Sunday Night 
Group and Ewell's chosen Flome Group, Wednesday night's Better Late Than Never 
Group (Nonsmoking) at St. Elizabeth's Hospital just two blocks down from the House. 
There is something queerly poignant about a deeply faded tattoo, a poignancy 
something along the lines of coming upon the tiny and poignantly unfashionable clothes 
of a child long-since grown up in an attic trunk somewhere (the clothes, not the grown 
child, Ewell confirmed for G. Day). See, e.g.. White Flag's cantankerous old Francis 
('Ferocious Francis') Gehaney's right forearm's tatt of a martini glass with a naked lady 
sitting in the glass with her legs kicking up over the broad flaring rim, with an old-style 
Rita Hayworth-era bangs-intensive hairstyle. Faded to a kind of underwater blue, its 
incidental black lines gone soot-green and the red of the lips/nails/ SUBIKBAY'62USN4- 
07 not lightened to pink but more like decayed to the dusty red of fire through much 
smoke. All these old sober Boston blue-collar men's irrevocable tattoos fading almost 
observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church basements and hospital 
auditoria — Ewell watched and charted and cross-referenced them, moved. Any 
number of good old U.S.N. anchors, and in Irish Boston sooty green shamrocks, and 
several little frozen tableaux of little khaki figures in G.l. helmets plunging bayonets into 
the stomachs of hideous urine-yellow bucktoothed Oriental caricatures, and screaming 
eagles with their claws faded blunt, and SEMPER FI, all autolyzed to the point where the 
tattoos look like they're just under the surface of a murky-type pond. 

A tall silent hard-looking old black-haired BLTN-Group veteran has the terse and 
hateful single word PUSSY in what's faded to pond-scum green down one liver-spotted 
forearm; but yet the fellow transcends even stoic regret by dressing and carrying 
himself as if the word simply wasn't there, or was so irrevocably there there was no 
point even thinking about it: there's a deep and tremendously compelling dignity about 
the old man's demeanor w/r/t the PUSSY on his arm, and Ewell actually considers 
approaching this fellow re the issue of sponsorship, if and when he feels it's appropriate 
to get an AA sponsor, if he decides it's germane in his case. 

Near the conclusion of this two-month obsession. Tiny Ewell approaches Don Gately 
on the subject of whether the jailhouse tattoo should maybe comprise a whole separate 
phylum of tattoo. Ewell's personal feeling is that jailhouse tattoos aren't poignant so 
much as grotesque, that they seem like they weren't a matter of impulsive decoration or 
self-presentation so much as simple self-mutilation arising out of boredom and general 
disregard for one's own body and the aesthetics of decoration. Don Gately's developed 
the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the little attorney shuts up, though this is partly 
to disguise the fact that Gately usually can't follow what Ewell's saying and is unsure 
whether this is because he's not smart or educated enough to understand Ewell or 
because Ewell is simply out of his fucking mind. 

Don Gately tells Ewell how your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing 
needles from the jailhouse canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain 
pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unalert Public Defender, is why the 



jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and 
jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and 
fucking up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately's got on his right 
wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never 
quite straight and the color's never quite all the way solid is it's impossible to get all the 
individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching 
flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic children on 
rainy afternoons. Gately has a blue square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on the 
inside of his mammoth left forearm. He'd done the square himself, and a cellmate had 
done the cross in return for Gately doing a cross on the cellmate. Oral narcotics render 
the process both less painful and less tedious. The sewing needle is sterilized in grain 
alcohol, which Gately explains that the alcohol is got by taking mess-hall fruit and 
mashing it up and adding water and secreting the whole mess in a Ziploc just inside the 
flush-hole thing of the cell's toilet, to, like, foment. The sterilizing results of this can be 
consumed, as well. Bonded liquor and cocaine are the only things hard to get inside of 
M.D.C. penal institutions, because the expense of them gets everybody all excited and 
it's only a matter of time before somebody goes and eats cheese. The inexpensive C-IV 
oral narcotic Talwin can be traded for cigarettes, however, which can in turn be got at 
the canteen or won at cribbage and dominoes (M.D.C. regs prohibit straight-out cards) 
or got in mass quantities off smaller inmates in return for protection from the romantic 
advances of larger inmates. Gately is right-handed and his arms are roughly the size of 
Tiny Ewell's legs. His wrist's jailhouse square is canted and has sloppy extra blobs at 
three of the corners. Your average jailhouse tatt can't be removed even with laser 
surgery because it's incised so deep in. Gately is polite about Tiny Ewell's inquiries but 
not expansive, i.e. Tiny has to ask very specific questions about whatever he wishes to 
know and then gets a short specific answer from Gately to just that question. Then 
Gately stares at him, a habit Ewell tends to complain about at some length up in the 
Five-Man Room. His interest in tattoos seems to be regarded by Gately not as invasive 
but as the temporary obsession of a still-quivering Substanceless psyche that in a couple 
weeks will have forgot all about tattoos, an attitude Ewell finds condescending in the 
extremus. Gately's attitude toward his own primitive tattoos is a second-category 
attitude, with most of the stoicism and acceptance of his tatt-regret sincere, if only 
because these irrevocable emblems of jail are minor Rung Bells compared to some of 
the fucked-up and really irrevocable impulsive mistakes Gately'd made as an active drug 
addict and burglar, not to mention their consequences, the mistakes', which Gately's 
trying to accept he'll be paying off for a real long time. 


Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other 
before he says anything. It's impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether 
Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character. It's worse when he's put away a 
couple 'drines. He and Trevor Axford and Hal Incandenza are in Pemulis's room, with 
Pemulis's roommates Schacht and Troeltsch down at lunch, so they're alone, Pemulis 
and Axford and Hal, stroking their chins, looking down at Michael Pemulis's yachting cap 



on his bed. Lying inside the overturned hat are a bunch of fair-sized but bland-looking 
tablets of the allegedly incredibly potent DMZ. 

Pemulis looks all around behind them in the empty room. 'This, Incster, Axhandle, is 
the incredibly potent DMZ. The Great White Shark of organo-synthesized hallucinogens. 
'The gargantuan feral infant of—' 

Hal says 'We get the picture.' 

'The Yale U. of the Ivy League of Acid,' says Axford. 

'Your ultimate psychosensual distorter,' Pemulis sums up. 

'Think you mean psycho sensory, unless I don't know the whole story here.' 

Axford gives Hal a narrow look. Interrupting Pemulis means having to watch him do 
the head-thing all over again each time. 

'Hard to find, gentlemen. As in very hard to find. Last lots came off the line in the early 
70s. These tablets here are artifacts. Certain amount of decay in potency probably 
inevitable. Used in certain shady ClA-era military experiments.' 

Axford nods down at the hat. 'Mind-control?' 

'More like getting the enemy to think their guns are hydrangea, the enemy's a blood- 
relative, that sort of thing. Who knows. The accounts I've been reading have been 
incoherent, gistless. Experiments conducted. Things got out of hand. Let's just say things 
got out of control. Potency judged too incredible to proceed. Subjects locked away in 
institutions and written off as casualties of peace. Formula shredded. Research team 
scattered, reassigned. Vague but I've got to tell you pretty sobering rumors.' 

'These are from the early 70s?' Axhandle says. 

'See the little trademark on each one, with the guy in bell-bottoms and long 
sideburns?' 

'Is that what that is?' 

'Unprecedentedly potent, this stuff. The Swiss inventor they say was originally 
recommending LSD-25 as what to take to come down off the stuff.' Pemulis takes one of 
the tablets and puts it in his palm and pokes at it with a callused finger. 'What we're 
looking at. We're looking here at either a serious sudden injection of cash —' 

Axford makes a shocked noise. 'You'd actually try to peddle the incredibly potent DMZ 
around this sorry place?' 

Pemulis's snort sounds like the letter K. 'Get a large economy-size clue, Axhandle. 
Nobody here'd have any clue what they'd even be dealing with. Not to mention be 
willing to pay what they're worth. Why, there are pharmaceutical museums, left-wing 
think tanks. New York designer-drug consortiums I'm sure'd be dying to dissect these. 
Decoct like. Toss into the spectrometer and see what's what.' 

'That we could get bids from, you're saying,' Axford says. Hal squeezes a ball, silently 
looking at the hat. 

Pemulis turns the tablet over. 'Or certain very progressive and hip-type nursing homes 
I know guys that know of. Or down at Back Bay at that yogurt place with that picture of 
those historical guys Inc was saying at breakfast was up on the wall.' 

'Ram Das. William Burroughs.' 

'Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old 
wool ponchos play chess against those little clocks they keep hitting.' 



Axford's pretending to punch Hal's arm in excitement. 

Pemulis says 'Or of course I'm thinking I could just go the sheer-entertainment route 
and toss them in the Gatorade barrels at the meet with Port Washington Tuesday, or 
down at the WhataBurger — watch everybody run around clutching their heads or 
whatever. I'd be way into watching Wayne play with distorted senses.' 

Hal puts one foot up on Pemulis's little frustum-shaped bedside stool and leans farther 
in. 'Would it be prying to ask how you finally managed to get hold of these?' 

'It wouldn't be prying at all,' Pemulis says, removing from the yachting cap's lining 
every piece of contraband he's got and spreading it out on the bed, sort of the way 
older people will array all their valuables in quiet moments. He has a small quantity of 
personal-consumption Lamb's Breath cannabis (bought back from Hal out of a 20-g. he'd 
sold Hal) in a dusty baggie, a little Saran-Wrapped cardboard rectangle with four black 
stars spaced evenly across it, the odd 'drine, and it looks like a baker's dozen of the 
incredibly potent DMZ, Sweet Tart-sized tablets of no particular color with a tiny mod 
hipster in each center wishing the viewer peace. 'We don't even know how many hits 
this is,' he muses quietly. There's sun on the wall with the hanging viewer and poster of 
the paranoid king and an enormous hand-drawn Sierpinski gasket. In one of the three 
big mullioned west windows — the Academy is nothing if not well-fenestrated — there's 
an oval flaw that's casting a bubble of ale-colored autumn sunlight from the window's 
left side to elongate onto Pemulis's tightly made bed, 73 and he moves everything his 
hat's got into the brighter bubble, going down on one knee to study a tablet between 
his forceps (Pemulis owns stuff like philatelic forceps, a loupe, a pharmaceutical scale, a 
postal scale, a personal-size Bunsen burner) with the calm precision of a jeweler. 'The 
literature's mute on the titration. Do you take one tablet?' He looks up on one side and 
then back around on the other at the boys' faces leaning in above. 'Is like half a tab a 
regulation hit?' 

'Two or even three tablets, maybe?' Hal says, knowing he sounds greedy but unable to 
help himself. 

'The accessible data's vague,' Pemulis says, his profile contorted around the loupe in 
his socket. 'The literature on muscimole-lysergic blends is spotty and vague and hard to 
read except to say how massively powerful the supposed yields are.' 

Hal looks at the top of Pemulis's head. 'Did you hit a medical library?' 

'I got on MED.COM off Lateral Alice's WATS line and went back and forth and up and 
down through MED.COM. Plenty on lysergics, plenty on methoxy-class hybrids. Vague 
and almost gossip-columny shit on fitviavi-compounds. To get anything you got to cross¬ 
key Ergotics with the phrase muscimole or muscimolated. Only a couple things ring the 
bell when you key in DMZ. Then they're all potent this, sinister that. Nothing with any 
specifics. And jumbly polysyllables out the ass. Whole thing gave me a migraine.' 

'Yes but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real med-library?' Hal's 
his mother Avril's child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc. Axford 
now really does punch him once in the shoulder, albeit the right one. Pemulis is 
scratching absently at the little hair-hurricane at the center of his hair. It's close to 
1430h., and the flawed bubble of light on the bed is getting to be the slightly sad color 
of early winter P.M. There are still no sounds from the West Courts outside, but there's 



high song of much volume through the wall's water-pipes — a lot of the guys who are 
drilled past caring in the A.M. don't get it up to shower until after lunch, then sit through 
P.M. classes with wet hair and different clothes than their A.M. classes. 

Pemulis rises to stand between them and looks around the empty three-bedded room 
again, with neat stacks of three players' clothes and bright gear on shelves and three 
wicker laundry hampers bulging slightly. There is the rich scent of athletic laundry, but 
other than that the room looks almost professionally clean. Pemulis and Schacht's room 
makes Hal and Mario's room look like an insane asylum, Hal thinks. Axford drew one of 
only two single upperclass rooms in last spring's lottery, the other having gone to the 
Vaught twins, who get counted as one entry in Room Draw. 

Pemulis still has his cheek screwed up to keep the loupe in as he looks around. 'One 
monograph had this toss-off about DMZ where the guy invites you to envision acid that 
has itself dropped acid.' 'Holy crow.' 

'One article out of fucking Moment of all sources talks about how this one Army 
convict at Leavenworth got allegedly injected with some massive unspecified dose of 
early DMZ as part of some Army experiment in Christ only knows what and about how 
this convict's family sued over how the guy reportedly lost his mind.' He directs the 
loupe dramatically at first Hal and then Axford. 'I mean literally lost his mind, like the 
massive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down 
someplace and forgot where.' 

'I think we get the picture, Mike.' 

'Allegedly Moment says how the guy's found later in his Army cell, in some impossible 
lotus position, singing show tunes in a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression 
voice.' 

Axford says maybe Pemulis stumbled on a possible explanation for poor old Lyle and 
his lotus position down in the weight room, gesturing with the bad right hand in the 
direction of Comm.-Ad. 

Again Pemulis with the thing with the head. The slackening of a cheek lets the loupe 
fall out and bounce off the drum-tight bed, and Pemulis gets it to rebound into his palm 
without even looking. 'I think we can err on the side of not dickying the Gatorade 
barrels, anyway. This soldier's story's moral was proceed with caution, big time. The 
guy's mind's still allegedly AWOL. An old soldier, now, still belting out Broadway medleys 
in some secretive institution someplace. Blood-relatives try to sue on the guy's behalf. 
Army apparently came up with enough arguments to give the jury reasonable doubt 
about if the guy can even be said to legally exist enough to bring suit, anymore, since 
the dose misplaced his mind.' 

Axford feels absently at his elbow. 'So you're saying let's proceed with care why don't 
we.' 

Hal kneels to prod one of the tablets up against the dusty baggie's side. His finger 
looks dark in the elongated bubble of light. 'I'm thinking these look like two tablets are 
possibly a hit. A kind of Motrinish look to them.' 

'Visual guesswork isn't going to do it. This is not Bob Hope, Inc.' 

'We could even designate it "Ethel," for on the phone,' Axford suggests. 

Pemulis watches Hal arranging the tablets into the same general cardioid-shape as 



E.T.A. itself. 'What I'm saying. This is not a fools-rush-in-type substance, Inc. This show- 
tune soldier like left the planet.' 

'Well, so long as he waves every so often.' 

'The sense I got is the only thing he waves at is his food.' 

'But that was from a massive early dose,' Axford says. 

Hal's arrangement of the tablets on the red-and-gray counterpane is almost Zen in its 
precision. 'These are from the 70s?' 

After intricate third-party negotiations, Michael Pemulis finally landed 650 mg. of the 
vaunted and elusive compound DMZ or 'Madame Psychosis' from a small-arms-draped 
duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents who now undertook small and probably 
kind of pathetic outdated insurgency-projects from behind the front-operation of a cut- 
rate mirror, blown-glass, practical joke 'n gag, trendy postcard, and low-demand old 
film-cartridge emporium called Antitoi Entertainment, just up Prospect St. from Inman 
Square in Cambridge's decayed Portugo/Brazilian district. Because Pemulis always 
conducts business solo and speaks no French, the whole transaction with the Nuck in 
charge had to be negotiated in dumbshow, and since this lumberjackish Antitoi 
Nuckwad tended to look from side to side before he communicated even more than 
Pemulis looked all around himself, with his dim-looking partner standing there cradling a 
broom and also scanning for eavesdroppers in the closed shop the whole time, the 
whole negotiated deal had resembled a kind of group psychomotor seizure, with 
different bits of whipping and waggling heads reflected in dislocated sections and at 
jagged angles in more mirrors and pebbled blown-glass vases than Pemulis had ever 
seen crammed into anywhere. A very low-rent TP indeed had a hardcore-porn cartridge 
going at five times the normal speed so it looked like crazed rodents and may have 
turned Pemulis's sexual glands off for all time, he feels. God alone knew where these 
clowns had acquired thirteen incredibly potent 50-mg. artifacts of the B.S. 1970s. But 
the good news is they were Canadians, and like fucking Nucksters about almost anything 
they had no idea what what they were in possession of was worth, as it slowly emerged. 
Pemulis, w/ aid of 150 mg. of time-release Tenuate Dospan, almost danced a little post¬ 
transaction jig on his way up the steps of the otiose Cambridge bus, feeling the way W. 
Penn in his Quaker Oats hat in like the 16th century must have felt trading a few trinkets 
to babe-in-the-woods Natives for New Jersey, he imagines, doffing the nautical cap to 
two nuns in the aisle. 

Over the course of the next academic day — the incredibly potent stash now wrapped 
tight in Saran and stashed deep in the toe of an old sneaker that sits atop the aluminum 
strut between two panels in subdorm B's drop ceiling, Pemulis's time-tested entrepot — 
over the course of the next day or so the matter's hashed out and it's decided that while 
there's no real reason to involve Boone or Stice or Struck or Troeltsch, it's really Pemulis 
and Axford and Hal's right — duty, almost, to the spirits of inquiry and good trade 
practice — to sample the potentially incredibly potent DMZ in predeter-minedly safe 
amounts before unleashing it on Boone or Troeltsch or any unwitting civilians. Axford 
having been allowed in on the front end, the question of Hal's defraying the 
opportunity-cost of his part in the experiment is tactfully broached and turns out to be 
no problem. Pemulis's mark-up isn't anything beyond accepted norms, and there's 



always room in Hal's budget for spirited inquiry. Hal's one condition is that somebody 
tech-literate actually take the truck down to B.U. or M.I.T.'s medical library and 
physically verify that the compound is both organic and nonaddictive, which Pemulis 
says a physical hands-on library assault is already down in his day-planner in pen, 
anyway. After P.M. drills on Thursday, as Hal Incandenza and Pemulis with camera- 
mounted Mario Incandenza in tow stand with their hands in the chainlink mesh of one 
of the Show Courts' fencing and watch Teddy Schacht play a private exhibition against a 
Syrian Satellite-pro who's at E.T.A. for two paid weeks of corrective instruction on a 
service-motion that's eroding his rotator cuff — the guy wears thick glasses with a black 
athletic band around his head and plays with an upright square-jawed liquid precision 
and is dispatching Ted Schacht handily, which Schacht is taking with his customary 
sanguine good temper, giving his stolid all, learning what he can, one of very few 
genuinely stocky players at E.T.A. and one of the even fewer ranked junior players 
around without an apparent ego, wholly noninsecure since he blew out his knee on a 
contre-pied in the pre-Thanksgiving exhibition three years back, which is odd, now still in 
and at it for just the fun — and more or less doomed, therefore, to a purgatorial 
existence in 128-256 Alphabetville — as Pemulis and Hal stand there sweaty in full red- 
and-gray E.T.A. sweats on a raw 11/5 P.M., the sweat in their hair starting to accrete and 
freeze, Mario's head bowed under the weight of the head-mount rig and his hideously 
arachnodactylic fingers whitening as the fence takes his forward weight, Hal's posture 
subtly but warmly inclined ever so slightly toward his tiny older brother, who resembles 
him the way creatures of the same Order but not the same Family might resemble one 
another — as they stand watching and hashing matters out, Hal and Pemulis, there's the 
thud and sprong of an E.W.D. transnational catapult off way below to their left and then 
the high keen sound of a waste-displacement projectile the clouds are too low to let 
them see the flight of — though a weirdly yellow sheep-shaped cloud is visible 
somewhere up off past Acton, connecting the horizon's seam to some kind of coming 
storm-front held off by the ATHSCME fans along the Lowell-Methuen stretch of border, 
northwest. Pemulis finally nixes the notion of performing the spirited controlled 
experiment here in Enfield, where Axford has to be at the A squad's dawn drills every 
morning at 0500, and also Hal, unless he's slept over at HmH the night before, with HmH 
just not being a good DMZ-dropping venue at all. Pemulis, scanning up and down the 
length of the fence and winking at Mario, posits that a solid 36 hours of demand-free 
time will be advisable for any interaction with the incredibly potent you-know-whatski. 
That also lets out the inter-academy thing with Port Washington tomorrow, for which 
Charles Tavis has chartered two buses, because so many E.T.A. players are getting to go 
and do battle in this one — Port Washington Academy is gargantuan, the Xerox Inc. of 
North American tennis academies, with over 300 students and 64 courts, half of which 
they'll have already put under warm inflatable TesTar cover as of like Halloween, P.W.'s 
staff being less into the value of elemental suffering than Schtitt & Co. — so many that 
Tavis will almost surely go ahead and bus them all back up from Long Island just as soon 
as the post-competition dance is over, rather than shell out for all those motel rooms 
without corporate support. This E.T.A.-P.W. meet and buffet and dance are a private, 
inter-academy tradition, an epic rivalry almost a decade old. Plus Pemulis says he'll need 



a couple weeks of quality med-library-stacks-tossing time to do the more exacting 
titration and side-effects research Hal agrees the soldier's sobering story seems to 
dictate. So, they conclude, the window of opportunity looks to be 11/20-21 — the 
weekend right after the big End-of-Fiscal-Year fundraising exhibition with the E.T.A. A & 
B squads in singles against (this year) Quebec's notoriously hapless Jr. Davis and Jr. 
Wightman Cup squads, 74 invited down under very quiet low-profile political conditions 
via the good expatriate offices of Avril Incandenza to get vivisected by Wayne and Hal et 
al for the philanthropic amusement of E.T.A. patrons and alums, then to dance the P.M. 
away at a catered supper and Alumni Ball — the weekend right before Thanksgiving 
week and the WhataBurger Invitational in sunny AZ, because this year in addition to 
Friday 11/20 they also get Saturday 11/21 off, as in from both class and practice, 
because C.T. and Schtitt have arranged a special one-match doubles exhibition for the 
Saturday A.M. following the big meet, one between two female coaches of the 
Quebecois Wightmans and E.T.A.'s infamous Vaught twins, Caryn and Sharyn Vaught, 
seventeen, O.N.A.N.'s top-ranked junior women's doubles team, unbeaten in three 
years, an unbeatable duo, uncanny in their cooperation on the court, moving as One at 
all times, playing not just as if but in fact because they shared a brain, or at least the 
psychomotor lobes of one, the twins Siamese, fused at the left and right temple, banned 
from Singles by O.N.A.N. regs, the broad-shadow-casting Vaughts, flinty-eyed tire- 
executive's daughters out of Akron, using her/their four legs to cover chilling amounts of 
court, plus to sweep the Charleston competition at every post-exhibition formal ball for 
the last five years running. Tavis'll be on Wayne to play some sort of exhibitory thing, 
too, though asking Wayne to publicly smear a second Quebecer in two days might be a 
bit much. And but everyone who's anyone'll be down at the Lung, watching the Vaughts 
vivisect some adult-ranked Nucks, plus maybe Wayne, 75 then the E.T.A.s will get 
Saturday to rest and recharge before starting both the pre-WhataBurger training week 
and the bell-lap of prep for 12/12's Boards, meaning late Friday night-Sunday A.M. will 
give Pemulis, Hal, and Axford (and maybe Struck if Pemulis needs to let Struck in, for 
help with library-tossing) enough time to psychospiritually rally from whatever 
meninges-withering hangover the incredibly potent DMZ might involve... and Axford in 
the sauna predicted it would be a witherer indeed, since even just LSD alone he 
observed left you the next day not just sick or down but utterly empty, a shell, void 
inside, like your soul was a wrung-out sponge. Hal wasn't sure he concurred. An alcohol 
hangover was definitely no frolic in the psychic glade, all thirsty and sick and your eyes 
bulging and receding with your pulse, but after a night of involved hallucinogens Hal said 
the dawn seemed to confer on his psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence. 76 
Halation, Axford observed. 

Pemulis appears to have left out of his calculations the fact that he'll get that Saturday 
P.M. off classes only if he makes the travelling list for the Tucson-WhataBurger the 
following week, and that unlike Hal and Axford he's not a lock: Pemulis's U.S.T.A. rank, 
excepting his halcyon thirteenth year in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, has 
never gotten higher than 128, and the WhataBurger draws kids from all over O.N.A.N. 
and even Europe; the draw will have to be weak indeed for him to get even one of the 
64 Qualifying-Round invitations. Axford's on the fringes of the top 50, but he got to go 



last year at seventeen, so he's almost got to get to go. And Hal is looking at getting a 
Third or maybe Fourth Seed in 18's Singles; he's definitely going, barring some sort of 
cataclysmic ankle-relapse against either Port Wash, or Quebec. Axford postulates that 
Pemulis isn't miscalculating so much as simply showing a slitty-eyed confidence, which 
as far as his match-play outlook is concerned would be unusual and rather a fine thing 
— prorector Aubrey deLint says (publicly) that seeing M. Pemulis in practice v. seeing M. 
Pemulis in a real match that means anything is like getting to know some girl through e- 
mail as like e-mail-keyboard-type penpals and really falling for her and then finally 
meeting her in person and finding out she's got like just one enormous tit in the exact 
middle of her chest or something like that. 77 

Mario will get to come along if Avril can convince C.T. to bring him along to get 
WhataBurger footage for this year's E.T.A. promotional Xmas-giveaway-to-private-and- 
incorporated-patrons cartridge. 

Schacht and the glossy Syrian are laughing together about something up at the net- 
post, where they've walked to gather gear and various spare rotator-cuff- and knee- 
appliances after the Syrian kind of cornily jumped the net and pumped Schacht's hand, 
breath and sweat-steam rising up off and moving off through the fence's mesh toward 
the manicured western hills as Mario's laugh rings out at some broad mock-supplicant's 
gesture Schacht's just now made. 


7 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


You can be at certain parties and not really be there. You can hear how certain parties 
have their own implied ends embedded in the choreography of the party itself. One of 
the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where a 
party ends — even a bad party — that moment of unspoken accord when everyone 
starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from 
the plastic rind's five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that 
acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually 
shutting the door. When everybody's voices recede down the hall. When the hostess 
turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white V of utter 
silence in the party's wake. 

Joelle, at the end of her rope and preparing to hang from it, listening, is supported by 
a polished hardwood floor above both river and Bay's edge, perched uncomfortably in 
striated light in one of Molly Notkin's chairs molded in the likeness of great filmmakers 
from the celluloid canon, seated between empty Cukor and frightening Murnau in 



Melies's fiberglass lap, his trousers' crease uncomfortable and his cummerbund M.I.T.- 
crested. The lurid chairs' directors are larger than life: Joelle's feet dangle well off the 
floor, her squished hamstrings beginning to burn under a damp thick cotton Brazilian 
skirt which is vivid, curled pale purples and fresh red against a Latin black that seems to 
glow above pale knees and white rayon kneesocks and feet in clogs that are hanging half 
off, legs swinging like a child's, always feeling like a child in Molly's chairs, conspicuously 
perched in the eye of a bad party's somewhat forced-feeling storm of wit and good 
cheer, sitting by herself under what used to be her window, the daughter of a low-pH 
chemist and homemaker from western Kentucky, a lot of fun to be with, normally, if you 
can get over the disconcerting veil. 

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and 
generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The 
truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and 
self-involvement. 

There are decorative bars, slender and of black iron that pigeon droppings have made 
piebald, over the west windows to this third-floor cooperative apartment on the East 
Cambridge fringes of the Back Bay, where near-Professor Notkin is holding a party to 
celebrate passing her Orals in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory, the doctoral program where 
Joelle — before her retreat into broadcast sound — had met her. 

Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented 
love of Notkin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at New York 
University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of 
erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the 
detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum 
farmer or something, so that whenever he tumefies he'll suffer the same order of guilt 
that your less eccentrically tortured Ph.D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, 
wearing baby-seal fur. Molly still takes the high-speed rail down to visit him every 
couple weeks, to be there for him in case by some selfish mischance he happens to 
harden, prompting in him black waves of self-disgust and an extreme neediness for 
understanding and nonjudgmental love. She and poor Molly Notkin are just the same, 
Joelle reflects, seated alone, watching doctoral candidates taste wine — sisters, sororal 
twins. With her fear of direct light, Notkin. And the disguises and whiskers are simply 
veiled veils. How many sub-rosa twins are there, out there, really? What if heredity, 
instead of linear, is branching? What if it's not arousal that's so finitely circumscribed? 
What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking 
around back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? 
The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the 
paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly 
open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one 
upside-down in a convex lens. 

Joelle is thinking about what she has in her purse. She sits alone in her linen veil and 
pretty skirt, obliquely looked at, listening to bits of conversation she reels in out of the 
overall voices' noise but seeing no one really else, the absolute end of her life and 
beauty running in a kind of stuttered old hand-held 16mm before her eyes, projected 



against the white screen on her side, for once, from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and 
Jim and YYY, all the way up to today's wet walk here from the Red Line's Downtown 
stop, walking the whole way from East Charles St., employing a self-conscious and kind 
of formal stride, but undeniably pretty, the overall walk toward her last hour was, on 
this last day before the great O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence revel. East Charles to the 
Back Bay today is a route full of rained-on sienna-glazed streets and upscale businesses 
with awnings and wooden signs hung with cute Colonial script, and people looking at 
her like you look at the blind, naked gazes, not knowing she could see everything at all 
times. She likes the wet walk for this, everything milky and halated through her veil's 
damp linen, the brick sidewalks of Charles St. unchipped and impersonally crowded, her 
legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine, holding the collar of her overcoat closed at 
her poncho's neckline in a way that lets her hold the veil secure against her face with a 
finger on her chin, thinking always about what she has in her purse, stopping in at a 
discount tobacconist and buying a quality cigar in a glass tube and then a block later 
placing the cigar inside carefully in among the overflowing waste atop a corner 
receptacle of pine-green mesh, but keeps the tube, puts the glass tube in her purse, can 
hear the rain's thup on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in the street, and can see 
droplets broken and regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special 
lonely sound of cars in rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis' shining windshields. 
In every alley are green I.W.D. dumpsters and the smaller red I.W.D. dumpsters to take 
the overflow from the green dumpsters. And the sound of her wood-sole clogs against 
the receding staccato of brittle women's high heels on brick westward as Charles St. 
now approaches Boston Common and becomes less quaint and upscale: sodden litter — 
flat the way only wet litter can be flat — appears on the sidewalk and in the curb's 
seam, and now murky-colored people with sacks and grocery carts appraising that litter, 
squatting to lift and sift through litter; and the rustle and jut of limbs from dumpsters 
being sifted by people who all day do nothing but sift through I.W.D. dumpsters; and 
other people's blue shoeless limbs extending in coronal rays from refrigerator boxes in 
each block's three alleys, and the little cataract of rainwater off the edge of each 
dumpster's red annex's downsloping side and hitting refrigerator boxes' tops with a 
rhythmless thappathappappathap; somebody going Pssssst from an alley's lip, and 
ghastly-white or blotched faces declaiming to thin air from recessed doorways curtained 
by rain, and for an other-directed second Joelle wishes she'd hung on to the cigar, to 
give away, and moving westward into the territory of the Endless Stem near the end of 
Charles she starts to dispense change she is asked for from doorways and inverted up- 
tilted boxes; and she gets asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she 
rather prefers. A sooty wheelchaired man with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI 
PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins — a puffed red cut across that businesslike 
palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing. It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives 
him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing. 

She buys a .473-liter Pepsi Cola in a blunt plastic bottle at a Store 24 whose Jordanian 
clerk just looks at her blankly when she asks if they carry Big Red Soda Water, and 
settles for the Pepsi and comes out and pours the pop out down a storm-drain and 
watches it pool there foaming brownly and stay put because the drain's grate is clogged 



solid with leaves and sodden litter. She walks on toward the Common with the empty 
bottle and glass tube in her purse. There was no need to buy Chore Boy pads at the 
Store 24. 

Joelle van Dyne is excruciatingly alive and encaged, and in the director's lap can call up 
everything from all times. What will be that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to 
lock oneself in Molly Notkin's bedroom or bath and get so high that she's going to fall 
down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more back and 
forth. Boston Common is like a lush hole Boston's built itself around, a two-k. square of 
shiny trees and dripping limbs and green benches over wet grass. Pigeons all over, the 
same sooty cream as the willows' rinds. Three young black men perched like tough 
crows along a bench's back approve her body and call her bitch with harmless affection 
and ask where's the wedding at. No more deciding to stop at 2300h. and then barely 
getting through the hour's show and hurtling back home at 0130h. and smoking the 
Chore Boy's resins and not stopping after all. No more throwing the Material away and 
then half an hour later rooting through the trash, no more all-fours scrutiny of the 
carpet in hopes of a piece of lint that looks enough like the Material to try to smoke. No 
more singeing the selvage of veils. The Common's south edge is Boylston Street with its 
24/7 commerce, upscale, cashmere scarves and cellular holsters, doormen with gold 
braid, jewelers with three names, women with valence-curtain bangs, stores disgorging 
shoppers with their wide white monogrammed twine-handle bags. The rain's wet veil 
blurs things like Jim had designed his neonatal lens to blur things in imitation of a neo¬ 
natal retina, everything recognizable and yet without outline. A blur that's more 
deforming than fuzzy. No more clutching her heart on a nightly basis. What looks like 
the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon's meshes. The entrance 
says EXIT. There isn't an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. 
Jim's own Cage III: Free Show. It is the cage that has entered her, somehow. The 
ingenuity of the whole thing is beyond her. The Fun has long since dropped off the Too 
Much. She's lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about 
enjoying it, still. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole. 
There's a certain smell to a rain-wet veil. Something about that caller and the moon, 
saying the moon never looked away. Revolving and yet not. She had hurtled on back 
home on the night's final T and gone home and at least finally not turned her face away 
from the situation, the predicament that she didn't love it anymore she hated it and 
wanted to stop and also couldn't stop or imagine stopping or living without it. She had 
in a way done as they'd made Jim do near the end and admitted powerlessness over this 
cage, this unfree show, weeping, literally clutching her heart, smoking first the Chore 
Boy-scrap she'd used to trap the vapors and form a smokable resin, then bits of the 
carpet and the acetate panties she'd filtered the solution through hours earlier, weeping 
and veilless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors of her little 
room's walls. 

CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS' REVENUE¬ 
ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR 

(1) Year of the Whopper 



(2) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad 

(3) Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar 

(4) Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken 

(5) Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster 

(6) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy- 
To-lnstall Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile 
(sic) 

(7) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland 

(8) Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment 

(9) Year of Glad 78 

Jim's eldest, Orin — punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extraordinaire — had 
once shown Joelle van Dyne his childhood collection of husks of the Lemon Pledge that 
the school's players used to keep the sun off. Different-sized legs and portions of legs, 
well-muscled arms, a battery of five-holed masks hung on nails from an upright 
fiberboard sheet. Not all the husks had names below them. 

Boylston St. east means she passes again the black-bronze equestrian statue of 
Boston's Colonel Shaw and the MA 54th, illuminated now by a patch of emergent 
sunlight, Shaw's metal head and raised sword illicitly draped in a large Quebecois fleur- 
de-lis flag with all four irises' stems altered to red blades, so it's absurdly now a red 
white and blue flag; three Boston cops on ladders with poles and shears; the Canadian 
militants come in the night, on the eve of Interdependence, thinking anyone cares 
whether they hang things from historic icons, hang anti-O.N.A.N. flags, as if anyone not 
paid to remove them cares one way or the other. The encaged and suicidal have a really 
hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything. And here too are E. 
Boylston's dealers, sirens of the other, second cage, standing as always outside F.A.O. 
Schwartz, young little black boys, boys so black they're blue, horrifically skinny and 
young, little more than living shadows in knit caps and knee-length sweatshirts and very 
white hightops, shifting and blowing into their cupped hands, alluding to the availability 
of a certain Material, just barely alluding is all, with their postures and bored blank 
important gaze. Certain salesmen have only to stand there. Certain types of sales: the 
customer comes to you; and Lo. The cops at the flag across the street don't give them a 
look. Joelle hurries past the line of dealers, she tries to, her clogs loose and clocking, 
tarrying for just a moment at the end, just past the gauntlet's end, still within two 
extended hands' reach of the last bored dealer; for here on the street outside Schwartz 
is placed an odd adverting display, not a live salesman of any sort but rather a humanoid 
figure of something that's better than cardboard, untouched by the vendors who don't 
seem even to look, a display on an angled rear-mount stand like a photo-frame's stand, 
2-D, the figure a man in a wheelchair, in a coat and tie, his lap blanketed and no legs 
below, his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile's arc of 
the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see, his 
head hairless and plastic and cast back, his eyes on the blue harlequin-patches of the 
post-storm sky, looking straight up, or having a seizure, or ecstatic, his arms also up and 
out in a gesture of submission or triumph or thanks, his oddly thick right hand the 



receptacle for the black spine of the case of some new film cartridge being advertised 
for distribution, the cartridge stuck like a tongue out of a slot in his (lineless) palm; 
except there is only this display, this ecstatic figure and a cartridge no feral vendor's 
removed, no mention of title, no blurbs or quoted references to critics' thumbs, the 
case's spine itself bare black slightly pebbled generic plastic, conspicuously unlabelled. 
Two Oriental women's shopping bags catch and make her raincoat billow slightly as 
Joelle stands there briefly, feeling the lines' dealers looking at her, assessing; and then 
someone calls something to one of the cops halfway up the statue, using his first name, 
which echoes slightly and breaks the spell; the little black boys look away. None of the 
passersby seem to notice the display she stands before, reflecting. It's some kind of anti- 
ad. To direct attention at what is not said. Lead up to an inevitability you deny. Not new. 
But an expensive and affecting display. The film-cartridge itself would be a blank, too, or 
the case empty, worthless because it really can be removed all the way from the slot in 
the figure's hand. Joelle removes it and looks at it and puts it back. She's had her last 
fling with film cartridges. Jim had used her several times. Jim at the end had filmed her 
at prodigious and multilensed length, and refused to share what he'd made of it, and 
died w/o a note. 79 Her mental name for the man had been 'Infinite Jim.' The display 
cartridge shoves home with a click. One of the such young dealers calls her Mama and 
asks where's the funeral at. 

For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit 
through that filmed apology-scene and then vanished and then came back but only to — 
only four years seven months six days past — to leave, for a while, after taking the veil, 
for a while she liked to get really high and clean. Joelle did. Scrub sinks until they were 
mint-white. Dust the ceilings without using any kind of ladder. Vacuum like a fiend and 
put in a fresh vacuum-bag after each room. Imitate the wife and mother they both de¬ 
clined to shoot. Use Incandenza's toothbrush on tiles' grout. 

In places along Boylston cars are triple-parked. People's wipers are on that setting that 
Joelle, who does not drive, imagines to read OCCASIONAL on the controls. Her own 
personal Daddy's old car had wipers' controls on the turn-signal stalk by the wheel. 
Available yellow cabs pass, hissing in the streets. Over half the passing cabs out here in 
the rain are advertising themselves as available, purple numbers lit below TAXI. As she 
remembers things Jim was, besides a great filmic mind and her true heart's friend, the 
world's best hailer of Boston cabs, known to have less hailed than conjured cabs in spots 
where Boston cabs by all that's right just aren't, a hailer of Boston cabs in places like 
Veedersburg, Indiana and Powell, Wyoming, something in the authority of the lifted 
arm's height, the oncoming taxi undergoing a sort of parallax as it bore down over 
tumbleweed streets, appearing under Incandenza's upraised palm as if awaiting 
benediction. He was a tall and physically slow-moving man with a great love of taxis. 
And they loved him back. Never again a cab in four-plus years, after that. And so Joelle 
van Dyne, a.k.a. Madame P., surrendered, suicidal, eschews tumbrel or hack, her solid 
clogs sounding formal on the smooth cement down Boylston's sidewalk past fine stores' 
revolving doors southeast toward serious brownstone-terrain, open coat swirling over 
poncho and hanging rain breaking into stutters and drips. 

After she had smoked homemade freebase cocaine this A.M. for the last time and 



then fired up the Chore Boys and good panties she'd used as a last filter and choked on 
burnt acetate when she shredded and smoked them, and had wept and imprecated at 
the mirrors and thrown away her paraphernalia again for the final time, when an hour 
later she'd walked not formally to her T-stop under a parliament of gathering storm- 
clouds and faint sticky bits of autumn thunder to ride to Upper Brighton and find Lady 
Delphina, get real weight from Lady Delphina, so hard to just cut it off in mid-binge, on a 
Saturday, unless you just passed out, to tell L.D. when she'd said goodbye and it was the 
last time it had been really the penultimate time but that this was the last time, this was 
goodbye for real, and get serious weight from Lady Delphina, pay her twice the 8-gram 
rate as a generous farewell, as she walked without much real formality to her T-stop and 
stood on the platform, each time mistaking little mutters of thunder for the approach of 
the train, wanting more of it so badly she could feel her brain heaving around in its skull, 
then a pleasant and gentle-faced older black man in raincoat and hat with a little flat 
black feather in the band and the sort of black-frame styleless spectacles pleasant older 
black men wear, with the weary but dignified mild comportment of the older black, 
waiting alone with her on the chill dim Davis Square subway platform, this man had 
folded his Herald neatly lengthwise and had it under the same arm he tipped his hat 
with and said to excuse him if this was an intrusion, he said, but he'd had occasion to 
see one or two of these linen veils before, around, like what she wore, and was 
interested and rendered curious. He pronounced all four syllables of interested, which 
Joelle, from Kentucky, enjoyed. If he might be so bold, he said, tipping his hat. Joelle had 
engaged with him completely, which was extremely rare, even off the air. She rather 
welcomed the chance to think about anything else at all, with the train surely never 
pulling in. She reflected that the anecdote had gotten about, but not the incident's 
legacy, she said, as if that part were hidden. The Union of the Hideously and Improbably 
Deformed was unofficially founded in London in B.S. 1940 in London U.K. by the cross¬ 
eyed, palate-clefted, and wildly carbuncular wife of a junior member of the House of 
Commons, a lady whom Sir Winston Churchill, P.M.U.K., having had several glasses of 
port plus a toddy at a reception for an American Lend-Lease administrator, had 
addressed in a fashion wholly inappropriate to social intercourse between civilized 
gentlemen and ladies. Unwittingly all but authoring the Union designed to afford the 
scopophobic empathic fellowship and the genesis of sturdy inner resources through 
shame-free and unconstrained concealment, W. Churchill — when the lady, no person's 
doormat, informed him with prim asperity that he appeared to be woefully inebriated 
— made the anecdotally famous reply that while, yes, yea verily, he was indeed 
inebriated, he would the following A.M. be once again sober, while she, dear lady, 
would tomorrow still be hideously and improbably deformed. Churchill, doubtless under 
weighty emotional pressures during this period in history, had then proceeded to 
extinguish his cigar in the lady's sherry and to place a finger-bowl napkin delicately over 
the ruined features of her flaming visage. The laminated non-photo U.H.I.D. 
membership card Joelle showed the interested old black gentleman related all this data 
and more in a point-size so tiny the card looked somehow both blank and defaced. 



PUTATIVE CURRICULUM VITAE OF HELEN P. STEEPLY, 36, 1.93 M., 104 KG., A.B., M.J.A. 

1 Year, Time (graduate intern, 'Newsmakers' Section); 

16 Months, Decade Magazine ('Hottest and Nottest,' a trends-and-style-analysis 
column) until Decade folded; 

5 Years, Southwest Annual (human-interest, geriatric-medical, personality and tourism 
articles); 

5 Months, Newsweek (11 small features on trends and entertainment until her 
Executive Editor, with whom she was in love, left Newsweek and took her with him); 

1 Year, Ladies Day (personality and medical-cosmetic features — some research first¬ 
hand — until one week in which the Executive Editor reconciled with his wife and H.P.S. 
got mugged and purse-snatched on W. 62nd and vowed never again to live in 
Manhattan); 

15 Months - Present, Moment magazine. Southwest Bureau, Erythema AZ (medical, 
soft sports, personality, and home-entertainment-trends reporting, masthead byline, 
contributing-editor status). 


Thereafter proceeding first to the Upper Brighton and now to the cooperative Back 
Bay-edge brownstone she had lived in once with Orin and performed in with his father 
and then passed on to Molly Notkin, today's party's guest of honor and hostess in one, 
as of yesterday enjoying A.B.D. pre-doctoral status in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory at 
M.I.T., having cleared the notorious hurdle of Oral Examinations on that day by offering 
her examination committee a dramatically rendered and if she did say so herself 
devastating oral critique of post-millennial Marxist Film-Cartridge Theory from the point 
of view of Marx himself, Marx as pretend-film-cartridge theorist and scholar. Still 
dressed as K.M. a day later, in celebration — the glued beard matted and pubic-black, 
Homburg ordered direct from Wiesbaden, soot from a terribly obscure British souvenir- 
filth shop — she has no idea that Joelle's been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B., has no idea 
what she and Jim Incandenza were even about for twenty-one months, whether they 
were lovers or what, whether Orin left because they were lovers or what, 80 or that 
Joelle even now lives hand-to-lung on a grossly generous trust willed her by a man she 
unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter's father, infinite jester, director 
of a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away. Joelle's never seen 
the completed assembly of what she'd appeared in, or seen anyone who's seen it, and 
doubts that any sum of scenes as pathologic as he'd stuck that long quartzy auto- 
wobbling lens on the camera and filmed her for could have been as entertaining as he'd 
said the thing he'd always wanted to make had broken his heart by ending up. 

Climbing to the third-floor, stairs pale from wear, still trembling from the A.M.'S 
interruptus, Joelle finds herself having a hard time, climbing, as if the force of gravity 
goes up as she does. The party-sounds start around the second landing. Here is Molly 
Notkin dressed as a crumbling Marx again greeting Joelle at her door with the sort of 
delighted mock-surprise U.S. hostesses use for greetings. Notkin secures Joelle's veil for 
her during removal of the beaded coat and poncho, then lifts the veil slightly in a 
practiced two-finger gesture to deliver a double-cheek kiss that is sour with cigarettes 



and wine — Joelle never smokes when veiled — asking how Joelle got here and then 
without waiting for an answer offering her that odd kind of British-Columbian apple 
juice they'd found they both liked so, and that Joelle at home's abandoned and gone 
back to the Big Red Soda Water of childhood, which Notkin doesn't know, and still 
cluelessly considers extra-sweet Canadian juice to be pretty much both her and Joelle's 
biggest vices. Molly Notkin's the kind of soul you want desperately to be polite to but 
have to hide it with because she'd be mortified if she suspected you were ever just 
being polite to her about anything. 

Joelle makes a get-out-of-here gesture. 'The really really good kind?' 

'The kind that looks muddy it's so fresh.' 

'Where'd you get it this late this far east?' 

'The kind you just about have to strain it's so fresh.' 

The living room is full and hot, campy mambo playing, walls still the same off-white 
but all the trim now a confectioner's rich brown. Or plus there's wine, Joelle sees, a 
whole assortment on the old sideboard it took three men with cigars in gray jumpsuits 
to get up the stairs when they got it, an assortment of bottles of different shapes and 
dim colors and different levels of what's inside. Molly Notkin has one dirty-nailed hand 
on Joelle's arm and one on the head of a chair of Maya Deren brooding avant-gardedly 
in vivid spun-glass polymers, and is telling Joelle about her Orals in a party's near-shout 
that will leave her hoarse well before this big one's sad end. 

A good muddy juice fills Joelle's mouth with spit that's as good as the juice, and her 
linen veil is drying and beginning once again comfortingly to flutter with her breath, and, 
perched alone and glanced at covertly by persons who don't know they know her voice, 
she feels the desire to raise the veil before a mirror, to refine some of her purse's 
untouched Material, raise the veil and set free the encaged rapacious thing inside to 
breathe the only uncloth'd gas it can stomach; she feels ghastly and sad; she looks like 
death, her mascara's all over the place; no one can tell. The plastic Pepsi bottle and glass 
cigar tube and lighter and packet of glycine bags are a shape in the corner of the rain- 
darkened cloth purse that rests on the floor just below her dangling clogs. Molly Notkin 
is standing with Rutherford Keck and Crosby Baum and a radically bad-postured man 
before the school-supplied Infernatron viewer. Baum's wide back and pompadour 
obscure whatever's on the screen. Academics' voices sound nasal, with a cultivated 
stutter at sentences' start. A good many of James 0. Incandenza's films were silent. He 
was a self-acknowledged visual filmmaker. His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to 
know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the lenses, grinning like 
somebody squinting into bright light. That insufferable child actor Smothergill used to 
contort his face at the boy and he'd just laugh, which sent Smothergill into tantrums 
that Miriam Prickett would resolve in the bathroom somehow. An old Latin-revival CD 
issues at acceptable volume from the speakers screwed into planters and hung with thin 
chains from each corner of the cream ceiling. Another large loose group is dancing in the 
cleared space between the cluster of directorial chairs and the bedroom door, most 
favoring Y.D.A.U.'s Minimal Mambo, this autumn's East Coast anticraze, the dancers 
appearing to be just this side of standing still, the subtlest possible hints of fingers 
snapping under right-angled elbows. Orin Incandenza, she has not forgotten, had a poor 



mottled swollen elbow above a forearm the size of a leg of lamb. He had switched 
neatly from arm to leg. Joelle was Orin Incandenza's only lover for twenty-six months 
and his father's optical beloved for twenty-one. A foreign academic with an almost 
Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis — hired by 
M.l.T. after her time. The better dancers' movements are so tiny they are evocative and 
compel watching, their near-static mass curdled and bent somehow subtly around one 
beautiful young woman, quite beautiful, her back undulating minimally in a thin tight 
blue-and-white-striped sailorish top as she alludes to a cha-cha with maracas empty of 
anything to rattle, watching herself almost dance in the full-length mirror of quality 
plate that after Orin left Joelle had forbidden Jim to hang and had slid beneath her bed 
face-down; now it's the west wall's framed mirror, hung between two empty ornate gilt 
frames Notkin thinks she's been retroironic by having the frames themselves framed, in 
rather less ornate frames, in wry allusion to the early-Experialist fashion of making art 
out of the accessories of artistic presentation, the framed frames hanging not quite 
evenly on either side of the mirror he'd cut for the scenes of that last ghastly thing he'd 
made her stand before, reciting in the openly empty tones she'd gone on to use on-air; 
the girl stands transfixed in alternating horizontal blue and white, then vertically sliced 
by bar-cut sunlight, diced, drunk, so wrecked on good vintage her lips hang slack and the 
reflected cheeks' muscles have lost all integrity and the cheeks jiggle like the 
outstanding paps in her little sailor's top. Apocalyptic rouge and a nose-ring that's either 
electrified or is catching bits of light from the window. She is watching herself with 
unselfconscious fascination in the only serviceable mirror here outside the bathroom. 
This absence of shame at the self-obsession. Is she Canadian? Mirror-cult? Not possibly 
a U.H.I.D.: the bearing's all wrong. But now, whispered to by a near-motionless man in 
an equestrian helmet, she turns abruptly falling away from her own reflection to 
explain, not to the man so much as no one in particular, the whole dancing mass: I was 
just looking at my tits she says looking down at herself aren't they beautiful, and it's 
moving, there's something so heartbreakingly sincere in what she says Joelle wants to 
go to her, tell her it is and will be completely all right, she's pronounced beautiful like 
the earlier interested in four syllables, splitting the diphthong, betraying her class and 
origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid 
or terribly brave, the girl raising her striped arms in triumph or artless thanks for being 
constructed this way, these 'tits,' built by whom and for whom never occurring, artlessly 
ecstatic, she is not drunk Joelle now sees but has taken Ecstasy, Joelle can see, from the 
febrile flush and eyes jacked so wide you can make out brain-meat behind the balls' 
poles, a.k.a. X or MDMA, a beta-something, an early synthetic, emotional acid, the Love 
Drug so-called, big among the artistic young under say Bush and successors, since fallen 
into relative disuse because its pulverizing hangover has been linked to the impulsive 
use of automatic weapons in public venues, a hangover that makes a freebase hangover 
look like a day at the emotional beach, the difference between suicide and homicide 
consisting perhaps only in where you think you discern the cage's door: Would she kill 
somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and 
scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of 
Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door? Had he even cut the tape into something coherent? 



There was nothing coherent in the mother-death-cosmology and apologies she'd 
repeated over and over, inclined over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid¬ 
sided pram. He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than 
ninety days later. Fewer than ninety days? How much must a person want out, to put 
his head in a microwave oven? A dim woman all the kids had known of in Boaz had put 
her cat in a microwave to dry it after a tick-bath and set the oven just on Defrost and the 
cat ended up all over the woman's kitchen's walls. How would you rig the thing so it 
would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light button 
you could hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt? She cannot 
remember thinking of it once in four years. Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining 
veilless over that lens? The woman in love with her own breasts is being congratulated 
with the subtlest possible allusions to clapping hands from barely animate dancers with 
their glass tulips held between their teeth, and Vogelsong of Emerson College tries 
suddenly to stand on his head and is immediately ill in a spreading plum-colored 
ectoplasm the dancers do not even try to evade the spread of, and Joelle applauds the 
Xtatic woman as well, because they are, Joelle admits freely, the paps, they are 
attractive , which in the Union is designated Compelling Within Compatible Relative 
Limits; Joelle has no problem seeing beauty approved, within compatible relative limits; 
she feels not empathy or maternal nurture any longer, just a desire to swallow every last 
drop of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes 
of Too Much Fun, eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all 
doorless cages; and she lets herself slide forward from Melies' lap, a tiny fall, leading 
with her lumpy purse and glass of matte apple juice toward the door beyond the lines of 
a becalmed conga and door-way'd huddles of a warm and well-felt theoretical party. 
And then, again, delays, dithers, and the easement to the bathroom is blocked. She is 
the only veiled woman here, and an academic generation ahead of most of these 
candidates, and rather feared, even though not many know she is an Aural Personality, 
feared for quitting instead of failing, and because of the connection of the memory of 
Jim, and she is given a certain wide social berth, allowed to delay and orbit and stand 
unengaged at the fringes of shifting groups, obliquely glanced at, veil going concave at 
each inbreath, waiting with hip-shot nonchalance for the bathroom off the bedroom to 
clear, laccarino the Chaplin-archivist and a jaundice-yellow older man have gone into 
Molly's bedroom and left the door ajar, waiting nonchalantly, ignoring the foreign 
academic who wishes to know where she works with that veil, turning from him, rudely, 
brain heaving in its bone-box, memorizing every detail like collecting empty shells, 
sipping cloudy juice under neatly lifted corners of veil, now looking at instead of through 
the translucent cloth, the Improbably Deformed's equivalent of closing the eyes in 
concentration on sound, letting the Very Last Party wash over her, passed gracefully by 
different mingling guests and once or twice almost touched, seeing only inrushing and 
then billowing white, listening to different mingling voices the way the unveiled young 
taste wine. 

'This is a technologically constituted space.' 

'— thing opens tight on Remington in a hideous grandfatherly flannel suit, b & w, 
straight full-frontal shot in this grainy b & w stuff Bouvier taught him to manipulate the 



/-stop to mimic that horrid old Super 8, straight full-frontal, staring past the camera, no 
attempt to disguise he's reading off a prompter, monotone and all, saying "Few 
foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common 
jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy's seminal 'Icb bein ein Berliner' was greeted by 
the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political," at which point he aims his 
thumb and finger at his own temple at which point his TA doubles the focal-length so 
there's this giant —' 

'I would die to defend your constitutional right to error, friend, but in this one case 
you —' 

'They used to be less beautiful but then Rutherford said to quit sleeping face-down.' 

'No no I'm saying that this, this whole thing, what you and I are discoursing within, is a 
technologically constituted space.' 

'A du nous avonsfoi au poison.' 

'It's good cheese, but I've had better cheese.' 

'Mainwaring, this is Kirby, Kirby here's in pain, he's been telling me about it and now 
he'd like to tell you about it.' 

'— complete mystery why Eve Plumb didn't show, it's known she'd re-upped for the 
part, the whole rest of them were there, even Henderson and that Davis woman as Alice 
who had to be wheeled out under nurses' care, my God and Peter, looking as if he'd 
eaten nothing but pastry for the past forty years, Greg with that absurd hairpiece and 
snakeskin boots, yes but all the kids recognizable, underneath, somehow, this pre-digital 
insistence on continuity through time that was the project's whole magic and raison, 
you know this, you're current on pre-digital phenomenology and Brady-theory. And 
then but now here's this entirely incongruous middle-aged black woman playing Jan!' 

'De gustibus non est disputandum. 1 

'Balls.' 

'An incongruous central blackness could have served to accentuate the terrible 
whiteness that had been in ineluct —' 

'The entire historical effect of a seminal program was horribly, horribly altered. 
Terribly altered.' 

'Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar.' 

'You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad 
they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.' 

so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but the 
right eye-socket. Then the old socket's fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb doubles 
me over. It won't stay put.' 

'Fucks with the emulsion's gradient so that all the tesseract's angles appear to be 
right-angled, except in —' 

'So what I did I sat right up next to him, you see, so in a sense he didn't have room to 
stalk or draw a bead. Keck had said they needed a good ten m., so I cocked the hat just 
so, just ever so slightly, like so, just cocked it over to the side like so and sat down 
practically on the man's knee, asked after his show-carp, he keeps pedigreed carp, and 
of course you can imagine what —' 

'— more interesting issue from a Heideggerian perspective is a priori, whether space 



as a concept is enframed by technology as a concept.' 

'It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like —' 

'Because they're emotional more labile at that stage.' 

' "So get dentures?" she said. "So get dentures?” " 

'Who shot The Incision? Who did the cinematography on The Incision?' 

way it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something 
more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. 
Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine- 
cue. A recorded delusion. Duquette says he's lost contact with three colleagues. He said 
a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone.' 

'I don't think anyone here would dispute that they're absolutely fetching tits, Melinda.' 

'We had blinis with caviar. There were tartines. We had sweetbreads in mushroom 
cream sauce. He said it was all on him. He said he was treating. There was roast 
artichoke topped with a sort of sly aioli. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate 
rum cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glace and brandy in snifters you needed two 
hands to swirl.' 

'That coke-addled fag in his Morris Mini.' 

The prosthetic film-scholar: 'Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It 
creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to 
learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent all 
creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back. Me, I can 
remember when your Charles was cafe with cream. Look now at it. It is the blue river. 
You have a river outside you that is robin-egg's blue.' 

'I think you mean Great Concavity, Alain.' 

'I meant Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant.' 

'And then it turned out he'd put ipecac in the brandy. It was the most horrible thing 
you've ever seen. Everyone, all over, spouting like whales. I'd heard the term projectile 
vomiting but I never thought that I — you could aim, the pressure was such that you 
could aim. And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth's like overhang, 
and he pulls out a canvas chair and clapper and begins filming the whole horrible 
staggering spouting groaning —' 

This ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor's been going around like a lazy toilet 
since Dishmaster, for Christ's sake. Simply make inquiries, mention some obscure 
foundation grant, obtain the thing through whatever shade of market the thing's alleged 
to be out in. Have a look. See that it's doubtless just high-concept erotica or an hour of 
rotating whorls. Or something like late Makavajev, something that's only entertaining 
after it's over, on reflection.' 

The striated parallelogram of P.M. sunlight is elongating in transit across the coop's 
eastern wall, over bottle-laden sideboard and glass cabinet of antique editing 
equipment and louvered vent and shelves of art-cartridges in their dull black and dun 
cases. The mole-studded man in the equestrian helmet is either winking at her or has a 
tic. There's the pre-suicide's classic longing: Sit down one second, I want to tell you 
everything. My name is Joelle van Dyne, Dutch-lrish, and I was reared on family land 
east of Shiny Prize, Kentucky, the only child of a low-pH chemist and his second wife. I 



now have no accent except under stress. I am 1.7 meters tall and weigh 48 kilograms. I 
occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breathe out. Joelle has never before 
today been conscious of the sustained volition required to just breathe in and breathe 
out, her veil recessing into nose and rounded mouth and then bowing out slightly like 
curtains over an opened pane. 

'Convexity.' 

'Concavity!' 

'Convexity!' 

'Concavity damn your eyes!' 

The bathroom has a hook and a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink and is off the 
bedroom. Molly Notkin's bedroom looks like the bedroom of someone who stays in bed 
for serious lengths of time. A pair of pantyhose has been tossed onto a lamp. There are 
not crumbs but whole portions of crackers protruding from the gray surf of wopsed-up 
bedding. A photo of the phalloneurotic New Yorker with the same fold-out triangular 
support as the blank cartridge's anti-ad. A Ziploc of pot and EZ-Widers and seeds in the 
ashtray. Books with German and Cyrillic titles lie open in spine-cracking attitudes on the 
colorless rug. Joelle's never liked the fact that Notkin's father's photograph is nailed at 
iconic height to the wall above the headboard, a systems planner out of Knoxville TN, his 
smile the smile of a man who wears white loafers and a squirting carnation. And why 
are bathrooms always way brighter lit than whatever room they're off? On the private 
side of the bathroom door she's had to take two damp towels off the top of to close all 
the way, the same rotten old hook for a lock never quite ever seeming to want to fit its 
receptacle in the jamb, the party's music now some horrible collection of mollified rock 
classics with all soft rock's grim dental associations, the business side of the door is hung 
with a Selective Automation of Knoxville calendar from before Subsidized Time and cut¬ 
out photos of Kinski as Paganini and Leaud as Doinel and a borderless still of the crowd 
scene in what looks like Peterson's The Lead Shoes and rather curiously the offprinted 
page of J. van Dyne, M.A.'s one and only published film-theory monograph. 81 Joelle can 
smell, through her veil and own stale exhalations, the little room's complicated spice of 
sandalwood rubble in a little violet-ribboned pomander and deodorant soap and the 
sharp decayed-lemon odor of stress-diarrhea. Low-budget celluloid horror films created 
ambiguity and possible elision by putting ? after THE END, is what pops into her head: 
THE END? amid the odors of mildew and dicky academic digestion? Joelle's mother's 
family had no indoor plumbing. It is all right. She represses all bathetic this-will-be-the- 
last-thing-l-smell thought-patterns. Joelle is going to have Too Much Fun in here. It was 
beyond all else so much fun, at the start. Orin had neither disapproved nor partaken; his 
urine was an open book because of football. Jim hadn't disapproved so much as been 
vacant with disinterest. His Too Much was neat bourbon, and he had lived life to the 
fullest, and then gone in for detoxification, again and again. This had been simply too 
much fun, at the start. So much better even than nasaling the Material up through 
rolled currency and waiting for the cold bitter drip at the back of your throat and 
cleaning the newly spacious apartment to within an inch of its life while your mouth 
twitches and writhes unbidden beneath the veil. The 'base frees and condenses, com¬ 
presses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the 



graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive , sheltered by 
limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if 
watched for an instant by God. She always sees, after inhaling, right at the apex, at the 
graph's spike's tip, Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa,' behind glass, at the Vittoria, for some 
reason, the saint recumbent, half-supine, her flowing stone robe lifted by the angel in 
whose other hand a bare arrow is raised for that best descent, the saint's legs frozen in 
opening, the angel's expression not charity but the perfect vice of barb-headed love. 
The stuff had been not just her encaging god but her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, of 
rock. The toilet seat is up. She can hear a helicopter's chop somewhere overhead east, a 
traffic helicopter over Storrow, and Molly Notkin's shriek as an enormous glass crash 
sounds off in the living room, imagines her beard hanging aslant and her mouth ellipsed 
with champagne's foam as she waves off the breakage that signals good Party, can hear 
through the door the ecstatic Melinda's apologies and Molly's laugh, which sounds like a 
shriek: 

'Oh everything falls off the wall sooner or later.' 

Joelle has lifted her veil back to cover her skull like a bride. Since she threw away her 
pipes and bowls and screens again this A.M. she is going to have to be resourceful. On 
the counter of an old sink the same not-quite white as the floor and ceiling (the 
wallpaper is a maddening uncountable pattern of roses twined in garlands on sticks) on 
the counter are an old splay-bristled toothbrush, tube of Gleem rolled neatly up from 
the bottom, unsavory old NoCoat scraper, rubber cement, NeGram, depilatory oint¬ 
ment, tube of Monostat not squeezed from the bottom, phony-beard whiskerbits and 
curled green threads of used mint floss and Parapectolin and a wholly unsqueezed tube 
of diaphragm-foam and no makeup but serious styling gel in a big jar with no lid and 
hairs around the rim and an empty tampon box half-filled with nickels and pennies and 
rubber bands, and Joelle sweeps an arm across the counter and squunches everything 
over to the side under the small rod with a washcloth wrung viciously out and dried in 
the tight spiral of a twisted cord, and if some items do totter and fall to the floor it is all 
right because everything eventually has to fall. On the cleared counter goes Joelle's 
misshapen purse. The absence of veil dulls the bathroom's smells, somehow. 

She's been resourceful before, but this is the most deliberate Joelle has been able to 
be about it in something like a year. From the purse she removes the plastic Pepsi 
container, a box of wooden matches kept dry in a resealable baggie, two little thick 
glycine bags each holding four grams of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, a single-edge 
razor blade (increasingly tough to find), a little black Kodachrome canister whose gray 
lid she pops and discards to reveal baking soda sifted fine as talc, the empty glass cigar 
tube, a folded square of Reynolds Wrap foil the size of a playing card, and an amputated 
length of the bottom of a quality wire coat hanger. The overhead light casts shadows of 
her hands over what she needs, so she turns on the light over the medicine cabinet's 
mirror as well. The light stutters and hums and bathes the counter with cold lithium-free 
fluorescence. She undoes the four pins and removes the veil from her head and places it 
on the counter with the rest of the Material. Lady Delphina's little glycine baglets have 
clever seals that are green when sealed and blue and yellow when not. She taps half a 
glycine's worth into the cigar tube and adds half again as much baking soda, spilling 



some of the soda in a parenthesis of bright white on the counter. This is the most 
deliberate she's been able to be in at least a year. She turns the sink's C knob and lets 
the water get really cold, then cranks the volume back to a trickle and fills the rest of the 
tube to the top with water. She holds the tube up straight and gently taps on its side 
with a blunt unpainted nail, watching the water slowly darken the powders beneath it. 
She produces a double rose of flame in the mirror that illuminates the right side of her 
face as she holds the tube over the matches' flame and waits for the stuff to begin to 
bubble. She uses two matches, twice. When the tube gets too hot to hold she takes and 
folds her veil and uses it as a kind of oven-mitt over the fingers of her left hand, careful 
(from habit and experience) not to let the bottom corners get close enough to the flame 
to brown. After it's bubbled for just a second Joelle shakes out the matches with a 
flourish and tosses them in the toilet to hear that briefest of hisses. She takes up the 
black wire prod from the hanger and begins to stir and mash the just-bubbled stuff in 
the tube, feeling it thicken quickly and its resistance to the wire's tiny circles increase. It 
was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the cooking procedure that 
she'd first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live. She is 
not stupid. The Charles rolling away far below the windowless bathroom is vividly blue, 
more mildly blue on top from the fresh rainwater that had made purple rings appear 
and widen, a deeper Magic Marker-type blue below the dilute layer, gulls stamped to 
the cleared sky, motionless as kites. A bulky thump sounds from behind the large flat- 
top Enfield hill on the river's south shore, a large but relatively shapeless projectile of 
drums wrapped in brown postal paper and belted with twine hurtling in a broad upward 
arc that bothers the gulls into dips and wheels, the brown package quickly a pinpoint in 
the yet-hazy sky to the north, where a yellow-brown cloud hangs just above the line 
between sky and terrain, its top slowly dispersing and opening out so that the cloud 
looks like a not very pretty sort of wastebasket, waiting. Inside, Joelle hears only a bit of 
the bulky thump, which could be anything. The only other thing besides what she's 
about to do too much of here right now she'd ever come close to feeling this way about: 
In Joelle's childhood, Paducah, not too bad a drive from Shiny Prize, still had a few public 
movie theaters, six and eight separate auditoria clustered in single honeycombs at the 
edges of interstate malls. The theaters always ended in -plex, she reflected. The 
Thisoplex and Thatoplex. It had never struck her as odd. And she never saw even one 
film there, as a girl, that she didn't just about die with love for. It didn't matter what 
they were. She and her own personal Daddy up in the front row, they sat in the front 
rows of the narrow little overinsulated -plexes up in neck-crick territory and let the 
screen fill their whole visual field, her hand in his lap and their big box of Crackerjacks in 
her hand and sodapops secure in little rings cut out of the plastic of their seats' arms; 
and he, always with a wooden match in the corner of his mouth, pointing up into the 
rectangular world at this one or that one, performers, giant flawless 2D beauties irides¬ 
cent on the screen, telling Joelle over and over again how she was prettier than this one 
or that one right there. Standing in the placid line as he bought the -plex's paper tickets 
that looked like grocery receipts, knowing that she was going to love the celluloid 
entertainment no matter what it was, wonderfully innocent, still thinking quality 
referred to the living teddy bears in Qantas commercials, standing hand-held, eyes even 



with his wallet's back-pocket bulge, she'd never so much again as in that line felt so 
taken care of, destined for big-screen entertainment's unalloyed good fun, never once 
again until starting in with this lover, cooking and smoking it, five years back, before 
Incandenza's death, at the start. The punter never made her feel quite so taken care of, 
never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn't know she was there 
and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind. 

The improbable thing of the whole thing is that, when the soda and water and cocaine 
are mixed right and heated right and stirred just right as the mix cools down, then when 
the stuff's too stiff to stir and is finally ready to come on out it comes out slick as shit 
from a goat, just an inverted-ketchup-bottle thump and out the son of a fucking whore 
slides, one molded cylinder hardened onto the black wire, its snout round from the glass 
tube's bottom. The average pre-chopped freebase rock looks like a .38 round. What 
Joelle now slides with three fillips from the cigar tube is a monstrous white wiener, a 
county-fair corn dog, its sides a bit rough, like mache, a couple clots left on the inside of 
the tube that are what you forage and smoke before the Chore Boys and panties. 

She is now a little under two deliberate minutes from Too Much Fun for anyone 
mortal to hope to endure. Her unveiled face in the dirty lit mirror is shocking in the 
intensity of its absorption. Out in the bedroom doorway she can hear Reeves 
Mainwaring telling some helium-voiced girl that life is essentially one long search for an 
ashtray. Too Much Fun. She uses the razor blade to cross-section chunks out of the 
freebase wiener. You can't whittle thin deli-shaved flakes off because they'll crumble 
back to powder right away and they anyway don't smoke as well as you'd think. Blunt 
chunks are S.O.P. Joelle chops out enough chunks for maybe twenty good-sized hits. 
They form a little quarry on the soft cloth of her folded veil on the counter. Her Brazilian 
skirt is no longer damp. Reeves Mainwaring's blond imperial often had little bits of food 
residue in it. 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa' is on perpetual display at the Vittoria in Rome 
and she never got to see it. She will never again say And Lo and invite people to watch 
darkness dance on the face of the deep. 'The Face of the Deep' had been the title she'd 
suggested for Jim's unseen last cartridge, which he'd said would be too pretentious and 
then used that skull-fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene instead, which talk 
about pretentious she'd laughed. His frightened look when she'd laughed is for the life 
of her the last facial-expression memory she can remember of the man. Orin had 
referred to his father sometimes as Himself and sometimes as The Mad Stork and once 
in a slip as The Sad Stork. She lights one wooden match and blows it right out and 
touches the hot black head to the side of the plastic pop bottle. It melts right through 
and makes a little hole. The helicopter was probably a traffic helicopter. Somebody at 
their Academy had had some connection to some traffic helicopter that had had an 
accident. She can't for the life of her. No one out there knows she is in here getting 
ready to have Too Much. She can hear Molly Notkin calling through rooms about has 
anyone seen Keck. In her first theory seminar Reeves Mainwaring had called one film 
'wretchedly ill-conceived' and another 'desperately acquiescent' and Molly Notkin had 
pretended to have a coughing fit and had had a Tennessee accent and that was how 
they met. The Reynolds Wrap is to make a screen that will rest in the bottle's open top. 
A regular dope screen is the size of a thimble, its sides spread like an opening bud. Joelle 



uses the point of some curved nail scissors on the back of the toilet to poke tiny holes in 
the rectangle of aluminum foil and shapes it into a shallow funnel large enough to 
siphon gasoline, narrowing its tip to fit in the bottle's mouth. She now owns a pipe with 
a monster-sized bowl and screen, now, and puts in enough chunklets to make five or six 
hits at once. The little rocks lie there piled and yellow-white. She puts her lips 
experimentally to the melted hole in the side of the bottle and draws, then, very delib¬ 
erately, lights another match and extinguishes it and makes the hole bigger. The idea 
that she'll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers 
and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked 
Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and banal. The idea of what she's 
about in here contains all other ideas and makes them banal. Her glass of juice is on the 
back of the toilet, half-empty. The back of the toilet is lightly sheened with condensation 
of unknown origin. These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many 
specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about 
to make her heart explode has assumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an 
idea but now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming concrete the 
more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of 
abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete 
things? Molly Notkin's middle name is Cantrell. Joelle puts two more matches together 
and prepares to strike them, breathing rapidly in and out like a diver preparing for a long 
descent. 

'I say is someone in there?' The voice is the young post-New Formalist from Pittsburgh 
who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won't stay tight, with that hesitant 
knocking of when you know perfectly well someone's in there, the oathroom door 
composed of thirty-six that's three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled 
squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom 
outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets' bottom 
drawer's wicked metal knob, through the door and offset 'Red' and glowering actors and 
calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spiral of pale blue smoke from the 
elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel's cone, the 
smoke's baby-blanket blue that's sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted 
washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, 
the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky's blue that's left her uprightly fetal with chin on 
knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe 
the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the 
radiant chill of the claw-footed tub's porcelain, Molly's had somebody lacquer the tub in 
blue, lacquer, she's holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the last generation 
was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier 
by far than any of the peach-colored titans they'd gazed up at, his hand in her lap her 
hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun 
inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it's 
still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow's best 
descent, so good she can't stand it and reaches out for the cold tub's rim's cold edge to 
pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic 



precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speakers blow, people barely twitching 
and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying 'We've Only 
Just Begun,' Joelle's limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowl¬ 
edgment of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, 
and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin 
roses of flame still hanging in the glass's corner, hair of the flame she's eaten now 
trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced 
veil and what's inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make 
the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver — 

'Look here then who's that in there? Is someone in there? Do open up. I'm on one foot 
then the other out here. I say Notkin someone's been in here locked in and, well, 
sounding unwell, amid rather a queer scent.' 

— and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub's lip 
revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice 
and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear 
again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids' blood, bladed vessels aloft in 
the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, 
searching. 


Enfield MA is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro 
Boston, because it is a township composed almost entirely of medical, corporate, and 
spiritual facilities. A kind of arm-shape extending north from Commonwealth Avenue 
and separating Brighton into Upper and Lower, its elbow nudging East Newton's ribs and 
its fist sunk into Allston, Enfield's broad municipal tax-base includes St. Elizabeth's 
Hospital, Franciscan Children's Hospital, The Universal Bleacher Co., the Provident Nurs¬ 
ing Home, Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems Inc., the Enfield Marine Public Health 
Hospital Complex, the Svelte Nail Co., half the metro Boston turbine and generating 
stations of Sunstrand Power and Light (the part that gets taxed is in incorporated 
Allston), corporate headquarters for 'The ATHSCME Family of Air-Displacement 
Effectuators' (meaning they make really big fans), the Enfield Tennis Academy, St. John 
of God Hospital, Hanneman Orthopedic Hospital, the Leisure Time Ice Company, a 
Dicalced monastery, the combined St. John's Seminary and offices for the RCC's Boston 
Archdiocese (partly in Upper Brighton; neither half taxed), convent headquarters of The 
Sisters for Africa, the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, the Dr. George Roebling 
Runyon Memorial Institute for Podiatric Research, regional shiny-truck, land-barge, and 
catapult facilities for the O.N.A.N.-subsidized Empire Waste Displacement Co. (what the 
Quebecois call les trebuchets noirs, spectacular block-long catapults that make a sound 
like a giant stamping foot as they fling great twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the 
subannular regions of the Great Concavity at a parabolic altitude exceeding 5 km.; the 
devices' slings are of alloy-belted elastic and their huge cupped vehicle-receptacles like 
catcher's mitts from hell, a half dozen or so of the catapults in this like blimp-hangarish 
thing with a selectively slide-backable roof, taking up a good six square blocks of 
Enfield's brachiform incursion into the Allston Spur, occasional school tours tolerated 



but not encouraged), and so on. W/ the whole flexed Enfield limb sleeved in a perimeter 
layer of light residential and mercantile properties. The Enfield Tennis Academy 
occupies probably now the nicest site in Enfield, some ten years after balding and 
shaving flat the top of the big abrupt hill that constitutes a kind of raised cyst on the 
township's elbow, the better part of 75 hectares of broad lawns and cloverleafing paths 
and topologically cutting-edge erections, 32 asphalt tennis courts and sixteen Har-Tru 
composition tennis courts and extensive underground maintenance and storage and 
athletic-training facilities and briers and caIliopsis and pines mixed artfully in on the 
inclines with deciduous trees, the E.T.A. hilltop overlooking on one side, east, historic 
Commonwealth Avenue's acclivated migration out of the squalor of Lower Brighton — 
liquor stores and Laundromats and bars and palisades of somber and guano-dappled 
tenement facades, the huge and brooding Brighton Project high-rises with three-story- 
high orange I.D.-numerals on the sides, plus liquor stores, and pale men in leather and 
whole gangs of pale children in leather on the corners and Greek-owned pizza places 
with yellow walls and dirty corner markets owned by Orientals who try like heck to keep 
their sidewalks clean but can t, even with hoses, plus the quarter-hourly trundle and 
ding of the Green Line train's labor up the Ave.'s long rise to Boston College — into the 
spiky elegance of B.C. and the broad gentrification of Newton out to the west, where 
the haze-haloed Boston sun drops behind the last node in the four-km. sine wave that is 
collectively called the historic April Marathon's 'Heartbreak Hill,' the sun always setting 
fifteen minutes to the nanosecond after deLint turns on the courts' high-tower lights. To 
I think it must be the southwest, E.T.A. overlooks the steely gray tangle of Sunstrand's 
transformers and high-voltage grids and coaxial chokers strung with beads of ceramic 
insulators, with not one Sunstrand smokestack anywhere in sight but a monstrous 
mega-ohm insulator-cluster at the terminus of a string of signs trailing in from the 
northeast, each sign talking with many 0's about how many annular-generated amps are 
waiting underground for anyone who digs or in any way dicks around, with hair-raising 
nonverbal stick-figure symbols of somebody with a shovel going up like a Kleenex in the 
fireplace. There are smokestacks in the visual background slightly south of Sunstrand, 
though, from the E.W.D. hangars, each stack with a monstrous ATHSCME 2100-Series 
A.D.E. (fan) bolted behind it and blowing due north with an insistent high-pitched fury 
that is somehow soothing, aurally, at E.T.A.'s distance and height. From both the north 
and northeast tree-lines E.T.A. looks down its hill's steepest, best-planted decline into 
the complexly decaying grounds of Enfield Marine. 



5 NOVEMBER —YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


The transparent phone sounded from somewhere under the hill of bedding 82 as Hal 
was on the edge of the bed with one leg up and his chin on its knee, clipping his nails 
into a wastebasket that sat several meters away in the middle of the room. It took four 
rings to find the receiver in the bedding and pull the antenna out. 

'Mmmyellow.' 

'Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we've 
had enough shit out of you.' 

'Hello Orin.' 

'How hangs it, kid.' 

'God, please no, please 0., not more Separatism questions.' 

'Relax. Never crossed my mind. Social call. Shoot the breeze.' 

'Interesting you should call just now. Because I'm clipping my toenails into a 
wastebasket several meters away.' 

'Jesus, you know how I hate the sound of nail clippers.' 

'Except I'm shooting seventy-plus percent. The little fragments of clipping. It's 
uncanny. I keep wanting to go out in the hall and get somebody in here to see it. But I 
don't want to break the spell.' 

'The fragile magic-spell feel of those intervals where it feels you just can't miss.' 

'It's definitely one of those can't-miss intervals. It's just like that magical feeling on 
those rare days out there playing. Playing out of your head, deLint calls it. Loach calls it 
The Zone. Being in The Zone. Those days when you feel perfectly calibrated.' 

'Coordinated as God.' 

'Some groove in the shape of the air of the day guides everything down and in.' 

'When you feel like you couldn't miss if you tried to.' 

'I'm so far away the wastebasket's mouth looks more like a slot than a circle. And yet 
in they go, ka-ching ka-ching. There went another one. Even the misses are near-misses, 
caroms off the rim.' 

'I'm sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep- 
tissue therapist's ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition mountains. 
Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom's redwood-panelled and overlooks a 
precipice. The sunlight's the color of the bronze.' 

'But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the 
grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don't want to change even the 
smallest detail. You don't know what concordance of factors and variables yields that 
calibrated can't-miss feeling, and you don't want to soil the magic by trying to figure it 
out, but you don't want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your 



angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart's in your throat every time you change sides of 
the court.' 

'You start to get like a superstitious native. What's the word propitiate the divine 
spell.' 

'I suddenly understand the gesundheit-impulse, the salt over the shoulder and 
apotropaic barn-signs. I'm actually frightened to switch feet right now. I'm clipping off 
the tiniest aerodynamically viable clippings possible, to prolong the time on this foot, in 
case the magic's a function of the foot. This isn't even the good foot.' 

'These can't-miss intervals make superstitious natives out of us all, Hallie. The 
professional football player's maybe the worst superstitious native of all the sports. 
That's why all the high-tech padding and garish Lycra and complex play-terminology. 
The like self-reassuring display of high-tech. Because the bug-eyed native's lurking just 
under the surface, we know. The bug-eyed spear-rattling grass-skirted primitive, feeding 
virgins to Popogatapec and afraid of planes.' 

'The new Discursive O.E.D. says the Ahts of Vancouver used to cut virgins' throats and 
pour the blood very carefully into the orifices of the embalmed bodies of their 
ancestors.' 

'I can hear those clippers. Quit with the clippers a second.' 

'The phone's no longer wedged under my jaw. I can even do it one-handed, holding 
the phone in one hand. But it's still the same foot.' 

'You don't know from true bug-eyed athletic superstition till you hit the pro ranks, 
Hallie. When you hit the Show is when you'll understand primitive. Winning streaks 
bring the native bubbling up to the surface. Jock straps unwashed game after game until 
they stand up by themselves in the overhead luggage compartments of planes. Bizarrely 
ritualized dressing, eating, peeing.' 

'Micturation.' 

'Picture a 200-kilo interior lineman insisting on sitting down to pee. Don't even ask 
what wives and girlfriends have to suffer during a can't-miss winning streak.' 

'I don't want to hear sexual stuff.' 

'Then there are the players who write down exactly what they say to everybody 
before a game, so if it's a magical can't-miss-type game they can say exactly the same 
things to the same people in the same exact order before the next game.' 

'Apparently the Ahts tried to fill up ancestors' bodies completely with virgin-blood to 
preserve the privacy of their own mental states. The apposite Aht dictum here being 
quote "The sated ghost cannot see secret things." The Discursive O.E.D. postulates that 
this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.' 'Hey Hallie?' 

'After a burial, rural Papineau-region Quebecers purportedly drill a small hole down 
from ground level all the way down through the lid of the coffin, to let out the soul, if it 
wants out.' 

'Hey Hallie? I think I'm being followed.' 

'This is the big moment. I've totally exhausted the left foot finally and am switching to 
the right foot. This'll be the real test of the fragility of the spell.' 'I said I think I'm being 
followed.' 'Some men are born to lead, 0.' 'I'm serious. And here's the weird part.' 

'Here's the part that explains why you're sharing this with your estranged little brother 



instead of with anybody whose credulity you'd actually value.' 

'The weird part is I think I'm being followed by ... by handicapped people.' 

'Two for three on the right foot, with one carom. Jury's still out.' 'Quit with the clipping 
a second. I'm not kidding. Take the other day. I strike up a conversation with a certain 
Subject in line in the post office. I notice a guy in a wheelchair behind us. No big deal. 
Are you listening?' 'What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. 
And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says.' 

'But so the conversation goes well and hits it off. Seduction Strategies 12 and 16 are 
employed, which I'll tell you about sometime at length. The point is the Subject and I 
walk out together hitting it off and there's another guy in a wheelchair whittling in the 
shade of a shop-awning just down the street. OK. Still not necessarily any kind of deal. 
But now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park —' 

'Phoenix has trailer parks? Not those silverish metal trailers.' 

'So but we get out of the car, and across the park's lot here's yet another wheelchaired 
guy, trying to maneuver in the gravel and not making a very good job of it.' 

'Doesn't Arizona have more than its share of the old and infirm?' 

'But none of these handicapped guys were old. And they were all awfully burly for 
guys in wheelchairs. And three in an hour's kind of stretching it, I was thinking.' 

'I always picture you having your little trysts in more domestic suburban settings. Or 
else tall motels with exotically shaped beds. Do women in metal trailers even have small 
children?' 

'This one had very sweet little twin girls who played very quietly with blocks without 
supervision the whole time.' 

'Cockle-warming, 0.' 

'And but so the point is I decamp the trailer like x number of hours later, and the guy's 
still there, mired in gravel. And in the distance I could swear he's got on some kind of 
domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a 
statistically improbable number of wheel-chaired figures around, lurking, somehow just 
a little too nonchalantly.' 

'Very shy fans, possibly? Some club of leg-dysfunctional people all obsessed in that 
shy-fan-like way with one of the first North American sports figures people think of in 
connection with the word leg?' 

'It's probably my imagination. A dead bird fell in my Jacuzzi.' 

'But now let me ask you a couple questions.' 

'This all wasn't even why I originally called.' 

'But you brought up trailer parks and trailers. I need to confirm some suspicions — 
two points, right in there, ka-ching. Never having been in a trailer, and even the 
Discursive O.E.D. having pretty much of a lacuna where trailer-park trailers are 
concerned.' 

'And this is the one supposedly nonbats family-member I call. This is who I reach out 
to.' 

'It'd be whom, I think. But this trailer. This lady you met's trailer. Confirm or deny the 
following. Its carpet was wall-to-wall and extremely thin, a kind of burnt yellow or 
orange.' 



'Yes.' 

'The living-room or like den area contained some or all of the following: a black velvet 
painting featuring an animal; a videophonic diorama on some sort of knickknack shelf; a 
needlepoint sampler with some kind of frothy biblical saw on it; at least one piece of 
chintz furniture with protective doilies on the arms; a Smoke-B-Gone air-filtration 
ashtray; the last couple years' Reader's Digests neatly displayed in their own special 
inclined magazine rack.' 

'Check on velvet painting of leopard, sampler sofa with doilies, ashtray. No Reader's 
Digests. This isn't especially funny, Hallie. The Moms comes out in you in these odd little 
ways sometimes.' 

'Last one. The trailer-person's name. Jean. May. Nora. Vera. Nora-Jean or Vera-May.' 

l l 

'That was my question.' 

'I guess I'll have to get back to you on that.' 

'Boy, you really put the small r in romance, don't you.' 

'But why I'm calling.' 

'It's not clear whether the fragile can't-miss magic's still in force on the right foot. I'm 
seven for nine, but there's a whole different feel of somehow deliberately trying to get 
them in.' 

'Hallie, I've got somebody from Moment fucking magazine out here doing a quote soft 
profile.' 

'You've got what?' 

'A human-interest thing. On me as a human. Moment doesn't do hard sports, this lady 
says. They're more people-oriented, human-interest. It's for something called quote 
People Right Now, a section.' 

'Moment's a supermarket-checkout-lane-display magazine. It's in there with the 
rodneys and gum. Lateral Alice Moore reads it. It's all over C.T.'s waiting room. They did 
a thing on the little blind Illinois kid Thorp thought so well of.' 

'Hal.' 

'I think Lateral Alice spends a lot of time in grocery-store checkout lanes, which if you 
think about it are almost the ideal environment for her.' 

'Hal.' 

'...Being that she can just locomote sideways right on through.' 

'Hallie, this physically imposing Moment girl's asking all these soft-profilesque family- 
background questions.' 

'She wants to know about Himself?' 

'Everybody. You, the Mad Stork, the Moms. It's gradually emerging it's going to be 
some sort of memorial to the Stork as patriarch, everybody's talents and 
accomplishments profiled as some sort of refracted tribute to el Storko's careers.' 

'He always did cast a long shadow, you said.' 

'Of course and my first thought is to invite her to go piss up a string. But Moment's 
been in touch with the team. The front office's indicated a soft profile would be positive 
for the team. Cardinal Stadium isn't exactly groaning under the weight of all the fannies, 
winning streak or no. I've also thought of referring her to Bain, let Bain rant at her or 



send her letters just trying to unparse for quotes'd take her a month.' 

'Her as in female. Not your typical Orin-type subject. A hardened, fast-lane, gum¬ 
cracking, maybe even small-childless journalist-type female, in from New Youok on the 
red-eye. Plus you said imposing.' 

'Not all that tough or hard, but physically imposing. Large but not un-erotic. A girl and 
a half in all directions.' 

'A girl to dominate the space of any trailer she lives in.' 

'Enough with the trailerisms.' 

'The strained quality is me trying to speak and pick caromed toenail-parings up off the 
floor at the same time.' 

'This girl's immune to most of your standard conversational distractions.' 

'You're afraid you're losing your touch. An immune girl and a half.' 

'I said distraction not seduction.' 

'You kind of wisely avoid any female who you suspect could beat you up if things came 
down to that.' 

'She's more imposing than like most of our starting backfield. But weirdly sexy. The 
linemen are gaga. The tackles keep making all these cracks about does she maybe want 
to see their hard profile.' 

'Let's hope her prose is better than whoever did that human-interest thing on the 
blind kid last spring. Have you bounced this new fear of the handicapped off her?' 

'Listen. You of all people should know I have zero intent of forthrightly answering any 
stained-family-linen-type questions from anybody, much less somebody who takes 
shorthand. Physical charms or no.' 

'You and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Quebec and 
Royal Victoria, the Moms and immigration. Himself and annulation. Himself and Lyle, 
Himself and distilled spirits. Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle, 
the Moms and C.T., you v. the Moms, E.T.A., nonexistent films, et cetera.' 

'But you can see how it's all going to get me thinking. How to avoid being forthright 
about the Stork material unless I know what the really forthright answers would be.' 

'Everybody said you'd regret not coming to the funeral. But I don't think this is what 
they meant.' 

'For example the Stork took himself down before C.T. moved in upstairs at HmH? or 
after?' 


'This is you asking me?' 

'Don't make this appalling for me, Hal.' 

'I wouldn't dream of even trying.' 

l l 

'Immediately before. Two, three days before. C.T. had had what's now deLint's room, 
next to Schtitt's, in Comm.-Ad.' 'And Dad knew they were... ?' 

'Very close? I don't know, 0.' 

'You don't know?' 

'Mario might know. Like to chew the fat with Booboo on this, 0.?' 



Don't make this like this Hallie. 


'And Dad... the Mad Stork put his head in the oven?' 

f f 

l l 

'The microwave, 0. The rotisserie microwave over next to the fridge, on the freezer 
side, on the counter, under the cabinet with the plates and bowls to the left of the 
fridge as you face the fridge.' 

'A microwave oven.' 

'That is a Rog and Wile, 0.' 

'Nobody ever said microwave.' 

'I think it came out generally at the funeral.' 

'I keep getting your point, if you're wondering.' 

f f 

'So where was he found, then?' 

'20 for 28 is what, 65%?' 

'It's not like this is all that —' 

'The microwave was in the kitchen I already explained, 0.' 

'All right.' 

'All right.' 

'So OK now, who would you say speaks most about the guy, keeps his memory alive, 
verbally, the most now: you, C.T., or the Moms?' 

'I think it's a three-way tie.' 

'So it's never mentioned. Nobody talks about him. It's taboo.' 

'But you seem to be forgetting somebody.' 

'Mario talks about him. About it.' 

'Sometimes.' 

'To what and/or who all this talking?' 

'To me, for one, I suppose.' 

'And so you do talk about it, but only to him, and only after he initiates it.' 

'Orin I lied. I haven't even started on the right foot yet. I've been too afraid to change 
my angle of approach to the nails. The right foot's a whole different angle of approach. 
I'm afraid the magic is left-foot-dependent. I'm like your superstitious lineman. Talking 
about it's broken the spell. Now I'm self-conscious and afraid. I've been sitting here on 
the edge of the bed with my right knee up under my chin, poised, studying the foot, 
frozen with aboriginal terror. And lying about it to my own brother.' 

'Can I ask you who it was who found him? His — who found him at the oven?' 

'Found by one Harold James Incandenza, thirteen going on really old.' 

'You were who found him? Not the Moms?' 


'Listen, may I ask why this sudden interest after four years 216 days, and with two 
years of that not even once even calling?' 

'I've already said I don't feel safe not answering Helen's questions if I haven't got a 




handle on what I'm not saying.' 

'Helen. So you did.' 

'Is why.' 

'I'm still frozen, by the way. The self-consciousness that kills the magic is getting worse 
and worse. This is why Pemulis and Troeltsch always seem to let a lead slip away. The 
standard term is Tightening Up. The clippers are poised, blades on either side of the nail. 

I just can't achieve the unconsciousness to actually clip. Maybe it was cleaning up the 
few that missed. Suddenly the wastebasket seems small and far away. I've lost the 
magic by talking about it instead of just giving in to it. Launching the nail out toward the 
wastebasket now seems like an exercise in telemachry.' 

'You mean telemetry?' 

'How embarrassing. When the skills go they go.' 

'Listen 

'You know, why don't you go ahead and ask me whatever standard ghoulish questions 
you want not to answer. This may be your only shot. Usually I seem not to talk about it.' 

'Was she there? The P.G.O.A.T.?' 

'Joelle hadn't been around the grounds since you two split up. You knew about that. 
Himself met her at the brownstone, shooting. I'm sure you know way more about 
whatever it was they were trying to make. Joelle and Himself. Himself went 
underground too. C.T. was already doing most of the day-to-day administration. Himself 
was down in that little post-production closet off the lab for like a solid month. Mario'd 
bring food and ... essentials down. Sometimes he'd eat with Lyle. I don't think he came 
up to ground level for at least a month, except for just one trip out to Belmont to 
McLean's for a two-day purge and detox. This was about a week after he came back. 
He'd flown off somewhere for three days, for what the impression I get was work- 
related business. Film-related. If Lyle didn't go with him Lyle went somewhere, because 
he wasn't in the weight room. I know Mario didn't go with him and didn't know what 
was up. Mario doesn't lie. It was unclear whether he'd finished whatever he was editing. 
Himself I mean. He stopped living on April First, if you weren't sure, was the day. I can 
tell you on April First he wasn't back by the time P.M. matches started, because I'd been 
around the lab door right after lunch and he wasn't back.' 

'He went in for another detox you say. In what, March?' 

'The Moms herself emerged and risked exterior transit and took him herself, so I 
gather it was urgent.' 

'He quit drinking in January, Hal. It was something Joelle was real specific about. She 
called even after we'd agreed not to call and told me about it even after I said I didn't 
want to hear about him if she was going to still be in his things. She said he hadn't had a 
drop in weeks. It was her condition for letting him put her in what he was doing. She 
said he said he'd do anything.' 

'Well, I don't know what to tell you. By this time it was hard to tell whether he'd been 
ingesting anything or not. Apparently at a certain point it stops making a difference.' 

'Did he have film-related things with him when he flew somewhere? A film case? 
Equipment?' 

'0., I didn't see him leave and didn't see him come back. He wasn't around by match- 



time, I know. Freer beat me badly and fast. It was 4 and 1, 4 and 2, something, and we 
were the first ones done. I came around HmH to do an emergency load of laundry 
before dinner. This was around 1630. I came over and came in and noticed something 
right away.' 

'And found him.' 

'And went to get the Moms, then changed my mind and went to get C.T., then 
changed my mind and went to get Lyle, but the first authority figure I ran into was 
Schtitt. Who was irreproachably brisk and efficient and sensible about everything and 
turned out to be just the authority figure to go get in the first place.' 

'I didn't even think a microwave oven would go on unless the door was closed. What 
with microwaves oscillating all over, inside. I thought there was like a refrigerator-light 
or Read-Only-tab-like device.' 

'You seem to be forgetting the technical ingenuity of the person we're talking about.' 

'And you were totally shocked and traumatized. He was asphyxuated, irradiated, 
and/or burnt.' 

'As we later reconstructed the scene, he'd used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to 
make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he'd gotten his head in he'd 
carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.' 

'Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 

'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.' 

i i 

'And there was a large and half-full bottle of Wild Turkey found on the counter not far 
away, with a large red decorative giftwrappish bow on the neck.' 

'On the bottle's neck, you mean.' 

'That is a Rog.' 

'As in he hadn't been sober after all.' 

'That would seem to follow, 0.' 

'And he left no note or living-will-type video or communique of any kind.' 

'0, I know you know very well he didn't. You're now asking me stuff I know you know, 
besides criticizing him and making sobriety-claims when you weren't anywhere near the 
scene or the funeral. Are we just about through here? I've got a whole long-nailed foot 
waiting for me here.' 

'As you reconstructed the scene, you just said.' 

'Also it just hit me I've got a library book I was supposed to return. I'd forgotten all 
about it. Kertwang.' 

' "Reconstructed the scene" as in the scene when you found him was somehow ... 
deconstructed?' 

'You of all people, 0. You know that was the one word he hated more than —' 

'So burned, then. Just say it. He was really really badly burned.' 

I l 

'No, wait. Asphyxuated. The packed foil was to preserve the vacuum in a space that 
got automatically evacuated as soon as the magnitron started oscillating and generating 
the microwaves.' 

'Magnitron? What do you know about magnitrons and oscillators? Aren't you the 



brother of mine who has to be reminded which way to turn the ignition key in a car?' 

'Brief liaison with this one Subject who used to model at kitchen-appliance trade 
shows.' 

l l 

'It was kind of a brutal brand of modelling. She'd stand there on a huge rotating Lazy 
Susan in a one-piece with one thigh turned in and a hand out palm-up, indicating the 
appliance next to her. Stood there smiling and spinning day after day. She'd stagger 
around half the evening trying to get her balance back.' 

'Did this subject by any chance explain to you how microwaves actually cook things?' 

l l 

'Or have you for example, say, ever like baked a potato in a microwave oven? Did you 
know you have to cut the potato open before you turn the oven on? Do you know why 
that is?' 

'Jesus.' 

'The B.P.D. 83 field pathologist said the build-up of internal pressures would have been 
almost instantaneous and equivalent in kg.s.cm. to over two sticks of TNT.' 

'Jesus Christ, Hallie.' 

'Hence the need to reconstruct the scene.' 

'Jesus.' 

'Don't feel bad. There's no guarantee anybody would have told you even if you'd 
popped in for, say, the memorial service. I for one wasn't exactly a jabberjaw at the 
time. I seemed to have been evincing shock and trauma throughout the whole funeral 
period. What I mostly recall is a great deal of quiet talk about my psychic well-being. It 
got so I kind of enjoyed popping in and out of rooms just to enjoy the quiet 
conversations stopping in mid-clause.' 

'You must have been traumatized beyond fucking belief.' 

'Your concern is much appreciated, believe me.' 

l l 

'Trauma seems to have been the consensus. It turns out Rusk and the Moms had 
begun interviewing top-flight trauma- and grief-counselors for me within hours after it 
happened. I was shunted directly into concentrated grief- and trauma-therapy. Four 
days a week for over a month, right in the April-May gearing-up-for-summer-tour 
period. I lost two spots on the 14's ladder just because of all the P.M. matches I missed. I 
missed the Hard Court Qualies and would have missed Indianapolis if... if I hadn't finally 
figured out the grief- and trauma-therapy process.' 

'But it helped. Ultimately. The grief-therapy.' 

'The therapy ended up taking place in that Professional Building right up Comm. Ave. 
past the Sunstrand Plaza by Lake Street, the one with bricks the color of Thousand Island 
dressing we all run by four days a week. Who was to know one of the continent's top 
grief-men was right up the street.' 

'The Moms didn't want the process going on too far from the old web, if need be, I'm 
sure.' 

'This grief-counselor insisted I call him by his first name, which I forget. A large red 
meaty character with eyebrows at a demonic-looking synclinal angle and very small 



nubbly gray teeth. And a mustache. He always had the remains of a sneeze in his 
mustache. I got to know that mustache very well. His face had that same blood-pressure 
flush C.T.'s face gets. And let's not even go into the man's hands.' 

'The Moms had Rusk shunt you to a top grief-pro so she wouldn't have to feel guilty 
about practically sawing the hole in the microwave door herself. Among other little guilt 
and antiguilt operations. She always did believe Himself was doing more with Joelle than 
work. Poor old Himself never had eyes for anybody but the Moms.' 

'This was one tough hombre, 0., this grief-counselor. He made a Rusk-session look like 
a day on the Adriatic. He wouldn't let up: "How did it feel, how does it feel, how do you 
feel when I ask how it feels." 

'Rusk always reminded me of a freshman fumbling with some Subject's bra, the way 
she'd sort of tug and fumble at your head.' 

'The man was unsatisfiable and scary. Those eyebrows, that ham-rind face, bland little 
eyes. He never once turned his face away or looked away at anything but right at me. It 
was the most brutal six weeks of full-bore professional conversation anybody could 
imagine.' 

'With fucking C.T. already moving his collection of platform shoes and unconvincing 
hairpieces and StairMaster in upstairs at HmH already.' 

'The whole thing was nightmarish. I just could not figure out what the guy wanted. I 
went down and chewed through the Copley Square library's grief section. Not disk. The 
actual books. I read Kubler-Ross, Hinton. I slogged through Kastenbaum and 
Kastenbaum. I read things like Elizabeth Harper Neeld's Seven Choices: Taking the Steps 
to New Life After Losing Someone You Love, 84 which was 352 pages of sheer goo. I went 
in and presented with textbook-perfect symptoms of denial, bargaining, anger, still 
more denial, depression. I listed my seven textbook choices and vacillated plausibly 
between and among them. I provided etymological data on the word acceptance all the 
way back to Wyclif and 14th-century langue-d'oc French. The grief-therapist was having 
none of it. It was like one of those final exams in nightmares where you prepare 
immaculately and then you get there and all the exam questions are in Hindi. I even 
tried telling him Himself was miserable and pancreatitic and out of his tree half the time 
by then anyway, that he and the Moms were basically estranged, that even work and 
Wild Turkey weren't helping anymore, that he was despondent about something he was 
editing that turned out so bad he didn't want it released. That the... that what happened 
was probably kind of a mercy, in the end.' 

'Himself didn't suffer, then. In the microwave.' 

'The B.P.D. field pathologist who drew the chalk lines around Himself's shoes on the 
floor said maybe ten seconds tops. He said the pressure buildup would have been 
almost instantaneous. Then he gestured at the kitchen walls. Then he threw up. The 
field pathologist.' 

'Jesus Christ, Hallie.' 

'But the grief-therapist was having none of it, the at-least-his-suffering's-over angle 
that Kastenbaum and Kastenbaum said is basically a neon-bright sign of real acceptance. 
This grief-therapist hung on like a Gila monster. I even tried telling him I really didn't feel 
anything.' 



'Which was a fiction.' 

'Of course it was a fiction. What could I do? I was panic-stricken. This guy was a 
nightmare. His face just hung there over his desk like a hypertensive moon, never 
turning away. With this glistening mucoidal dew in his mustache. And don't even ask me 
about his hands. He was my worst nightmare. Talk about self-consciousness and fear. 
Here was a top-rank authority figure and I was failing to supply what he wanted. He 
made it manifestly clear I wasn't delivering the goods. I'd never failed to deliver the 
goods before.' 

'You were our designated deliverer, Hallie, no question about it.' 

'And here but here was this authority figure with top credentials in frames over every 
square cm. of his walls who sat there and refused even to define what the goods here 
would be. Say what you will about Schtitt and deLint: they let you know what they want 
in no uncertain terms. Flottman, Chawaf, Prickett, Nwangi, Fentress, Lingley, Pettijohn, 
Ogilvie, Leith, even the Moms in her way: they tell you on the very first day of class what 
they want from you. But this son of a bee right here: no dice.' 

'You must have been in shock the whole time, too.' 

'0., it got worse and worse. I dropped weight. I couldn't sleep. This was when the 
nightmares started. I kept dreaming of a face in the floor. I lost to Freer again, then to 
Coyle. I went three sets with Troeltsch. I got B's on two different quizzes. I couldn't 
concentrate on anything else. I'd become obsessed with the fear that I was somehow 
going to flunk grief-therapy. That this professional was going to tell Rusk and Schtitt and 
C.T. and the Moms that I couldn't deliver the goods. 

'I'm sorry I couldn't be there.' 

'The odd thing was that the more obsessed I got, the worse I played and slept, the 
happier everybody got. The grief-therapist complimented me on how haggard I was 
looking. Rusk told deLint the grief-therapist'd told the Moms that it was starting to 
work, that I was starting to grieve, but that it was a long process.' 

'Long and costly.' 

'Roger. I began to despair. I began to foresee somehow getting left back in grief- 
therapy, never delivering the goods and it never ending. Having these Kafkaesque 
interfaces with this man day after day, week after week. It was now May. The 
Continental Clays I'd gotten all the way to the fourth round of the year before were 
coming up, and it became quietly clear that everybody felt I was at a crucial stage in the 
long costly grieving process and I wasn't going to get to go with the contingent to 
Indianapolis unless I could figure out some last-ditch way to deliver the emotional goods 
to this guy. I was totally desperate, a wreck.' 

'So you schlepped on down to the weight room. You and the forehead paid a visit to 
good old Lyle.' 

'Lyle turned out to be the key. He was down there reading Leaves of Grass. He was 
going through a Whitman period, part of grieving for Himself, he said. I'd never gone to 
Lyle before in any kind of supplicatory capacity, but he said he took one grief-stricken 
look at me flailing away down there working up a gourmet sweat and said he felt so 
moved by my additional suffering on top of having had to be the first of Himself's loved 
ones to experience the loss of Himself that he'd bend every cerebral effort. I assumed 



the position and let him at the old forehead and explained what had been happening 
and that if I couldn't figure out some way to satisfy this grief-pro I was going to end up in 
a soft quiet room somewhere. Lyle's key insight was that I'd been approaching the issue 
from the wrong side. I'd gone to the library and acted like a student of grief. What I 
needed to chew through was the section for grief-professionals themselves. I needed to 
prepare from the grief-pro's own perspective. How could I know what a professional 
wanted unless I knew what he was professionally required to want, etc. It was simple, 
he said. I needed to empathize with the grief-therapist, Lyle said, if I wanted to spread a 
broader breast than his own. It was such a simple obversion of my normal goods- 
delivery-preparation system that it hadn't once occurred to me, Lyle explained.' 

'Lyle said all that? That doesn't sound like Lyle.' 

'But a sort of soft light broke inside me for the first time in weeks. I called a cab, still in 
my towel. I jumped in the cab before it had even stopped at the gate. I actually said, 
"The nearest library with a cutting-edge professional grief- and trauma-therapy section, 
and step on it." Et cetera et cetera.' 

'The Lyle my class knew wasn't a how-to-deliver-the-goods-to-authorities-type figure.' 

'By the time I hit the grief-therapist's the next day I was a different man, immaculately 
prepared, unfazable. Everything I'd come to dread about the man — the eyebrows, the 
multicultural music in the waiting room, the implacable stare, the crusty mustache, the 
little gray teeth, even the hands — did I mention that this grief-therapist hid his hands 
under his desk at all times?' 

'But you got through it. You grieved to everybody's satisfaction, you're saying.' 

'What I did,-l went in there and presented with anger at the grief-therapist. I accused 
the grief-therapist of actually inhibiting my attempt to process my grief, by refusing to 
validate my absence of feelings. I told him I'd told him the truth already. I used foul 
language and slang. I said I didn't give a damn if he was an abundantly credentialed 
authority figure or not. I called him a shithead. I asked him what the cock-shitting fuck 
he wanted from me. My overall demeanor was paroxysmic. I told him I'd told him that I 
didn't feel anything, which was the truth. I said it seemed like he wanted me to feel 
toxically guilty for not feeling anything. Notice I was subtly inserting certain loaded 
professional-grief-therapy terms like validate, process as a transitive verb, and toxic 
guilt. These were library-derived.' 

'The whole difference was this time you were walking on-court oriented, with a sense 
of where the lines were, Schtitt would say.' 

'The grief-therapist encouraged me to go with my paroxysmic feelings, to name and 
honor my rage. He got more and more pleased and excited as I angrily told him I flat-out 
refused to feel iota-one of guilt of any kind. I said what, I was supposed to have lost 
even more quickly to Freer, so I could have come around HmH in time to stop Himself? 
It wasn't my fault, I said. It was not my fault I found him, I shouted; I was down to black 
street-socks, I had legitimate emergency-grade laundry to do. By this time I was 
pounding myself on the breastbone with rage as I said that it just by-God was not my 
fault that —' 

That what?' 

'That's just what the grief-therapist said. The professional literature had a whole bold- 



font section on Abrupt Pauses in High-Affect Speech. The grief-therapist was now 
leaning way forward at the waist. His lips were wet. I was in The Zone, therapeutically 
speaking. I felt on top of things for the first time in a long time. I broke eye-contact with 
him. That I'd been hungry, I muttered.' 

'Come again?' 

'That's just what he said, the grief-therapist. I muttered that it was nothing, just that it 
damn sure wasn't my fault that I had the reaction I did when I came through the front 
door of HmH, before I came into the kitchen to get to the basement stairs and found 
Himself with his head in what was left of the microwave. When I first came in and was 
still in the foyer trying to get my shoes off without putting the dirty laundry-bag down 
on the white carpet and hopping around and couldn't be expected to have any idea 
what had happened. I said nobody can choose or have any control over their first 
unconscious thoughts or reactions when they come into a house. I said it wasn't my 
fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be —' 

'Jesus, kid, what?' 

' "That something smelled delicious!" I screamed. The force of my shriek almost sent 
the grief-therapist over backwards in his leather chair. A couple credentials fell off the 
wall. I bent over in my own nonleather chair as if for a crash-landing. I put a hand to 
each temple and rocked back in forth in the chair, weeping. It came out between sobs 
and screams. That it'd been four hours plus since lunchtime and I'd worked hard and 
played hard and I was starved. That the saliva had started the minute I came through 
the door. That golly something smells delicious was my first reaction!' 

'But you forgave yourself.' 

'I absolved myself with seven minutes left in the session right there in full approving 
view of the grief-therapist. He was ecstatic. By the end I swear his side of the desk was 
half a meter off the floor, at my grief-therapist-textbook breakdown into genuine affect 
and trauma and guilt and textbook earsplit-ting grief, then absolution.' 

'Christ on a jet-ski, Hallie.' 

l l 

'But you got through it. You really did grieve, and you can tell me what it was like, so I 
can say something generic but convincing about loss and grief for Helen for Moment.' 

'But I'd omitted that somehow the single most nightmarishly compelling thing about 
this top grief-therapist was that his hands were never visible. The dreadfulness of the 
whole six weeks somehow coalesced around the issue of the guy's hands. His hands 
never emerged from underneath his desk. It was as if his arms terminated at the elbow. 
Besides mustache-material-analysis, I also spent large blocks of each hour trying to 
imagine the configurations and activities of those hands under there.' 

'Hallie, let me just ask and then I'll never bring it back up again. You implied before 
that what was especially traumatic was that Himself's head had popped like an uncut 
spud.' 

'Then on what turned out to be the last day of the therapy, the last day before the A 
squads were picked for Indianapolis, after I'd finally delivered the goods and my 
traumatic grief was professionally pronounced uncovered and countenanced and 
processed, when I put on my sweatshirt and got set to take my leave, and came up to 



the desk and put out my hand in a trembly grateful way he couldn't possibly have 
refused, and he stood and brought out the hand and shook my hand, I finally 
understood.' 

'His hands were disfigured or something.' 

'His hands were no bigger than a four-year-old girl's. It was surreal. This massive 
authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps 
and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and pink 
and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells. The hands were the capper. I barely made 
it out of the office before it started.' 

'The cathartic post-traumatic-like-reexperience hysteria. You reeled out of there.' 

'I barely made it to the men's room down the hall. I was laughing so hysterically I was 
afraid all the periodontists and C.P.A.s on either side of the men's room would hear. I 
sat in a stall with my hands over my mouth, stamping my feet and beating my head 
against first one side of the stall and then the other in hysterical mirth. If you could have 
seen those hands.' 

'But you got through it all, and you can thumbnail-sketch the overall feeling for me.' 

'What I feel is myself gathering my resources for the right foot, finally. That magic 
feeling's back. I'm not lining up the vectors for the wastebasket or anything. I'm not 
even thinking. I'm trusting the feeling. It's like that celluloid moment when Luke 
removes his high-tech targeting helmet.' 

'What helmet?' 

'You know, of course, that human nails are the vestiges of talons and horns. That 
they're atavistic, like coccyges and hair. That they develop in-utero long before the 
cerebral cortex.' 

'What's the matter?' 

'That at some point in the first trimester we lose our gills but are now still now little 
more than a bladdery sac of spinal fluid and a rudimentary tail and hair-follicles and 
little microchips of vestigial talon and horn.' 

Ts this to make me feel bad? Did this fuck you up, me probing for details after all this 
time? Did it reactivate the grief?' 

'Just one more confirmation. The trailer's interior. There was some object or 
contiguous trio of objects with the following color scheme: brown, lavender, and either 
mint-green or jonquil-yellow.' 

'I can call back when you're more yourself. The leg's starting to prune a bit from the 
whirlpool anyway.' 

Til be right here. I've got a whole foot to yield to the magic with. I'm not going to alter 
the smallest particular. I'm just about ready to bear down on the clippers. It's going to 
feel right, I know.' 

'A throw. Like an afghan throw, on the chintz sofa. The yellow was more fluorescent 
than jonquil.' 

'And the word is asphyxiated. Kick some egg-shaped balls for all of us, 0. The next 
sound you hear will be unpleasant,' Hal said, holding the phone down right next to the 
foot, his expression terrifically intense. 



6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


White halogen off the green of the composite surface, the light out on the indoor 
courts at the Port Washington Tennis Academy is the color of sour apples. To the 
spectators at the gallery's glass, the duos of players arrayed and moving down below 
have a reptilian tinge to their skin, a kind of seasick-type pallor. This annual meet is 
mammoth: both academies' A and B teams for both Boys and Girls, both singles and 
doubles, in 14 and Unders, 16 and Unders, 18 and Unders. Thirty-six courts stretch out 
down away from one end's gallery under a fancy tri-domed system of permanent all- 
weather Lung. 

A jr. tennis team has six people on it, with the highest-ranked playing # 1 singles 
against the other team's best guy, the next-highest-ranked playing #2, and on down the 
line to #6. After the six singles matches there are three doubles, with a team's best two 
singles players usually turning around and also playing #1 doubles — with occasional 
exceptions, e.g. the Vaught twins, or the fact that Schacht and Troeltsch, way down on 
the B squad in 18's singles, play #2 doubles on E.T.A.'s 18's A team, because they've 
been a doubles team since they were incontinent toddlers back in Philly, and they're so 
experienced and smooth together they can wipe surfaces with the 18's A team's #3 and 
#4 singles guys, Coyle and Axford, who prefer to skip doubles altogether. It all tends to 
get complicated, and probably not all that interesting — unless you play. 

But so a normal meet between two junior teams is the best out of nine matches, 
whereas this mammoth annual early-November thing between E.T.A. and P.W.T.A. will 
try to be the best out of 108. A 54-match-all conclusion is extremely unlikely — odds 
being 1 in 2 27 — and has never happened in nine years. The meet's always down on 
Long Island because P.W.T.A. has indoor courts out the bazoo. Each year the academy 
that loses the meet has to get up on tables at the buffet supper afterward and sing a 
really silly song. An even more embarrassing transaction is supposed to take place in 
private between the two schools' Headmasters, but nobody knows quite what. Last year 
Enfield lost 57-51 and Charles Tavis didn't say one word on the bus-ride home and used 
the lavatory several times. 

But last year E.T.A. didn't have John Wayne, and last year H. J. Incandenza hadn't yet 
exploded, competitively. John Wayne, formerly of Montcerf, Quebec — an asbestos¬ 
mining town ten clicks or so from the infamously rupture-prone Mercier Dam — 
formerly the top-ranked junior male in Canada at sixteen as well as #5 overall in the 
Organization of North American Nations Tennis Association computerized rankings, was 
finally successfully recruited by Gerhardt Schtitt and Aubrey deLint last spring via the 



argument that two gratis years at an American academy would maybe let Wayne bypass 
the usual couple seasons of top college tennis and go pro immediately at nineteen with 
more than enough competitive tempering. This reasoning was not unsound, since the 
top four U.S. tennis academies' tournament schedules closely resemble the A.T.P. tour 
in terms of numbing travel and continual stress. John Wayne is currently ranked #3 in 
the O.N.A.N.T.A.'s Boys' 18's and #2 in the U.S.T.A. (Canada, under Provincial pressure, 
has disowned him as an emigrant) and has in this Year of the Depend Adult 
Undergarment reached the semis of both the Junior French and Junior U.S. Opens, and 
has lost to exactly nobody American in seven meets and a dozen major tournaments. He 
trails the #1 American kid, an Independent 85 down in Florida, Veach, by only a couple 
U.S.T.A. computer points, and they haven't yet met in sanctioned play this year, and the 
kid is well known to be hiding out from Wayne, avoiding him, staying down in Pompano 
Beach, allegedly nursing a like four-month groin-pull, sitting on his ranking. He's 
supposed to show at the WhataBurger Invitational in AZ in a couple weeks, this Veach, 
having won the 18's at age seventeen there last year, but he's got to know Wayne's 
coming down, and speculation is rife and complex. O.N.A.N.T.A.-wise, there's an 
Argentine kid that Mexico's Academia de Vera Cruz has got rat-holed away who's #1 and 
not about to lose to anybody, having this year taken three out of four legs of the Junior 
Grand Slam, the first time anybody's done that since a sepulchral Czech kid named 
Lendl, who retired from the Show and suicided well before the advent of Subsidized 
Time. But so there's Wayne at #1. 

And it's been established that Hal Incandenza, last year a respectable but by no means 
to-write-home-about 43rd nationally and bouncing between #4 and #5 on the 
Academy's A team in Boys' 16's singles, has made a kind of quantumish competitive 
plateaux-hop such that this year — the one nearly done, Kimberly-Clark Corp.'s Depend 
Absorbent Products Division soon to give way to the highest corporate bidder for rights 
to the New Year — Incandenza, mind you this year just seventeen, is 4th in the nation 
and #6 on the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and playing A-#2 for E.T.A. in Boys' 18's. These 
competitive explosions happen sometimes. Nobody at the Academy talks to Hal much 
about the explosion, sort of the way you avoid a pitcher who's got a no-hitter going. 
Hal's delicate and spinny, rather cerebral game hasn't altered, but this year it seems to 
have grown a beak. No longer fragile or abstracted-looking on court, he seems now 
almost to hit the corners without thinking about it. His Unforced-Error stats look like a 
decimal-error. 

Hal's game involves attrition. He'll probe, pecking, until some angle opens up. Until 
then he'll probe. He'd rather run his man ragged, wear him down. Three different 
opponents this past summer had to go to oxygen during breaks. 86 His serve yanks across 
at people as if on a hidden diagonal string. His serve, now, suddenly, after four summers 
of thousand-a-day serves to no one at dawn, is suddenly supposed to be one of the best 
left-handed kick serves the junior circuit has ever seen. Schtitt calls Hal Incandenza his 
'revenant,' now, and sometimes points his pointer at him in an affectionate way from 
his observation crow's nest in the transom, during drills. 

Most of the singles' A matches are under way. Coyle and his man on 3 are in an 
endless butterfly-shaped rally. Hal's muscular but unquick opponent is bent over trying 



to get his breath while Hal stands there and futzes with his strings. Tall Paul Shaw on 6 
bounces the ball eight times before he serves. Never seven or nine. 

And John Wayne's without question the best male player to appear at Enfield 
Academy in several years. He'd been spotted first by the late Dr. James Incandenza at 
age six, eleven summers back, when Incandenza was doing an early and coldly 
conceptual Super-8 on people named John Wayne who were not the real thespio- 
historical John Wayne, a film Wayne's not-to-be-fucked-with papa eventually litigated 
the kid's segment out of because the film had the word Homo in the title. 87 

On 1, with John Wayne up at net. Port Washington's best boy throws up a lob. It's a 
beauty: the ball soars slowly up, just skirts the indoor courts' system of beams and 
lamps, and floats back down gentle as lint: a lovely quad-function of fluorescent green, 
seams whirling. John Wayne backpedals and flies back after it. You can tell — if you play 
seriously — you can tell just by the way the ball comes off a guy's strings whether the 
lob is going to land fair. There's surprisingly little thought. Coaches tell serious players 
what to do so often it gets automatic. John Wayne's game could be described as having 
a kind of automatic beauty. When the lob first went up he'd backpedaled from the net, 
keeping the ball in sight until it reached the top of its flight and its curve broke, casting 
many shadows in the tray of lights hung from the ceiling's insulation; then Wayne 
turned his back to the ball and sprinted flat-out for the spot where it will land fair. 
Would land. He doesn't have to locate the ball again until it's hit the green court just 
inside the baseline. By now he's come around the side of the bounced ball's flight, still 
sprinting. He looks mean in a kind of distant way. He comes around the side of the 
bounced ball's second ascent the way you come up around the side of somebody you're 
going to hurt, and he has to leave his feet and half-pirouette to get his side to the ball 
and whip his big right arm through it, catching it on the rise and slapping it down the 
line past the Port Washington boy, who's played the percentages and followed a beauty 
of a lob up to net. The Port Washington kid applauds with the heel of his hand against 
his strings in acknowledgment of a really nice get, even as he looks up at Port 
Washington's coaching staff in the gallery. The spectators' glass panel is at ground level, 
and the players play below it on courts that have been carved out of a kind of pit, dug 
long ago: some northeast clubs favor courts below ground, because earth insulates and 
keeps utility bills daunting instead of prohibitive, once the Lungs go up. The gallery 
panel stretches overhead behind Courts 1 through 6, but there's a decided spectatorial 
clumping at the part of the gallery that looks out over the Show Courts, Boys' 18's #1 
and #2, Wayne and Hal and P.W.T.A.'s two best. Now after Wayne's balletic winner 
there's the sad sound of a small crowd behind glass's applause; on the courts the 
applause is muffled and compromised by on-court sounds, and sounds like the trapped 
survivors of something tapping for help at a great depth. The panel is like an aquarium's 
glass, thick and clean, and traps noise behind it, and to the gallery it seems that 72 well¬ 
muscled children are arrayed and competing in total silence in the pit. Almost everyone 
in the gallery is wearing tennis clothes and bright nylon warm-ups; some even wear 
wristbands, the tennis equivalent of a football fan's pennant and raccoon coat. 

John Wayne's post-pirouette backward inertia has carried him into the heavy black 
tarpaulin that hangs several meters behind both sides of the 36 courts on a system of 



rods and rings not unlike a very ambitious shower-curtain, the tarps hiding from view 
the waterstained walls of puffy white-wrapped insulation and creating a narrow passage 
for players to get to their courts without crossing open court and interrupting play. 
Wayne hits the heavy tarp and kind of bounces off, producing a boom that resounds. 
The sounds on court in an indoor venue are huge and complex; everything echoes and 
the echoes then meld. In the gallery, Tavis and Nwangi bite their knuckles and deLint 
squashes his nose flat against the glass in anxiety as everyone else politely applauds. 
Schtitt calmly taps his pointer against the top of his boot at times of high stress. Wayne 
isn't hurt, though. Everybody goes into the tarp sometimes. That's what it's there for. It 
always sounds worse than it is. 

The boom of the tarp sounds bad down below, though. The boom rattles Teddy 
Schacht, who's kneeling in the little passage right behind Court 1, holding M. Pemulis's 
head as Pemulis down on one knee is sick into a tall white plastic spare-ball bucket. 
Schacht has to haul Pemulis slightly back as Wayne's outline bulges for a moment into 
the billowing tarp and threatens to knock Pemulis over, plus maybe the bucket, which 
would be a bad scene. Pemulis, deep into the little hell of his own nauseous pre-match 
nerves, is too busy trying to vomit w/o sound to hear the mean sound of Wayne's 
winner or the boom of him against the heavy curtain. It's freezing back here in the little 
passage, up next to insulation and I-beams and away from the infrared heaters that 
hang over the courts. The plastic bucket is full of old bald Wilson tennis balls and 
Pemulis's breakfast. There is of course an odor. Schacht doesn't mind. He lightly strokes 
the sides of Pemulis's head as his mother had stroked his own big sick head, back in 
Philly. 

Placed at eye-level intervals in the tarp are little plastic windows, archer-slit views of 
each court from the cold backstage passage. Schacht sees John Wayne walk to the net- 
post and flip his card as he and his opponent change sides. Even indoors, you change 
ends of the court after every odd-numbered game. No one knows why odd rather than 
even. Each P.W.T.A. court has, welded to its west net-post, another smaller post with a 
double set of like flippable cards with big red numerals from 1 to 7; in umpless 
competition you're supposed to flip your card appropriately at every change of sides, to 
help the gallery follow the score in the set. A lot of junior players neglect to flip their 
cards. Wayne is always automatic and scrupulous in his accounts. Wayne's father is an 
asbestos miner who at forty-three is far and away the seniorest guy on his shift; he now 
wears triple-thick masks and is trying to hold on until John Wayne can start making 
serious $ and take him away from all this. He has not seen his eldest son play since John 
Wayne's Quebecois and Canadian citizenships were revoked last year. Wayne's card is 
on (5); his opponent has yet to flip a card. Wayne never even sits down to take the 60 
seconds he's allowed on each change of sides. His opponent, in his light-blue flare- 
collared shirt with WILSON and P.W.T.A. on the sleeves, says something not unfriendly 
as Wayne brushes past him by the post. Wayne doesn't respond one way or the other. 
He just goes back to the baseline farthest from Schacht's little tarp-window and bounces 
a ball up and down in the air with the reticulate face of his stick as the Port Washington 
boy sits in his little canvas director's chair and towels the sweat off his arms (neither of 
which is large) and looks briefly up at the gallery behind the panel. The thing about 



Wayne is he's all business. His face on court is blankly rigid, with the hypertonic masking 
of schizophrenics and Zen adepts. He tends to look straight ahead at all times. He is 
about as reserved as they come. His emotions emerge in terms of velocity. Intelligence 
as strategic focus. His play, like his manner in general, seems to Schacht less alive than 
undead. Wayne tends to eat and study alone. He's sometimes seen with two or three 
expatriate E.T.A. Nucks, but when they're together they all seem morose. It's wholly 
unclear to Schacht how Wayne feels about the U.S. or his citizenship-status. He figures 
Wayne figures it doesn't much matter: he is destined for the Show; he will be an all¬ 
business entertainer, citizen of the world, everywhere undead, endorsing juice drinks 
and liniment ointment. 

Pemulis has nothing left and is spasming dryly over the bucket, his covered Dunlop 
gut-strung sticks and gear tumbled just past Schacht's in the passage. They are the last 
guys to get out on court. Schacht is to play #3 singles on the 18's B team, Pemulis #6-B. 
They are undeniably tardy getting out there. Their opponents stand out on the baselines 
of Courts 9 and 12 waiting for them to come out and warm up, jittery, stretching out the 
way you do when you've already stretched out, dribbling fresh bright balls with their 
black Wilson widebody sticks. The whole Port Washington Tennis Academy student 
body gets free and mandatory Wilson sticks under an administrative contract. Nothing 
personal, but no way would Schacht let an academy tell him what brand of stick to 
swing. He himself favors Head Masters,-which is regarded as bizarre and eccentric. The 
AMF-Head rep brings them out to him out of some cobwebby warehouse where they're 
kept since the line was discontinued during the large-head revolution many years back. 
Aluminum Head Masters have small, perfectly round heads and a dull blue plastic brace 
in the V of the throat and look less like weapons than toys. Coyle and Axford are always 
kibitzing that they've seen a Head Master for sale at like a flea market or garage sale 
someplace and Schacht better get down there quick. Schacht, who's historically tight 
with Mario and with Lyle down in the weight room (where Schacht, since the knee and 
the Crohn's Disease, likes to go even on off-days, to work off discomfort, and deLint and 
Loach are always on him about not getting musclebound), has a way of just smiling and 
holding his tongue when he's kibitzed. 

'Are you okay?' 

Pemulis says 'Blarg.' He wipes at his forehead in a gesture of completion and submits 
to being hauled to his feet and stands there on his own with his hands on his hips, 
slightly bent. 

Schacht straightens and pulls some wrinkles out of the bandage around the brace on 
his knee. 'Take maybe another second. Wayne's already way up.' 

Pemulis sniffs unpleasantly. 'How come this happens to me every time? This is not like 
me.' 

'Happens to some people is all.' 

'This hunched spurting pale guy is not any me I ever recognize.' 

Schacht gathers gear. 'Some people their nerves are in their stomachs. Cisne, Yard- 
Guard, Lord, you: stomach men.' 

'Teddy brother man I'm never once hung-over for a competitive thing. I take elaborate 
precautions. Not so much as a whippet. I'm always in bed the night before by 2300 all 



pink-cheeked and clean. 1 

As they pass the plastic window behind Court 2 Schacht sees Hal Incandenza try to 
pass his serve-and-volley guy with a baroque sideways slice down the backhand side and 
miss just wide. Hal's card's already flipped to (4). Schacht gives a little toodleoo-wave 
that Hal can't see to acknowledge. Pemulis is in front of him as they go down the cold 
passage. 

'Hal's way up too. Another victory for the forces of peace.' 

'Jesus I feel awful,' Pemulis says. 

'Things could be worse.' 

'Expand on that, will you?' 

'This wasn't like that Atlanta stomach-incident. We were enclosed here. No one saw. 
You saw that glass; to Schtitt and deLint it's all a silent movie down here. Nobody heard 
thing one. Our guys'll think we were back here butting heads to get enraged or 
something. Or we can tell them I got a cramp. That was a freebie, in terms of stomach- 
incidents.' 

Pemulis is a whole different person before competitive play. 

'I'm fucking inept.' 

Schacht laughs. 'You're one of the eptest people I know. Get off your own back.' 

'Never remember getting sick as a kid. Now it's like I make myself sick just from 
worrying about getting sick.' 

'Well then there you go. Just don't think anything thoracic. Pretend you don't have a 
stomach.' 

'I have no stomach,' Pemulis says. His head stays still when he talks, at least, 
negotiating the passage. He carries four sticks, a rough white P.W.T.A. locker-room 
towel, an empty ball-can full of high-chlorine Long Island water, nervously zipping and 
unzipping the top stick's cover. Schacht only ever carries three sticks. His don't have 
covers on them. Except for Pemulis and Rader and Unwin and a couple others who favor 
gut strings and really need protection, nobody at Enfield uses racquet-covers; it's like an 
antifashion statement. People with covers make a point of telling you they're valid and 
for gut. A similar point of careful nonpride is never having their shirts tucked in. Ortho 
Stice used to drill in cut-off black jeans until Schtitt had Tony Nwangi go over and 
scream at him about it. Each academy has its own style or antistyle. The P.W.T.A. 
people, more or less a de facto subsidiary of Wilson, have unnecessary light-blue Wilson 
covers on all their courtside synthetic-strung sticks and big red Ws stencilled onto their 
Wilson synth-gut strings. You have to let your company of choice spraypaint their logo 
on your strings if you want to be on their Free List for sticks, is the universal junior deal. 
Schacht's orange Gamma-9 synthetic strings have AMF-Head Inc.'s weird Taoist 
paraboloid logo sprayed on. Pemulis isn't on Dunlop's Free List 88 but gets the E.T.A. 
stringer to put Dunlop's dot-and-circumflex trademark on all his stick's strings, as a kind 
of touchingly insecure gesture, in Schacht's opinion. 

'I played your guy in Tampa two years ago,' Pemulis says, sidestepping one of the old 
discolored drill-balls that always litter passages behind indoor tarps. 'Name escapes.' 

'Le-something,' says Schacht. 'Yet another Nuck. One of those names that start with 
Le.' Mario Incandenza, in a pair of little Audern Tallat-Kelpsa's E.T.A. drill-sweats, is 



lurching noiselessly some ten m. behind them in the passage, his police-lock up and 
head uncamera'd; he's framing Schacht's back in a three-cornered box with his thumbs 
and long fingers, simulating the view through a lens. Mario's been authorized to travel 
with the squads to the WhataBurger Invitational for final footage for his short and 
upbeat annual documentary — brief testimonials and lighthearted moments and 
behind-the-scenes shots and emotional moments on court, etc. — that every year gets 
distributed to E.T.A. alumni and patrons and guests at the pre-Thanksgiving fundraising 
exhibition and formal fete. Mario is wondering how you could get enough light back 
here in a tarp-tunnel to film a tense cold pre-match gladiatorial march behind an indoor 
tarp, carrying tennis racquets in your arms like an obscene bouquet, without sacrificing 
the dim and diffuse and kind of gladiatorially doomed quality figures in the dim passage 
have. After Pemulis has mysteriously won, he'll tell Mario maybe a Marino 350 with a 
diffusion-filter on some kind of overhead cable you could winch along behind the figures 
at about twice the focal length, or else use fast film and station the Marino at the 
tunnel's very start and let the figures' backs gradually recede into a kind of doomed mist 
of low exposure. 

'I remember your guy as one big forehand. Nothing but slice off the back. His VAPS 
never varies. If you kick the serve over to the backhand he'll slice it short. You can come 
in behind it at like will.' 

'Worry about your own guy,' Schacht says. 

'Your guy's got zero imagination.' 

'And you've got an empty expanse where your stomach ought to be, remember.' 

'I am a man with no stomach.' 

They emerge through flaps in the tarp with hands upraised in slight apology to their 
opponents, walk out onto the warmer courts, the slow green eraserish footing of indoor 
composite. Their ears dilate into all the sounds in the larger space. Gasps and thwaps 
and pocks and sneakers' squeaks. Pemulis's court is almost down in female territory. 
Courts 13 to 24 are Girls' 18's A and B, all bobbing ponytails and two-handed backhands 
and high-pitched grunts that if girls could only hear what their own grunts sounded like 
they'd cut it out. Pemulis can't tell whether the very muffled applause way down up 
behind the gallery-panel is sardonic applause at his finally appearing after several 
minutes of vomiting or is sincerely for K. D. Coyle on Court 3, who's just smashed a 
sucker-lob so hard it's bounced up and racked 3's tray of hanging lights. Except for some 
rubber in his legs Pemulis feels stomachless and tentatively OK. This match is an all-out 
must-win for him in terms of the WhataBurger. 

The infra-lit courts are warm and soft; the heaters bolted into both walls above the 
tarp's upper hem are the deep warm red of little square suns. 

The Port Washington players all wear matching socks and shorts and tucked-in shirts. 
They look sharp but effete, a mannequinish aspect to them. Most of the higher-ranked 
E.T.A. students are free to sign on with different companies for no fees but free gear. 
Coyle is Prince and Reebok, as is Trevor Axford. John Wayne is Dunlop and Adidas. 
Schacht is Head Master sticks but his own clothes and knee-supports. Ortho Stice is 
Wilson and all-black Fila. Keith Freer is Fox sticks and both Adidas and Reebok until one 
of the two companies' NNE reps catches on. Troeltsch is Spalding and damn lucky to get 



that. Hal Incandenza is Dunlop and lightweight Nike hightops and an Air Stirrup brace for 
the dicky ankle. Shaw is Kennex sticks and clothes from Tachani's Big St Tall line. 
Pemulis's entrepreneurial vim has earned him complete freedom of choice and expense, 
though he's barred by deLint and Nwangi from shirts that mention the Sinn Fein or that 
extol Allston MA in any way, in competition. 

Before going back to the baseline and warming up groundstrokes Schacht likes to take 
a little time courtside futzing around, hitting his heads' frames against strings and 
listening for the pitch of best tension, arranging his towel on the back of his chair, 
making sure his cards aren't still flipped from some previous match, etc., and then he 
prefers to sort of snuffle around his baseline for a bit, checking for dustbunnies of ball- 
fuzz and little divots or ridges from cold-weather heave, adjusting the brace on his 
ruined knee, putting his thick arms out cruciform and pulling them way back to stretch 
out the old pecs and cuffs. His opponent waits patiently, twirling his poly-butylene stick; 
and when they finally start to hit around, the guy's expression is pleasant. Schacht 
always prefers a pleasant match, one way or the other. He really doesn't care all that 
much whether he wins anymore, since first the Crohn's and then the knee at sixteen. 
He'd probably now describe his desire to win as a preference, nothing more. What's 
singular is that his tennis seems to have improved slightly in the two years since he 
stopped really caring. It's like his hard flat game stopped having any purpose beyond 
itself and started feeding on itself and got fuller, looser, its edges less jagged, though 
everybody else has been improving too, even faster, and Schacht's rank has been 
steadily declining since sixteen, and the staff has stopped talking even about a top- 
college ride. Schtitt's warmed to him, though, since the knee and the loss of any urge 
beyond the play itself, and treats Schacht now almost more like a peer than an 
experimental subject with something at stake. Schacht is already in his heart committed 
to a dental career, and he even interns twice a week for a root-specialist over at the 
National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, in east Enfield, when not touring. 

It strikes Schacht as odd that Pemulis makes such a big deal of stopping all substances 
the day before competitive play but never connects the neurasthenic stomach to any 
kind of withdrawal or dependence. He'd never say this to Pemulis unless Pemulis asked 
him directly, but Schacht suspects Pemulis is physically 'drine-dependent, Preludin or 
Tenuate or something. It's not his business. 

Schacht's supposedly French-Canadian guy is as broad as Schacht but shorter, his face 
dark and with a kind of Eskimoid structure to it, at eighteen his hairline recessed in the 
sort of way where you just know the kid's already got hair on his back, and he warms up 
with crazy spins, moony top off a western forehand and weird inside-out shit off a one- 
hand back, his knees dipping oddly whenever he makes contact and his follow-through 
full of the dancerly flourishes that characterize a case of nerves. A nervous spin-artist 
can be eaten more or less for lunch, if you hit as hard as Schacht does, and what Pemulis 
said is true: the guy's backhand is always sliced and lands shallow. Schacht looks over at 
Pemulis's guy, a grunter with a moody profile and the storky look of recent puberty. 
Pemulis is looking oddly sanguine and confident after a couple minutes futzing with the 
cans of water, rinsing out the oral cavity and so on. Pemulis is maybe going to win, too, 
despite himself. Schacht figures he can run in and get one of the twelve-year-olds he Big 



Buddies to go back into the passage and empty Pemulis's bucket on the sly before 
anybody coming off court sees it. Evidence of nervous incapacity of any kind gets noted 
and logged, at E.T.A., and Schacht's observed Pemulis having some kind of vested 
emotional interest in attending the WhataBurger Inv. over Thanksgiving. He thought 
Mario's lurking around in the cold passage scratching his poor big head over technical 
lighting problems was kind of funny. There will be no Lungs or tarps or dim passages at 
the WhataBurger: the Tucson tournament is outside, and Tucson cruised around 40° C 
even in November, and the sun there was a retinal horror-show on overheads and 
serves. 

Though Schacht buys quarterly urine like the rest of them, it seems to Pemulis that 
Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to 
finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life 
interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism; and Schacht 
doesn't even have to worry about obsessive training like Inc or Stice or get sick so often 
from the physical stress of constant 'drines like Troeltsch or suffer from thinly disguised 
psychological fallout like Inc or Struck or Pemulis himself. The way Pemulis and Troeltsch 
and Struck and Axford ingest substances and recover from substances and have a whole 
jargony argot based around various substances gives Schacht the creeps, a bit, but since 
the knee injury broke and remade him at sixteen he's learned to go his own interior way 
and let others go theirs. Like most very large men, he's getting comfortable early with 
the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons 
even smaller — which is a big reason he can sometimes forget to finish his portion of a 
given substance, so interested does he become in the way he's already started to feel. 
He's one of these people who don't need much, much less much more. 

Schacht and his opponent warm up their groundstrokes with the fluid economy of 
years of warming up groundstrokes. They take turns feeding each other some volleys at 
net and then each take a 'couple up,' lobs, hitting loose easy overheads, slowly adjusting 
the idle from half-speed to three-quarter-speed. The knee feels fundamentally all right, 
springy. Slow indoor composite surfaces do not like Schacht's hard flat game, but they 
are kind to the knee, which after some days outside on hard cement swells to about the 
size of a volleyball. Schacht feels blandly happy down here on 9, playing in private, way 
down past the gallery's panel. There is a nourishing sense of pregnable space in a big 
indoor club that you never get playing outside, especially playing outside in the cold, 
when the balls feel hard and sullen and come off the stick's strung face with an echoless 
ping. Here everything cracks and booms, the grunts and shoe-squeaks and booming 
pocks of impact and curses unfolding across the white-on-green plane and echoing off 
each tarp. Soon they'll all go inside for the winter. Schtitt will yield and let them inflate 
the E.T.A. Lung over the sixteen Center Courts; it's like a barn-raising, inflation-day; it's 
communal and fun, and they'll take down the central fences and outdoor night-lamps 
and unbolt all the posts into sections and stack them and store them, and the TesTar 
and ATHSCME guys will come up in vans smoking cigarettes and squinting with weary 
expertise at tubes of plans in draftsman-blue, and there'll be one and sometimes two 
ATHSCME helicopters w/ slings and grappling hooks for the Lung's dome and nacelle; 
and Schtitt and deLint will let the younger E.T.A.s get the infrared indoor heaters out of 



the same corrugated shed the disassembled fences and lamps will go in, leaf-cutter-ant- 
or Korean-like armies of 14- and 16-year-olds carrying sections and heaters and Gore- 
Tex swatches and long halo-lithiated bulbs while the 18s get to sit on canvas chairs and 
kibitz because they did their leaf-cutter Lung-raising bits at 13-16 already. Two TesTar 
guys'll supervise Otis P. Lord and all this year's conspicuous tech-wonks in mounting the 
heaters and stringing the lights and running coaxial shunts with ceramic jacks between 
the Pump Room's main breaker and the Sunstrand grid and booting up the circulation- 
fans and pneumatic hoists that'll raise the Lung to the inflated shape of a distended 
igloo, sixteen courts in four rows of four, enclosed and warmed by nothing but fibrous 
Gore-Tex and AC current and an enormous ATHSCME Exhaust-Flow Effectuator that an 
ATHSCME crew in one of the ATHSCME helicopters will bring in in a sling and cable and 
mount and secure on the Lung's nipply nacelle at the top of the inflating dome. And that 
first night after Inflation, traditionally the fourth Monday of November, all the 
upperclass 18s so inclined will crank up the infrareds and get high and eat low-lipid 
microwave pizza and play all night, sweating magnificently, sheltered for the winter atop 
Enfield's levelheaded hill. 

Schacht stands back in the deuce court and lets his guy warm up his serves, oddly flat 
and low-margin for a nervous touch-artist. Schacht bloops each return up with severe 
backspin so the balls'll roll back to him and he can serve them back to his guy, also 
warming up. The warm-up routine has become automatic and requires no attention. 
Way up on #1, Schacht sees John Wayne just plaster a backhand cross-court. Wayne hits 
it so hard a little mushroom cloud of green fuzz hangs in the air where ball had met 
strings. Their cards were too far to read in the sour-apple light, but you could tell by the 
way Port Washington's best boy walked back to the baseline to take the next serve that 
his ass had already been presented to him. In a lot of junior matches everything past the 
fourth game or so is kind of a formality. Both players tend to know the overall score by 
then. The big picture. They'll have decided who's going to lose. Competitive tennis is 
largely mental, once you're at a certain plateau of skill and conditioning. Schtitt'd say 
spiritual instead of mental, but as far as Schacht can see it's the same thing. As Schacht 
sees it, Schtitt's philosophical stance is that to win enough of the time to be considered 
successful you have to both care a great deal about it and also not care about it at all. 89 
Schacht does not care enough, probably, anymore, and has met his gradual 
displacement from E.T.A.'s A singles squad with an equanimity some E.T.A.'s thought 
was spiritual and others regarded as the surest sign of dicklessness and burnout. Only 
one or two people have ever used the word brave in connection with Schacht's radical 
reconfiguration after the things with the Crohn's Disease and knee. Hal Incandenza, 
who's probably as asymetrically hobbled on the care-too-much side as Schacht is on the 
not-enough, privately puts Schacht's laissez-faire down to some interior decline, some 
doom-gray surrender of his childhood's promise to adult gray mediocrity, and fears it; 
but since Schacht is an old friend and a dependable designated driver and has actually 
gotten pleasanter to be around since the knee — which Hal prays fervently that the 
ankle won't start being the size of a volleyball itself at the end of each outdoor day — 
Hal in a weird and deeper internal way almost somehow admires and envies the fact 
that Schacht's stoically committed himself to the oral professions and stopped dreaming 



of getting to the Show after graduation — an air of something other than failure about 
Schacht's not caring enough, something you can't quite define, the way you can't quite 
remember a word that you know you know, inside — Hal can't quite feel the contempt 
for Teddy Schacht's competitive slide that would be a pretty much natural contempt in 
one who cared so dreadfully secretly much, and so the two of them tend to settle for 
not talking about it, just as Schacht cheerfully wordlessly drives the tow truck on 
occasions when the rest of the crew are so incapacitated they'd have to hold one eye 
closed even to see an undoubled road, and consents w/o protest to pay retail for clean 
quarterly urine, and doesn't say a word about Hal's devolution from occasional tourist 
to subterranean compulsive, substance-wise, with his Pump Room visits and Visine, 
even though Schacht deep down believes that the substance-compulsion's strange 
apparent contribution to Hal's erumpent explosion up the rankings has got to be a 
temporary thing, that there's like a psychic credit-card bill for Hal in the mail, 
somewhere, coming, and is sad for him in advance about whatever's surely got to give, 
eventually. Though it won't be the Boards. Hal'll murder his Boards, and Schacht may 
well be among those jockeying to sit near him, he'd be the first to admit. On 2 Hal now 
kicks a second serve to the ad court with so much left-handed top on it that it almost 
kicks up over Port Washington's #2 guy's head. It's clearly carnage up there on Show 
Courts 1 and 2. Dr. Tavis will be irrepressible. The gallery is barely even applauding 
Wayne and Incandenza anymore; at a certain point it becomes like Romans applauding 
lions. All the coaches and staff and P.W.T.A. parents and civilians in the overhead gallery 
wear tennis outfits, the high white socks and tucked-in shirts of people who do not 
really play. 

Schacht and his man play. 


Both Pat Montesian and Gately's AA sponsor like to remind Gately how this new 
resident Geoffrey Day could end up being an invaluable teacher of patience and 
tolerance for him, Gately, as Ennet House Staff. 

'So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by cliches,' is what Day 
says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was, again, at 0825. 'To 
turn my will and life over to the care of cliches. One day at a time. Easy does it. First 
things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be 
done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.' 

Poor old Charlotte Treat, needlepointing primly beside him on the old vinyl couch that 
just came from Goodwill, purses her lips. 'You need to ask for some gratitude.' 

'Oh no but the point is I've already been fortunate enough to receive gratitude.' Day 
crosses one leg over the other in a way that inclines his whole little soft body toward 
her. 'For which, believe you me, I'm grateful. I cultivate gratitude. That's part of the 
system of cliches I'm here to live by. An attitude of gratitude. A grateful drunk will never 
drink. I know the actual cliche is "A grateful heart will never drink," but since organs 
can't properly be said to imbibe and I'm still afflicted with just enough self-will to decline 
to live by utter non sequiturs, as opposed to just good old cliches. I'm taking the liberty 
of light amendment.' He gives with this a look like butter wouldn't melt. 'Albeit grateful 



amendment, of course.' 

Charlotte Treat looks over to Gately for some sort of help or Staff enforcement of 
dogma. The poor bitch is clueless. All of them are clueless, still. Gately reminds himself 
that he too is probably mostly still clueless, still, even after all these hundreds of days. 'I 
Didn't Know That I Didn't Know' is another of the slogans that looks so shallow for a 
while and then all of a sudden drops off and deepens like the lobster-waters off the 
North Shore. As Gately fidgets his way through daily A.M. meditation he always tries to 
remind himself daily that this is all an Ennet House residency is supposed to do: buy 
these poor yutzes some time, some thin pie-slice of abstinent time, till they can start to 
get a whiff of what's true and deep, almost magic, under the shallow surface of what 
they're trying to do. 

'I cultivate it assiduously. I do special gratitude exercises at night up there in the room. 
Gratitude-Ups, you could call them. Ask Randy over there if I don't do them like 
clockwork. Diligently. Sedulously.' 

'Well'it's true is all,' Treat sniffs. 'About gratitude.' 

Everybody else except Gately, lying on the old other couch opposite them, is ignoring 
this exchange, watching an old InterLace cartridge whose tracking is a little messed up 
so that staticky stripes eat at the screen's picture's bottom and top. Day is not done 
talking. Pat M. encourages newer Staff to think of residents they'd like to bludgeon to 
death as valuable teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, restraint. 

Day is not done talking. 'One of the exercises is being grateful that life is so much 
easier now. I used sometimes to think. I used to think in long compound sentences with 
subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn't. Now I live by 
the dictates of macrame samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader's 
Digest or Saturday Evening Post. Easy does it. Remember to remember. But for the 
grace of capital-g God. Turn it over. Terse, hard-boiled. Monosyllabic. Good old Norman 
Rockwell-Paul Harvey wisdom. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me 
and recite these cliches. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? 
Could that be added to the cliche-pool? "No inflection necessary”? Too many syllables, 
probably.' 

Randy Lenz says 'I ain't got time for this shit.' 

Poor old Charlotte Treat, all of nine weeks clean, is trying to look primmer and 
primmer. She looks again over to Gately, lying on his back, taking up the living room's 
whole other sofa, one sneaker up on the sofa's square frayed fabric arm-thing, his eyes 
almost closed. Only Staff get to lie on the couches. 

'Denial,' Charlotte finally says, 'is not a river in Egypt.' 'Hows about the both of you 
shut the fuck up,' says Emil Minty. Geoffrey (not Geoff, Geoffrey) Day has been at Ennet 
House six days. He came from Roxbury's infamous Dimock Detox, where he was the only 
white person, which Gately bets must have been broadening for him. Day has a 
squished blank smeared flat face, one requiring like great self-effort to like, and eyes 
that are just starting to lose the nictitated glaze of early sobriety. Day is a newcomer and 
a wreck. A red-wine-and-Quaalude man who finally nodded out in late October and put 
his Saab through the window of a Maiden sporting goods store and then got out and 
proceeded to browse until the Finest came and got him. Who taught something 



horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality at some jr. college up the 
Expressway in Medford and came in saying on his Intake he also manned the helm of a 
Scholarly Quarterly. Word for word, the House Manager had said: 'manned the helm' 
and 'Scholarly .' His Intake estimated that Day's been in and out of a blackout for most of 
the last several years, and his wiring is still as they say a bit frayed. His detox at Dimock, 
where they barely have the resources to give you a Librium if you start to D.T., must 
have been just real grim, because Geoffrey D. alleges it never happened: now his story is 
he just strolled into Ennet House on a lark one day from his home 10+ clicks away in 
Maiden and found the place too hilariously egregulous to want to ever leave. It's the 
newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to Gene M. They identify 
their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in 
the head. 90 Day wears chinos of indeterminate hue, brown socks with black shoes, and 
shirts that Pat Montesian had described in the Intake as 'Eastern-European-type 
Hawaiian shirts.' Day's now on the vinyl couch with Charlotte Treat after breakfast in the 
Ennet House living room with a few of the other residents that either aren't working or 
don't have to be at work early, and with Gately, who'd pulled an all-night Dream Duty 
shift out in the front office till 0400, then got temp-relieved by Johnette Foltz so he 
could go to work janitoring down at the Shattuck Shelter till 0700, then came and 
hauled ass back up here and took back over so's that Johnette could go off to her NA 
thing with a bunch of NA people in what looked like a dune buggy if the dunes in 
question were in Hell, and is now, Gately, trying to unclench and center himself inside 
by tracing the cracks in the paint of the living room ceiling with his eyes. Gately often 
feels a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the A.M., still, even after this long clean. 
His sponsor over at the White Flag Group says some people never get over the loss of 
what they'd thought was their one true best friend and lover; they just have to pray 
daily for acceptance and the brass danglers to move forward through the grief and loss, 
to wait for time to harden the scab. The sponsor. Ferocious Francis G., doesn't give 
Gately one iona of shit for feeling some negative feelings about it: on the contrary, he 
commends Gately for his candor in breaking down and crying like a baby and telling him 
about it early one A.M. over the pay phone, the sense of loss. It's a myth no one misses 
it. Their particular Substance. Shit, you wouldn't need help if you didn't miss it. You just 
have to Ask For Help and like Turn It Over, the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, 
pray. Ask For Help. Gately rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of 
cliches — Day's right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by 
the way things seem to him then he's a dead man for sure. Gately's already watched 
dozens come through here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail or 
die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office at 
night to scream that he can't take it anymore and clutch at Gately's pantcuff and 
blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately'll get to tell Day the thing is that the cliched 
directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just 
say. But he'll only get to say it if Day comes and asks. Personally, Gately gives Geoffrey 
D. like a month at the outside before he's back tipping his hat to parking meters. Except 
who is Gately to judge who'll end up getting the Gift of the program v. who won't, he 
needs to remember. He tries to feel like Day is teaching him patience and tolerance. It 



takes great patience and tolerance not to want to punt the soft little guy out into the 
Comm. Ave. ravine and open up his bunk to somebody that really desperately wants it, 
the Gift. Except who is Gately to think he can know who wants it and who doesn't, deep 
down. Gately's arm is behind his head, up against the sofa's other arm. The old D.E.C. 
viewer is on to something violent and color-enhanced Gately neither sees nor hears. It 
was part of his gifts as a burglar: he can sort of turn his attention on and off like a light. 
Even when he was a resident here he'd had this prescient housebreaker's ability to 
screen input, to do sensory triage. It was one reason he'd even been able to stick out his 
nine residential months here with twenty-one other newly detoxed housebreakers, 
hoods, whores, fired execs, Avon ladies, subway musicians, beer-bloated construction 
workers, vagrants, indignant car salesmen, bulimic trauma-mamas, bunko artists, 
mincing pillow-biters. North End hard guys, pimply kids with electric noserings, denial- 
ridden housewives and etc., all jonesing and head-gaming and mokus and grieving and 
basically whacked out and producing nonstopping output 24-7-365. 

At some point in here Day's saying 'So bring on the lobotomist, bring him on I say!' 

Except Gately's own counselor when he was a resident here, Eugenio Martinez, one of 
the volunteer alumni counselors, a one-eared former boiler-room bunko man and now a 
cellular-phone retailer who'd hooked up with the House under the original founder Guy 
That Didn't Even Use His First Name, and had about ten years clean. Gene M. did — 
Eugenio'd lovingly confronted Gately early on about his special burglar's selective at¬ 
tention and about how it could be dangerous because how can you be sure it's you 
doing the screening and not The Spider. Gene called the Disease The Spider and talked 
about Feeding The Spider versus Starving The Spider and so on and so forth. Eugenio M. 
had called Gately into the House Manager's back office and said what if Don's screening 
input turned out to be Feeding The Old Spider and what about an experimental 
unscreening of input for a while. Gately had said he'd do his best to try and'd come back 
out and tried to watch a Spont-Dissem of the Celtics while two resident pillow-biters 
from the Fenway were having this involved conversation about some third fag having to 
go in and get the skeleton of some kind of fucking rodent removed from inside their 
butthole. 91 The unscreening experiment had lasted half an hour. This was right before 
Gately got his 90-day chip and wasn't exactly wrapped real tight or real tolerant, still. 
Ennet House this year is nothing like the freakshow it was when Gately went through. 

Gately has been completely Substance-free for 421 days today. 

Ms. Charlotte Treat, with a carefully made-up, ruined face, is watching the viewer's 
stripe-shot cartridge while she needlepoints something. Conversation between her and 
Geoffrey D. has mercifully petered out. Day is scanning the room for somebody else to 
engage and piss off so he can prove to himself he doesn't fit in here and stay separated 
off isolated inside himself and maybe get them so pissed off there's a beef and he gets 
bounced out. Day, and it won't be his fault. You can almost hear his Disease chewing 
away inside his head, feeding. Emil Minty, Randy Lenz, and Bruce Green are also in the 
room, sprawled in spring-shot chairs, lighting one gasper off the end of the last, their 
postures the don't-fuck-with-me slouch of the streets that here makes their bodies' 
texture somehow hard to distinguish from that of the chairs. Nell Gunther is sitting at 
the long table in the door-less dining room that opens out right off the old D.E.C. fold- 



out TP's pine stand, whitening under her nails with a manicure pencil amid the remains 
of something she's eaten that involved serious syrup. Burt F. Smith is also in there, way 
down by himself at the table's far end, trying to saw at a waffle with a knife and fork 
attached to the stumps of his wrists with Velcro bands. A long-time-ago former DMV 
Driver's License Examiner, Burt F. Smith is forty-five and looks seventy, has almost all- 
white hair that's waxy and yellow from close-order smoke, and finally got into Ennet 
House last month after nine months stuck in the Cambridge City Shelter. Burt F. Smith's 
story is he's making his like fiftieth-odd stab at sobriety in AA. Once devoutly R.C., Burt 
F.S. has potentially lethal trouble with Faith In A Loving God ever since the R.C. Church 
apparently granted his wife an annulment in like B.S. '99 after fifteen years of marriage. 
Then for several years a rooming-house drunk, which on Gately's view is about like one 
step up from a homeless-person-type drunk. Burt F.S. got mugged and beaten half to 
death in Cambridge on Xmas Eve of last year, and left there to like freeze there, in an 
alley, in a storm, and ended up losing his hands and feet. Doony Glynn's been observed 
telling Burt F.S. things like that there's some new guy coming into the Disabled Room off 
Pat's office with Burt F.S. who's without not only hands and feet but arms and legs and 
even a head and who communicates by farting in Morris Code. This sally earned Glynn 
three days Full-House Restriction and a week's extra Chore for what Johnette Foltz de¬ 
scribed in the Log as 'XSive Cruetly.' There is a vague intestinal moaning in Gately's right 
side. Watching Burt F. Smith smoke a Benson & Hedges by holding it between his 
stumps with his elbows out like a guy with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking 
pathos as far as Gately's concerned. And Geoffrey Day cracks wise about There But for 
Grace. And forget about what it's like trying to watch Burt F. Smith try and light a match. 

Gately, who's been on live-in Staff here four months now, believes Charlotte Treat's 
devotion to needlepoint is suspect. All those needles. In and out of all that thin sterile- 
white cotton stretched drum-tight in its round frame. The needle makes a kind of thud 
and squeak when it goes in the cloth. It's not much like the soundless pop and slide of a 
real cook-and-shoot. But still. She takes such great care. 

Gately wonders what color he'd call the ceiling if forced to call it a color. It's not white 
and it's not gray. The brown-yellow tones are from high-tar gaspers; a pall hangs up 
near the ceiling even this early in the new sober day. Some of the drunks and tranq- 
jockeys stay up most of the night, joggling their feet and chain-smoking, even though 
there's no cartridges or music allowed after OOOOh. He has that odd House Staffer's 
knack, Gately, already, after four months, of seeing everything in both living and dining 
rooms without really looking. Emil Minty, a hard-core smack-addict punk here for 
reasons nobody can quite yet pin down, is in an old mustard-colored easy chair with his 
combat boots up on one of the standing ashtrays, which is tilting not quite enough for 
Gately to tell him to watch out, please. Minty's orange mohawk and the shaved skull 
around it are starting to grow out brown, which is just not a pleasant sight in the 
morning at all. The other ashtray on the floor by his chair is full of the ragged little new 
moons of bitten nails, which has got to mean that the Hester T. that he'd ordered to bed 
at 0230 was right back down here in the chair going at her nails again the second Gately 
left to mop shit at the Shelter. When he's up all night Gately's stomach gets all tight and 
acidy, from either all the coffee maybe or just staying up. Minty's been on the streets 



since he was like sixteen, Gately can tell: he's got that sooty complexion homeless guys 
get where the soot has insinuated itself into the dermal layer and thickened, making 
Minty look somehow upholstered. And the big-armed driver for Leisure Time Ice, the 
quiet kid. Green, a garbage-head all-Substance-type kid, maybe twenty-one, face very 
slightly smunched in on one side, wears sleeveless khaki shirts and had lived in a trailer 
in that apocalyptic Enfield trailer park out near the Allston Spur; Gately likes Green 
because he seems to have got sense enough to keep his map shut when he's got 
nothing important to say, which is basically all the time. The tattoo on the kid's right 
tricep is a spear-pierced heart over the hideous name MILDRED BONK, who Bruce G. 
told him was a ray of living light and a dead ringer for the late lead singer of The Fiends 
in Human Shape and his dead heart's one love ever, and who took their daughter and 
left him this summer for some guy that told her he ranched fucking longhorn cows east 
of Atlantic City NJ. He's got, even by Ennet House standards, major-league sleep trouble. 
Green, and he and Gately play cribbage sometimes in the wee dead hours, a game 
Gately picked up in jail. Burt F.S. is now hunched in a meaty coughing fit, his elbows out 
and his forehead purple. No sign of Hester Thrale, nailbiter and something Pat calls 
Borderline. Gately can see everything without moving or moving his head or either eye. 
Also in here is Randy Lenz, who Lenz is a small-time organic-coke dealer who wears 
sportcoats rolled up over his parlor-tanned forearms and is always checking his pulse on 
the inside of his wrists. It's come out that Lenz is of keen interest to both sides of the 
law because this past May he'd apparently all of a sudden lost all control and holed up 
all of a sudden in a Charlestown motel and free-based most of a whole 100 grams he'd 
been fronted by a suspiciously trusting Brazilian in what Lenz didn't know was supposed 
to have been a D.E.A. sting operation in the South End. Having screwed both sides in 
what Gately secretly views as a delicious fuck-up, Randy Lenz has, since May, been the 
most wanted he's probably ever been. He is seedily handsome in the way of pimps and 
low-level coke dealers, muscular in the MP-ish way that certain guys' muscles look 
muscular but can't really lift anything, with complexly gelled hair and the little birdlike 
head-movements of the deeply vain. One forearm's hair has a little hairless patch, which 
Gately knows well spells knife-owner, and if there's one thing Gately's never been able 
to stomach it's a knife-owner, little swaggery guys that always queer a square beef and 
come up off the ground with a knife where you have to get cut to take it away from 
them. Lenz is teaching Gately reserved politeness to people you pretty much want to 
beat up on sight. It's pretty obvious to everybody except Pat Montesian — whose odd 
gullibility in the presence of human sludge, though, Gately needs to try to remember 
had been one of the reasons why he himself had got into Ennet House, originally — 
obvious that Lenz is here mostly just to hide out: he rarely leaves the House except 
under compulsion, avoids windows, and travels to the nightly required AA/NA meetings 
in a disguise that makes him look like Cesar Romero after a terrible accident; and then 
he always wants to walk back to the House solo afterward, which is not encouraged. 
Lenz is seated low in the northeasternmost corner of an old fake-velour love seat he's 
jammed in the northeasternmost corner of the living room. Randy Lenz has a strange 
compulsive need to be north of everything, and possibly even northeast of everything, 
and Gately has no clue what it's about but observes Lenz's position routinely for his own 



interest and files. Lenz's leg, like Ken Erdedy's leg, never stops joggling; Day claims it 
joggles even worse in sleep. Another gurgle and abdominal chug for Don G., lying there. 
Charlotte Treat has violently red hair. As in hair the color of like a red crayon. The reason 
she doesn't have to work an outside menial job is she's got some strain of the Virus or 
like H.I.V. Former prostitute, reformed. Why do prostitutes when they get straight 
always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding 
out. Charlotte T. has a cut-rate whore's hard half-pretty face, her eyes lassoed with 
shadow around all four lids. Her also with a case of the dermal-layer sooty complexion. 
The riveting thing about Treat is how her cheeks are deeply pitted in these deep 
trenches that she packs with foundation and tries to cover over with blush, which along 
with the hair gives her the look of a mean clown. The ghastly wounds in her cheeks look 
for all the world like somebody got at her with a woodburning kit at some point in her 
career path. Gately would rather not know. 

Don Gately is almost twenty-nine and sober and just huge. Lying there gurgling and 
inert with a fluttery-eyed smile. One shoulder blade and buttock pooch out over the 
side of a sofa that sags like a hammock. Gately looks less built than poured, the smooth 
immovability of an Easter Island statue. It would be nice if intimidating size wasn't one 
of the major factors in a male alumni getting offered the male live-in Staff job here, but 
there you go. Don G. has a massive square head made squarer-looking by the Prince 
Valiantish haircut he tries to maintain himself in the mirror, to save $: room and board 
aside — plus the opportunity for Service — he makes very little as an Ennet House 
Staffer, and is paying off restitution schedules in three different district courts. He has 
the fluttery white-eyed smile now of someone who's holding himself just over the level 
of doze. Pat Montesian is due in at 0900 and Don G. can't go to bed until she arrives 
because the House Manager has driven Jennifer Belbin to a court appearance 
downtown and he's the only Staffer here. Foltz, the female live-in Staffer, is at a 
Narcotics Anonymous convention in Hartford for the long Interdependence Day 
weekend. Gately personally is not hot on NA: so many relapses and un-humble returns, 
so many war stories told with nondisguised bullshit pride, so little emphasis on Service 
or serious Message; all these people in leather and metal, preening. Rooms full of Randy 
Lenzes, all hugging each other, pretending they don't miss the Substance. Rampant 
newcomer-fucking. There's a difference between abstinence v. recovery, Gately knows. 
Except of course who's Gately to judge what works for who. He just knows what seems 
like it works for him today: AA's tough Enfield-Brighton love, the White Flag Group, old 
guys with suspendered bellies and white crew cuts and geologic amounts of sober time, 
the Crocodiles, that'll take your big square head off if they sense you're getting 
complacent or chasing tail or forgetting that your life still hangs in the balance every 
fucking day. White Flag newcomers so crazed and sick they can't sit and have to pace at 
the meeting's rear, like Gately when he first came. Retired old kindergarten teachers in 
polyresin slacks and a pince-nez who bake cookies for the weekly meeting and relate 
from behind the podium how they used to blow bartenders at closing for just two more 
fingers in a paper cup to take home against the morning's needled light. Gately, albeit 
an oral narcotics man from way back, has committed himself to AA. He drank his fair 
share, too, he figures, after all. 



Exec. Director Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three 
people, 2F and 1M, who better be showing up soon, and Gately will answer the door 
when they don't know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup 
of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He'll get them aside and tip them off to be 
sure to pet Pat M.'s dogs during the interview. They'll be sprawled all over the front 
office, sides heaving, writhing and biting at themselves. He'll tell them it's a proved fact 
that if Pat's dogs like you, you're in. Pat M. has directed Gately to tell appliers this, and 
then if the appliers do actually pet the dogs — two hideous white golden retrievers with 
suppurating scabs and skin afflictions, plus one has Grand Mall epilepsy — it'll betray a 
level of desperate willingness that Pat says is just about all she goes by, deciding. 

A nameless cat oozes by on the broad windowsill above the back of the fabric couch. 
Animals here come and go. Alumni adopt them or they just disappear. Their fleas tend 
to remain. Gately's intestines moan. Boston's dawn coming back on the Green Line this 
morning was chemically pink, trails of industrial exhaust blowing due north. The nail- 
parings in the ashtray on the floor are, he realizes now, too big to be from fingernails. 
These bitten arcs are broad and thick and a deep autumnal yellow. He swallows hard. 
He'd tell Geoffrey Day how, even if they are just cliches, cliches are (a) soothing, and (b) 
remind you of common sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns out 
silence; and (4) silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you've got the Disease. Gene M. 
says you can spell the Disease DIS-EASE, which sums the basic situation up nicely. Pat 
has a meeting at the Division of Substance Abuse Services in Government Center at 
noon she needs to be reminded about. She can't read her own handwriting, which the 
stroke affected her handwriting. Gately envisions going around having to find out who's 
biting their fucking toenails in the living room and putting the disgusting toenail-bits in 
the ashtray at like 0500. Plus House regs prohibit bare feet anyplace downstairs. There's 
a pale-brown water stain on the ceiling over Day and Treat the almost exact shape of 
Florida. Randy Lenz has issues with Geoffrey Day because Day is glib and a teacher at a 
Scholarly Journal's helm. This threatens the self-concept of a Randy Lenz that thinks of 
himself as a kind of hiply sexy artist-intellectual. Small-time dealers never conceptualize 
themselves as just small-time dealers, kind of like whores never do. For Occupation on 
his Intake form Lenz had put free lance script writer. And he makes a show of that he 
reads. For the first week here in July he'd held the books upside-down in the northeast 
corner of whatever room. He had a gigantic Medical Dictionary he'd haul down and 
smoke and read until Annie Parrot the Asst. Manager had to tell him not to bring it 
down anymore because it was fucking with Morris Hanley's mind. At which juncture he 
quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic for when he just sat there 
and read. Geoffrey D. has issues with Randy L., also, you can tell: there's a certain way 
they don't quite look at each other. And so now of course they're mashed together in 
the 3-Man together, since three guys in one night missed curfew and came in without 
one normal-sized pupil between them and refused Urines and got bounced on the spot, 
and so Day gets moved up in his first week from the 5-Man room to the 3-Man. 
Seniority comes quick around here. Past Minty, down at the dining-room table's end, 
Burt F.S.'s still coughing, still hunched over, his face a dusky purple, and Nell G. is behind 
him pounding him on the back so that it keeps sending him forward over his ashtray. 



and he's waving one stump vaguely over his shoulder to try and signal her to quit. Lenz 
and Day: a beef may be brewing: Day'll try to goad Lenz into a beef that'll be public 
enough so he doesn't get hurt but does get bounced, and then he can leave treatment 
and go back to Chianti and 'Ludes and getting assaulted by sidewalks and make out like 
the relapse is Ennet House's fault and never have to confront himself or his Disease. To 
Gately, Day is like a wide-open interactive textbook on the Disease. One of Gately's jobs 
is to keep an eye on what's possibly brewing among residents and let Pat or the 
Manager know and try to smooth things down in advance if possible. The ceiling's color 
could be called dun, if forced. Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn't 
like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn't happen; here 
everybody has to make their little comment. 

Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, 
hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here. Gately changes the 
angle of one sneaker, puts the other arm behind his head. His head has real weight and 
pressure. Randy Lenz's obsessive compulsions include the need to be north, a fear of 
disks, a tendency to constantly take his own pulse, a fear of all forms of timepieces, and 
a need to always know the time with great precision. 

'Day man you got the time maybe real quick?' Lenz. For the third time in half an hour. 
Patience, tolerance, compassion, self-discipline, restraint. 

Gately remembers his first six months here straight: he'd felt the sharp edge of every 
second that went by. And the freakshow dreams. Nightmares beyond the worst D.T.s 
you'd ever heard about. A reason for a night-shift Staffer in the front office is so 
somebody's there for the residents to talk at when — not if, when — when the 
freakshow dreams ratchet them out of bed at like 0300. Nightmares about relapsing and 
getting high, not getting high but having everybody think you're high, getting high with 
your alcoholic mom and then killing her with a baseball bat. Whipping the old Unit out 
for a spot-Urine and starting up and flames coming shooting out. Getting high and 
bursting into flames. Having a waterspout shaped like an enormous Talwin suck you up 
inside. A vehicle explodes in an enhanced bloom of sooty flame on the D.E.C. viewer, its 
hood up like an old pop-tab. 

Day's making a broad gesture out of checking his watch. 'Right around 0830, fella.' 

Randy L.'s fine nostrils flare and whiten. He stares straight ahead, eyes narrowed, 
fingers on his wrist. Day purses his lips, leg joggling. Gately hangs his head over the arm 
of the sofa and regards Lenz upside-down. 

'That look on your map there mean something there, Randy? Are you like 
communicating something with that look?' 

'Does anybody maybe know the time a little more exactly is what I'm wondering, Don, 
since Day doesn't.' 

Gately checks his own cheap digital, head still hung over the sofa's arm. 'I got 0832:14, 
15, 16, Randy.' 

"ks a lot, D.G. man.' 

So and now Day has that same flared narrow look for Lenz. 'We've been over this, 
friend. Amigo. Sport. You do this all the time with me. Again I'll say it — I don't have a 
digital watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of far better days. 



It's not a digital watch. It's not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands. See, 
Spiro Agnew here has two little arms: they point, they suggest. It's not a sodding 
stopwatch for life. Lenz, get a watch. Am I right? Why don't you just get a watch, Lenz. 
Three people I happen to know of for a fact have offered to get you a watch and you can 
pay them back whenever you feel comfortable about poking your nose out and 
investigating the work-a-world. Get a watch. Obtain a watch. A fine, digital, incredibly 
wide watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a 
falconer, and it treats time like pi.' 

'Easy does it,' Charlotte Treat half-sings, not looking up from her needle and frame. 

Day looks around at her. 'I don't believe I was speaking to you in any way shape or 
form.' 

Lenz stares at him. 'If you're trying to fuck with me, brother.' He shakes his fine shiny 
head. 'Big mistake.' 

'Oo I'm all atremble. I can barely hold my arm steady to read my watch.' 

'Big big big real big mistake.' 

'Peace on earth good will toward men,' says Gately, back on his back, smiling at the 
dun cracked ceiling. He's the one who'd farted. 


They returned from Long Island bearing their shields rather than upon them, as they 
say. John Wayne and Hal Incandenza lost only five total games between them in singles. 
The A doubles had resembled a spatterpainting. And the B teams, especially the distaffs, 
had surpassed themselves. The whole P.W.T.A. staff and squad had had to sing a really 
silly song. Coyle and Troeltsch didn't win, and Teddy Schacht had, incredibly, lost to his 
squat spin-doctory opponent in three sets, despite the kid's debilitating nerves at crucial 
junctures. The fact that Schacht wasn't all that upset got remarked on by staff. Schacht 
and a conspicuously energized Jim Troeltsch rallied for the big win in 18-A #2 dubs, 
though. Troeltsch's disconnected microphone mysteriously disappeared from his gear 
bag during post-doubles showers, to the rejoicing of all. Pemulis's storky intense two- 
hands-off-both-sides opponent had gotten weirdly lethargic and then disoriented in the 
second set after Pemulis had lost the first in a tie-break. After the kid had delayed play 
for several minutes claiming the tennis balls were too pretty to hit, P.W.T.A. trainers had 
conducted him gently from the court, and the Peemster got 'V.D.,' which is jr.-circuit 
argot for a Victory by Default. The fact that Pemulis hadn't walked around with his chest 
out recounting the win for any E.T.A. females got remarked on only by Hal and T. 
Axford. Schacht was in too much knee-pain to remark on much of anything, and Schtitt 
had E.T.A.'s Barry Loach inject the big purple knee with something that made Schacht's 
eyes roll up in his head. 

Then during the post-meet mixer and dance Pemulis's defaulted opponent ate from 
the hors d' oeuvres table without using utensils or at one point even hands, did a disco 
number when there wasn't any music going, and was finally heard telling the Port 
Washington Headmaster's wife that he'd always wanted to do her from behind. Pemulis 
spent a lot of time whistling and staring innocently up at the pre-fab ceiling. 

The bus for all the 18's squads was warm and there were little nozzles of light over 



your seat that you could either have on to do homework or shut off and sleep. 
Troeltsch, left eye ominously nystagmic, pretended to recap the day's match highlights 
for a subscription audience, speaking earnestly into his fist. The C team's Stockhausen 
was pretending to sing opera. Hal and Tall Paul Shaw were each reading an SAT prep- 
guide. A good quarter of the bus was yellow-highlighting copies of E. A. Abbott's 
inescapable-at-E.T.A. book Flatlcmd for either Flottman or Chawaf or Thorp. An elon¬ 
gated darkness with assorted shapes melted by, plus long gauntlets, near exits, of tall 
Interstatish lamps laying down cones of dirty-looking sodium light. The ghastly sodium 
lamplight made Mario Incandenza happy to be in his little cone of white inside light. 
Mario sat next to K. D. Coyle — who was kind of mentally slow, especially after a hard 
loss — and they played rock-paper-scissors for two hundred clicks or more, not saying 
anything, engrossed in trying to locate patterns in each other's rhythms of choices of 
shapes, which they both decided there weren't any. Two or three upper-classmen in 
Levy-Richardson-O'Byrne-Chawaf's Disciplinary Lit. were slumped over Goncharov's 
Oblomov, looking very unhappy indeed. Charles Tavis sat way in the back with John 
Wayne and beamed and spoke nonstop in hushed tones to Wayne as the Canadian 
stared out the window. DeLint was with the 16's one bus back; he'd been ragging Slice's 
and Kornspan's asses since their doubles, which it looked like they practically gave away. 
The bus was Schtittless: Schtitt always found a private mysterious way back, then 
appeared at dawn drills with deLint and elaborate work-ups of everything that had gone 
wrong the day before. He was particularly shrill and insistent and negative after they'd 
won something. Schacht sat listing to port and didn't respond when hands were waved 
in front of his face, and Axford and Struck started kibitzing Barry Loach about their knees 
were feeling punk as well. The luggage rack over everyone's heads bristled with grips 
and coverless strings, and liniment and tincture of benzoin had been handed out and 
liberally applied, so the warm air became complexly spiced. Everybody was tired in a 
good way. 

The homeward ride's camaraderie was marred only by the fact that someone near the 
back of the bus started the passing around of a Gothic-fonted leaflet offering the 
kingdom of prehistoric England to the man who could pull Keith Freer out of Bernadette 
Longley. Freer had been discovered by prorector Mary Esther Thode more or less Xing 
poor Bernadette Longley under an Adidas blanket in the very back seat on the bus trip 
to the East Coast Clays in Providence in September, and it had been a nasty scene, 
because there were some basic Academy-license rules that it was just unacceptable to 
flout under the nose of staff. Keith Freer was deeply asleep when the leaflet was getting 
passed around, but Bernadette Longley wasn't, and when the leaflet hit the front half 
where all the females now had to sit since September she'd buried her face in her hands 
and flushed even on the back of her pretty neck, and her doubles partner 92 came all the 
way back to where Jim Struck and Michael Pemulis were sitting and told them in no 
uncertain terms that somebody on this bus was so immature it was really sad. 

Charles Tavis was irrepressible. He did a Pierre Trudeau impersonation no one except 
the driver was old enough to laugh at. And the whole mammoth travelling squad, three 
buses' worth, got to stop and have the Mega-breakfast at Denny's, over next to Empire 
Waste, at like 0030, when they got in. 



Hal's eldest brother Orin Incandenza got out of competitive tennis when Hal was nine 
and Mario nearly eleven. This was during the period of great pre-Experialist upheaval 
and the emergence of the fringe C.U.S.P. of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, and the 
tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism. At late seventeen, Orin was ranked in the low 70s 
nationally; he was a senior; he was at that awful age for a low-70s player where age 
eighteen and the terminus of a junior career are looming and either: (1) you're going to 
surrender your dreams of the Show and go to college and play college tennis; or (2) 
you're going to get your full spectrum of gram-negative and cholera and amoebic- 
dysentery shots and try to eke outsome kind of sad diasporic existence on a Eurasian 
satellite pro tour and try to hop those last few competitive plateaux up to Show-caliber 
as an adult; or (3) or you don't know what you're going to do; and it's often an awful 
time. 93 

E.T.A. tries to dilute the awfulness a little by letting eight or nine postgraduates stay 
on for two years and serve in deLint's platoon of prorectors 94 in exchange for room and 
board and travel expenses to small sad satellite tourneys, and Orin's being directly 
related to E.T.A. Administration obviously gave him kind of a lock on a prorector 
appointment if he wanted it, but a prorector's job was only for maybe at most a few 
years, and was regarded as sad and purgatorial... and then of course what then, what 
are you going to do after that, etc. 

Orin's decision to attend college pleased his parents a great deal, though Mrs. Avril 
Incandenza, especially, had gone out of her way to make it clear that whatever Orin 
decided to do would please them because they stood squarely behind and in full 
support of him, Orin, and any decision his very best thinking yielded. But they were still 
in favor of college, privately, you could tell. Orin was clearly not ever going to be a 
professional-caliber adult tennis player. His competitive peak had come at thirteen, 
when he'd gotten to the 14-and-Under quarterfinals of the National Clays in Indianapolis 
IN and in the Quarters had taken a set off the second seed; but starting soon after that 
he'd suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised his 
father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he'd cleaned the clocks 
of at twelve and thirteen become now seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested 
and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin's own clock at fourteen and fifteen — 
this had sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit, 
Orin, and his U.S.T.A. ranking had nosedived through three years until it levelled off 
somewhere in the low 70s, which meant that by age fifteen he wasn't even qualifying 
for the major events' main 64-man draw. When E.T.A. opened, his ranking among the 
Boys' 18s hovered around 10 and he was relegated to a middle spot on the Academy's 
B-squad, a mediocrity that sort of becalmed his verve even further. His style was 
essentially that of a baseliner, a counterpuncher, but without the return of serve or 
passing shots you need to stand much of a chance against a quality net-man. The E.T.A. 
rap on Orin was that he lobbed well but too often. He did have a phenomenal lob: he 
could hug the curve of the dome of the Lung and three times out of four nail a large¬ 
sized coin placed on the opposite baseline; he and Marlon Bain and two or three other 



marginal counterpunching boys at E.T.A. all had phenomenal lobs, honed through spare 
P.M. devoted more and more to Eschaton, which by the most plausible account a 
Croatian-refugee transfer had brought up from the Palmer Academy in Tampa. Orin was 
Eschaton's first game-master at E.T.A., where in the first Eschaton generations it was 
mostly marginal and deafflatusized upperclassmen who played. 

College was the comparatively obvious choice, then, for Orin, as the time of decision 
drew nigh. Oblique family pressures aside, as a low-ranked player at E.T.A. he'd had 
stiffer academic demands than did those for whom the real Show had seemed like a 
viable goal. And the Eschatonology helped a great deal with the math/computer stuff 
E.T.A. tended to be a bit weak in, both Himself and Schtitt being at that point pretty 
anti-quantitative. His grades were solid. His board-scores weren't going to embarrass 
anybody. Orin was basically academically sound, especially for a somebody with a top- 
level competitive sport on his secondary transcript. 

And you have to understand that mediocrity is relative in a sport like junior tennis. A 
national ranking of 74 in Boys 18-and-Under Singles, while mediocre by the standards of 
aspiring pros, is enough to make most college coaches' chins shiny. Orin got a couple 
Pac-10 offers. Big 10 offers. U. New Mexico actually hired a mariachi band that 
established itself under his dorm-room's window six nights running until Mrs. 
Incandenza got Himself to authorize 'F. D. V.' Harde to electrify the fences. Ohio State 
flew him out to Columbus for such a weekend of 'prospective orientation' that when 
Orin got back he had to stay in bed for three days drinking Alka-Seltzer with an ice pack 
on his groin. Cal-Tech offered him an ROTC waiver and A.P. standing in their elite 
Strategic Studies program after Decade Magazine had run a short interest-piece on Orin 
and the Croate and Eschaton's applied use of c:\Pink 2 . 95 

Orin chose B.U. Boston U. Not a tennis power. Not in Cal-Tech's league academically. 
Not the sort of place that hires bands or flies you out for Roman orgies of inducement. 
And only just about three clicks down the hill and Comm. Ave. from E.T.A., west of the 
Bay, around the intersection of Commonwealth and Beacon, Boston. It was kind of a 
joint Orin Incandenza/ Avril Incandenza decision. Orin's Moms privately thought it was 
important for Orin to be away from home, psychologically speaking, but still to be able 
to come home whenever he wished. She put everything to Orin in terms of worrying 
that her concern over what'd be best for him psychologically might prompt her to 
overstep her maternal bounds and speak out of turn or give intrusive advice. According 
to all her lists and advantage-disadvantage charts, B.U. was from every angle far and 
away O.'s best choice, but to keep ever from overstepping or lobbying intrusively the 
Moms actually for six weeks would flee any room Orin entered, both hands clapped 
over her mouth. Orin had this way his face would get when she'd beg him not to let her 
influence his choice. It was during this period that Orin had characterized the Moms to 
Hal as a kind of contortionist with other people's bodies, which Hal's never been able to 
forget. Himself, from his own experience, probably thought it'd be better for Orin to get 
the hell out of Dodge altogether, do something Midwest or PAC, but he kept his own 
counsel. He never had to struggle not to overstep. He probably figured Orin was a big 
boy. This was four years and 30-some released entertainments before Himself put his 
head in a microwave oven, fatally. Then it turned out Avril's adoptive-slash-half-brother 



Charles Tavis, who at this time was back chairing A.S.A. at Throppinghamshire, 96 turned 
out to be old minor-sport-athletic-administration-network friends with Boston 
University's varsity tennis coach. Tavis flew down special on Air Canada to set up a meet 
between the four of them, Avril and son and Tavis and the B.U. tennis coach. The B.U. 
tennis coach was a septuagenaric Ivy League guy, one of those emptily craggily 
handsome old patrician men whose profile looks like it ought to be on a coin, who liked 
his 'lads' to wear all white and actually literally vault the net, win or lose, after matches. 
B.U. had only had a couple nationally ranked players, like ever, and that had been in the 
A.D. 1960s, way before this fashion-conscious guy's tenure; and when the coach saw 
Orin play he about fell over sideways. Recall how mediocrity is contextual. B.U.'s players 
all hailed (literally) from New England country clubs and wore ironed shorts and those 
faggy white tennis sweaters with that blood-colored stripe across the chest, and talked 
without moving their jaw, and played the sort of stiff and patrician serve-and-volley 
game you play if you've had lots of summer lessons and club round-robins but had never 
ever had to get out there and kill or die, psychically. Orin wore cut-off jeans and deck- 
sneakers w/o socks and yawned compulsively as he beat B.U.'s immaculately groomed 
#1 Singles man 2 and 0, hitting something like 40 offensive lobs for winners. Then at the 
four-way meeting Tavis arranged, the old B.U. coach showed up in L.L. Bean chinos and 
a Lacoste polo shirt and got a look at the size of Orin's left arm, and then at Orin's Moms 
in a tight black skirt and levantine jacket with kohl around her eyes and a moussed 
tower of hair and about fell back over sideways the other way. She had this effect on 
older men, somehow. Orin was in a position to dictate terms limited only by the 
parameters of B.U.'s own sports-budget marginality. 97 Orin signed a Letter of Intent 
accepting a Full Ride to B.U., plus books and a Hitachi lap-top w/ software and off- 
campus housing and living expenses and a lucrative work-study job where his job was to 
turn on the sprinklers every morning at the B.U. football Terriers' historic Nickerson 
Field, sprinklers that were already on automatic timers — the sprinkler job was B.U.'s 
tennis team's one plum, recruitment-wise. Charles Tavis — who at Avril's urging that fall 
cashed in his Canadian return ticket and stayed on as Assistant Headmaster to assist 
Orin's father's oversight of the Academy 98 in a progressively more and more total 
capacity as both in- and external travels took J. 0. Incandenza away from Enfield more 
and more often — said 334 years later that he'd never really expected a Thank-You from 
Orin anyway, for liaisoning with the B.U. tennis apparatus, that he wasn't in this for the 
Thank-Yous, that a person who did a service for somebody's gratitude was more like a 2- 
D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person; at least that's what he thought, he 
said; he said what did Avril and Hal and Mario think? was he a genuine 3-D person? was 
he perhaps just rationalizing away some legitimate hurt? did Orin maybe resent him for 
seeming to move in just as he, Orin, moved out? though surely not for Tavis's assuming 
more and more total control of the E.T.A. helm as J. 0. Incandenza spent increasingly 
long hiati either off with Mario on shoots or editing in his room off the tunnel or in 
alcohol-rehabilitative facilities (13 of them over those final three years; Tavis has the 
Blue Cross statements right here), and even more surely not for the final felo de se 
anyone with any kind of denial-free sensitivity could have predicted for the past VA 
years; but, C.T. opined on 4 July Y.D.P.A.H. after Orin, who now had plenty of free 



summer time, declined his fifth straight invitation back to Enfield and his family's annual 
barbecue and Wimbledon-Finals-InterLace-spontaneous-dissemination-watching, Orin 
might just be harboring a resentment over C.T. moving into the Headmaster's office and 
changing the door's TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT. . .' before Himself's microwaved head had 
even cooled, even if it was to take over a Headmaster's job that had been positively 
keening to have someone sedulous and brisk take over. Incandenza Himself having 
eliminated his own map on 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar just as spring 
Letters of Intent were due from seniors who'd decided to slouch off to college tennis, 
just as invitations for the European-dirt-circuit Invitationals were pouring in all over 
Lateral Alice Moore's paraboloid desk, just as E.T.A.'s tax-exempt status was coming up 
for review before the M.D.R." Exemption Panel, just as the school was trying to readjust 
to new O.N.A.N.T.A.-accreditation procedures after years of U.S.T.A.-accreditation 
procedures, just as litigations with Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital over alleged 
damage from E.T.A.'s initial hilltop-flattening and with Empire Waste Displacement over 
the flight-paths of Concavity-bound displacement vehicles were reaching the appellate 
stage, just as applications and fellowships for the Fall term were in the final stages of 
review and response. Well someone had had to come in and fill the void, and that 
person was going to have to be someone who could achieve Total Worry without 
becoming paralyzed by the worry or by the absence of minimal Thank-Yous for 
inglorious duties discharged in the stead of a person whose replacement was naturally, 
naturally going to come in for some resentment, Tavis felt, since since you can't get mad 
at a dying man, much less at a dead man, who better to assume the stress of filling in as 
anger-object than that dead man's thankless inglorious sedulous untiring 3-D bureaucra¬ 
tic assistant and replacement, whose own upstairs room was right next to the HmH's 
master bedroom and who might, by some grieving parties, be viewed as some kind of 
interloping usurper. Tavis had been ready for all this stress and more, he told the 
assembled Academy in preparatory remarks before last year's Fall term Convocation, 
speaking through amplification from the red-and-gray-bunting-draped crow's nest of 
Gerhardt Schtitt's transom down into the rows of folding chairs arranged all along the 
base-and sidelines of E.T.A. Courts 6-9: he not only fully accepted the stress and 
resentment, he said he had worked hard and would continue, in his dull quiet 
unromantic fashion, to work hard to remain open to it, to this resentment and sense of 
loss and irreplaceability, even after four years, to let everyone who needed to get it out 
get it out, the anger and resentment and possible contempt, for their own psychological 
health, since Tavis acknowledged publicly that there was more than enough on every 
E.T.A.'s plate to begin with as it was. The Convocation assembly was outside, on the 
Center Courts that in winter are sheltered by the Lung. It was 31 August in the Year of 
Dairy Products from the American Heartland, hot and muggy. Upper-classmen who'd 
heard these same basic remarks for the past four years made little razor-to-jugular and 
hangman's-noose-over-imaginary-cross-beam motions, listening. The sky overhead was 
glassy blue between clots and strings of clouds moving swiftly north. On Courts 30-32 
the Applied Music Chorus guys kept up a background of 'Tenabrae Factae Sunt,' sotto v. 
Everybody had had on the black armbands everybody still wore for functions and 
assemblies, to keep from forgetting; and the cotton U.S. and crisp nylon O.N.A.N. flags 



flapped and clanked halfway down the driveway's poles in remembrance. The Sunstrand 
Plaza still as of that fall hadn't yet found a way to muffle its East Newton ATHSCME fans, 
and Tavis's voice, which even with the police bullhorn tended to sound distant and 
receding anyway, wove in and out of the sound of the fans and the whump of the 
E.W.D. catapults and locusts' electric screams and the exhaust-rich hot rush of the 
summer wind up off Comm. Ave. and the car-horns and Green Line's trundle and clang 
and the clank of the flags' poles and wires, and everybody but the staff and littlest kids 
up front missed most of Tavis's explanation that Salic law'd nothing to do with the fact 
that there was simply no way the late Headmaster's beloved spouse and E.T.A. Dean of 
Academic Affairs and of Females Mrs. Avril Incandenza could have become Headmaster: 
how would 'Headmistress' have sounded? and she had the females and female 
prorectors and Harde's custodians to oversee, and curricula and assignments and 
schedules, and complex new O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation to finalize the Kafkan 
application for, plus daily HmH-sterilization and personal-ablution rituals and the 
constant battle against anthracnose and dry-climate blight in the dining room's Green 
Babies, plus of course E.T.A. teaching duties on top of that, with the addition of untold 
sleepless nights with the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, the academic PAC 
that watchdogged media-syntax and invited florid fish-lipped guys from the French 
Academy to come speak with trilled r's on prescriptive preservation, and held marathon 
multireadings of e.g. Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language,' and whose Avril- 
chaired Tactical Phalanx (MGM's) was then (unsuccessfully, it turned out) court-fighting 
the new Gentle administration's Title-ll/G-public-funded-library-phaseout-fat-trimming 
initiative, besides of course being practically laid out flat with grief and having to do all 
the emotional-processing work attendant on working through that kind of personal 
trauma, on top of all of which assuming the administrative tiller of E.T.A. itself would 
have been simply an insupportable burden she's thanked C.T. effusively on more than 
one public occasion for leaving the plush sinecure of Throppinghamshire and coming 
down to undertake the stress-ridden tasks not only of bureaucratic administration and 
insuring as smooth a transition as possible but of being there for the Incandenza family 
itself, w/ or w/o Thank-Yous, and for helping support not only Orin's career and 
institutional decision-processes but also for being there supportively for all involved 
when Orin made his seminal choice not to go ahead and play competitive college tennis 
after all, at B.U. 

What happened was that by the third week of his freshman year Orin was attempting 
an extremely unlikely defection from college tennis to college football. The reason he 
gave his parents — Avril made it clear that the very last thing she wanted was to have 
any of her children feel they had to justify or explain to her any sort of abruptly or even 
bizarrely sudden major decision they might happen to make, and it's not clear that The 
Mad Stork had even nailed down the fact that Orin was still in metro-Boston at B.U. in 
the first place, but Orin still felt the move demanded some kind of explanation — was 
that fall tennis practice had started and he'd discovered that he was an empty withered 
psychic husk, competitively, burned out. 

Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping, and excreting competitive tennis since his 
racquet was bigger than he was. He said he realized he had at eighteen become exactly 



as fine a tennis player as he was ever destined to be. The prospect of further 
improvement, a crucial carrot that Schtitt and the E.T.A. staff were expert at dangling, 
had disappeared at a fourth-rate tennis program whose coach had a poster of Bill Tilden 
in his office and offered critique on the level of Bend Your Knees and Watch The Ball. 
This was all actually true, the burn-out part, and totally swallowable as far as the from- 
tennis- part went, but Orin had a harder time explaining the decision's -to-football 
component, partly because he had only the vaguest understanding of U.S. football's 
rules, tactics, and nonmetric venue; he had in fact never once even touched a real 
pebbled-leather football before and, like most serious tennis players, had always found 
the misshapen ball's schizoid bounces disorienting and upsetting to look at. In fact the 
decision had very little to do with football at all, or with the reason Orin ended up 
starting to give before Avril all but demanded that he stop feeling in any way pressured 
or compelled to do anything more than ask for their utter and unqualified support of 
whatever actions he felt his personal happiness required, which is what she did when he 
started a slightly lyrical thing about the crash of pads and Sisboomba of Pep Squad and 
ambience of male bonding and smell of dewy turf at Nickerson Field at dawn when he 
showed up to watch the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into 
plumed rainbows of refraction. The refracting-sprinklers part was actually true, and that 
he liked it; the rest had been fiction. 

The real football reason, in all its inevitable real-reason banality, was that, over the 
course of weeks of dawns of watching the autosprinklers and the Pep Squad (which 
really did practice at dawn) practices, Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade 
crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired sophomore 
baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut from a distance through the diffracted 
spectrum of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field's dewy turf, a twirler 
who'd attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers Orin and his strabismic B.U. 
doubles partner had gone to, and who danced the same way she twirled and invoked 
mass Pep, which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin's body 
watery and distant and oddly refracted. 

Orin Incandenza, who like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had 
internal addictive-sexuality issues, had already drawn idle little sideways 8's on the 
postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds. But this was different. He'd been smitten before, 
but not decapitated. He lay on his bed in the autumn P.M.s during the tennis coach's 
required nap-time, squeezing a tennis ball and talking for hours about this twirling 
sprinkler-obscured sophomore while his doubles partner lay way on the other side of 
the huge bed looking simultaneously at Orin and at the N.E. leaves changing color in the 
trees outside the window. The schoolboy epithet they'd made up to refer to Orin's 
twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time. It wasn't the entire 
attraction, but she really was almost grotesquely lovely. She made the Moms look like 
the sort of piece of fruit you think you want to take out of the bin and but then once 
you're right there over the bin you put back because from close up you can see a much 
fresher and less preserved-seeming piece of fruit elsewhere in the bin. The twirler was 
so pretty that not even the senior B.U. football Terriers could summon the saliva to 
speak to her at Athletic mixers. In fact she was almost universally shunned. The twirler 



induced in heterosexual males what U.H.I.D. later told her was termed the Actaeon 
Complex, which is a kind of deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty. About all Orin's 
doubles partner — who as a strabismic was something of an expert on female 
unattainability — felt he could do was warn 0. that this was the kind of hideously 
attractive girl you just knew in advance did not associate with normal collegiate human 
males, and clearly attended B.U.-Athletic social functions only out of a sort of bland 
scientific interest while she waited for the cleft-chinned ascapartic male-model-looking 
wildly-successful-in-business adult male she doubtless was involved with to telephone 
her from the back seat of his green stretch Infiniti, etc. No major-sport player had ever 
even orbited in close enough to hear the elisions and apical lapses of a mid-Southern 
accent in her oddly flat but resonant voice that sounded like someone enunciating very 
carefully inside a soundproof enclosure. When she danced, at dances, it was with other 
cheerleaders and twirlers and Pep Squad Terrierettes, because no male had the grit or 
spit to ask her. Orin himself couldn't get closer than four meters at parties, because he 
suddenly couldn't figure out where to put the stresses in the Charles-Tavis-unwittingly- 
inspired 'Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive-and-l'll-affect-the-demeanor-of- 
that-sort-of-man' strategic opening that had worked so well on other B.U. Subjects. It 
took three hearings for him to figure out that her name wasn't Joel. The big hair was 
red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zygomatics 
indescribable and her eyes an extra-natural HD green. He wouldn't learn till later that 
the almost pungently clean line-dried-laundry scent that hung about her was a special 
low-pH dandelion attar decocted special by her chemist Daddy in Shiny Prize KY. 

Boston University's tennis team, needless to say, had neither cheerleaders nor baton- 
twirling Pep Squads, which were reserved for major and large-crowd sports. This is 
pretty understandable. 

The tennis coach took Orin's decision hard, and Orin had had to hand him a Kleenex 
and stand there for several minutes under the poster of an avuncular Big Bill Tilden 
standing there in WWII-era long white pants and ruffling a ballboy's hair, Orin watching 
the Kleenex soggify and get holes blown through it while he tried to articulate just what 
he meant by burned out and withered husk and carrot. The coach had kept asking if this 
meant Orin's mother wouldn't be coming down to watch practice anymore. 

Orin's now former doubles partner, a strabismic and faggy-sweatered but basically 
decent guy who also happened to be heir to the Nickerson Farms Meat Facsmile 
fortune, had his cleft-chinned and solidly B.U.-connected Dad make 'a couple quick calls' 
from the back seat of his forest-green Lexus. B.U.'s Head Football Coach, the Boss 
Terrier, an exiled Oklahoman who really did wear a gray crewneck sweatshirt with a 
whistle on a string, was intrigued by the size of the left forearm and hand extended 
(impolitely but intriguingly) during introductions — this was Orin's tennis arm, roughly 
churn-sized; the other, whose dimensions were human, was hidden under a sportcoat 
draped strategically over the aspiring walk-on's right shoulder. 

But you can't play U.S. football with a draped sportcoat. And Orin's only real speed 
was in tiny three-meter lateral bursts. And then it turned out that the idea of actually 
making direct physical contact with an opponent was so deeply ingrained as alien and 
horrific that Orin's tryouts, even at reserve positions, were too pathetic to describe. He 



was called a drogoss and then a mollygag and then a bona fried pussy. He was finally 
told that he seemed to have some kind of empty swinging sack where his balls ought to 
be and that if he wanted to keep his scholarship he might ought to stick to minor-type 
sports where what you hit didn't up and hit you back. The Coach finally actually grabbed 
Orin's facemask and pointed to the mouth of the field's southern tunnel. Orin walked 
south off the field solo and disconsolate, helmet under his little right arm, with not even 
a wistful glance back at the Pep Squad's P.G.O.A.T. practicing baton-aloft splits in a 
heart-rendingly distant way beneath the Visitors' northern goalposts. 

What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny's kisses and its 
dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really 
meaningful events in his life: 100 i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you 
happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans 
trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear 
because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer. 
The destiny-grade event that happened to Orin Incandenza at this point was that just as 
he was passing glumly under the Home goalposts and entering the shadow of the south 
exit-tunnel's adit a loud and ominously orthopedic cracking sound, plus then shrieking, 
issued from somewhere on the field behind him. What had happened was that B.U.'s 
best defensive tackle — a 180-kilo future pro who had no teeth and liked to color — 
practicing Special Teams punt-rushes, not only blocked B.U.'s varsity punter's kick but 
committed a serious mental error and kept coming and crashed into the little padless 
guy while the punter's cleated foot was still up over his head, falling on him in a beefy 
heap and snapping everything from femur to tarsus in the punter's leg with a dreadful 
high-caliber snap. Two Pep majorettes and a waterboy fainted from the sound of the 
punter's screams alone. The blocked punt's ball caromed hard off the defensive tackle's 
helmet and bounced crazily and rolled untended all the way back to the shadow of the 
south tunnel, where Orin had turned to watch the punter writhe and the lineman rise 
with a finger in his mouth and a guilty expression. The Defensive Line Coach 
disconnected his headset and dashed out and began blowing his whistle at the lineman 
at extremely close range, over and over, as the huge tackle started to cry and hit himself 
in the forehead with the heel of his hand. Since nobody else was close, Orin picked up 
the blocked punt's ball, which the Head Coach was gesturing impatiently for from his 
position at the midfield bench. Orin held the football (which he'd not been very good at 
it during tryouts, holding onto it), feeling its weird oval weight, and looked way upfield 
at the stretcher-bearers and punter and assistants and Coach. It was too far to try to 
throw, and there was just no way Orin was making another solo walk up the sideline and 
then back off the field again under the distant green gaze of the twirler who owned his 
CNS. 

Orin, before that seminal moment, had never tried to kick any sort of ball before in his 
whole life, was the unengineered and kind of vulnerable revelation that ended up 
moving Joelle van Dyne way more than status or hang-time. 

And but as of that moment, as whistles fell from lips and people pointed, and under 
that same green and sprinkler-hazed gaze Orin found for himself, within competitive 
U.S. football, a new niche and carrot. A Show-type career he could never have dreamed 



of trying to engineer. Within days he was punting 60 yards without a rush, practicing 
solo on an outside field with the Special Teams Assistant, a dreamy Gauloise-smoking 
man who invoked ideas of sky and flight and called Orin 'ephebe,' which a discreet 
phone call to his youngest brother revealed not to be the insult Orin had feared it 
sounded like. By the second week 0. was up around 65 yards, still without a snap or 
rush, his rhythm clean and faultless, his concentration on the transaction between one 
foot and one leather egg almost frighteningly total. Nor, by the third week, was he much 
distracted by the ten crazed pituitary giants bearing down as he took the snap and 
stepped forward, the gasps and crunching and meaty splats of interpersonal contact 
around him, the cooly-type shuffle of the stretcher-bearers who came and went after 
the whistles blew. He'd been taken aside and the empty-scrotum crack apologized for, 
and it had been explained — complete with blow-ups of Rulebook pages — that 
regulations against direct physical contact with the punter were draconian, enforced by 
the threat of massive yardage and loss of possession. The rifle-shot sounds of the ex¬ 
punter's now useless leg were one-in-a-million sounds, he was assured. The Head Coach 
let Orin overhear him telling the defense that any man misfortunate enough to impact 
the team's new stellar punt-man might could just keep on walking after the play was 
over, all the way to the south tunnel and the stadium exit and the nearest 
transportation to some other institution of learning and ball. 

It was, pretty obviously, the start of football season. Crisp air, everything half dead, 
burning leaves, hot chocolate, raccoon coats and halftime-twirling and something called 
the Wave. Crowds exponentially larger and more demonstrative than tennis- 
tournament crowds. HOME v. SUNY-Buffalo, HOME v. Syracuse, AT Boston College, AT 
Rhode Island, HOME v. the despised Minutemen of UMass-Amherst. Orin's average 
reached 69 yards per kick and was still improving, his eyes fixed on the twin 
inducements of a gleaming baton and a massive developmental carrot he hadn't felt 
since age fourteen. He punted the football better and better as his motion — a dancerly 
combination of moves and weight-transfers every bit as complex and precise as a kick 
serve — got more instinctive and he found his hamstrings and adductors loosening 
through constant and high-impact competitive punting, his left cleat finishing at 90° to 
the turf, knee to his nose, Rockette-kicking in the midst of crowd-noise so rabid and 
entire it seemed to remove stadiums' air, the one huge wordless orgasmic voice rising 
and creating a vacuum that sucked the ball after it into the sky, the leather egg receding 
as it climbed in a perfect spiral, seeming to chase the very crowd-roar it had produced. 

By Halloween his control was even better than his distance. It wasn't by accident that 
the Special Teams Assistant described it as 'touch.' Consider that a football field is 
basically just a grass tennis court tugged unnaturally long, and that white lines at 
complex right angles still define tactics and movement, the very possibility of play. And 
that Orin Incandenza, who tennis-historically had had mediocre passing shots, had been 
indicted by Schtitt for depending way too often on the lob he'd developed as compensa¬ 
tion. Like the equally weak-passing Eschaton-prodigy Michael Pemulis after him, Orin's 
whole limited game had been built around a preternatural lob, which of course a lob is 
just a higher-than-opponent parabola that ideally lands just shy of the area of play's rear 
boundary and is hard to retrieve and return. Gerhardt Schtitt and deLint and their 



depressed prorectors had had to sit eating butterless popcorn through only one 
cartridge of one B.U. game to understand how Orin had found his major-sport niche. 
Orin was still just only lobbing, Schtitt observed, illustrating with the pointer and a 
multiple-replayed fourth down, but now with the leg instead, the only punting, and now 
with ten armored and testosterone-flushed factota to deal with what ever return an 
opponent could muster; Schtitt posited that Orin had stumbled by accident on a way, in 
this grotesquely physical and territorial U.S. game, to legitimate the same dependency 
on the one shot of lob that had kept him from developing the courage to develop his 
weaker areas, which this unwillingness to risk the temporary failure and weakness for 
long-term gaining had been the real herbicide on the carrot of Orin Incandenza's tennis. 
Puberty Schmuberty, as the real reason for burning down the inside fire for tennis, 
Schtitt knew. Schtitt's remarks were nodded vigorously at and largely ignored, in the 
Viewing Room. Schtitt later told deLint he had several very bad feelings about Orin's 
future, inside. 

But so by freshman Halloween Orin was regularly placing his punts inside the 
opponents' 20, spinning the ball off his cleats' laces so it either hit and squiggled outside 
the white sideline and out of play or else landed on its point and bounced straight up 
and seemed to squat in the air, hovering and spinning, waiting for some downfield 
Terrier to kill it just by touching. The Special Teams Assistant told Orin that these were 
historically called coffin-corner kicks, and that Orin Incandenza was the best natural 
coffin-corner man he'd lived to see. You almost had to smile. Orin's Full-Ride scholarship 
was renewed under the aegis of a brutaler but way more popular North American sport 
than competitive tennis. This was after the second home game, around the time that a 
certain Actaeonizingly pretty baton-twirler, invoking mass Pep during breaks in the 
action, seemed to begin somehow directing her glittering sideline routines at Orin in 
particular. So and then the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship of Orin's life 
took bilateral root at a distance, during games, without one exchanged personal pho¬ 
neme, a love communicated — across grassy expanses, against stadiums' monovocal 
roar — entirely through stylized repetitive motions — his functional, hers celebratory — 
their respective little dances of devotion to the spectacle they were both — in their 
different roles — trying to make as entertaining as possible. 

But so the point was that the accuracy came after the distance. In his first couple 
games Orin had approached his fourth-down task as one of simply kicking the ball out of 
sight and past hope of return. The dreamy S.T. Assistant said this was a punter's natural 
pattern of growth and development. Your raw force tends to precede your control. In 
his initial Home start, wearing a padless uniform that didn't fit and a wide receiver's 
number, he was summoned when B.U.'s first drive stalled on the 40 of a Syracuse team 
that had no idea it was in its last season of representing an American university. A side- 
issue. College-sport analysts would later use the game to contrast the beginning and 
end of different eras. But a side-issue. Orin had a book-long of 73 yards that day, and an 
average hang of eight-point-something seconds; but that first official punt, exhilarated 
— the carrot, the P.G.O.A.T., the monovocal roar of a major-sport crowd — he sent over 
the head of the Orangeman back waiting to receive it, over the goalposts and the safety- 
nets behind the goalposts, over the first three sections of seats and into the lap of an 



Emeritus theology prof in Row 52 who'd needed opera glasses to make out the play 
itself. It went in the books at 40 yards, that baptismal competitive punt. It was really 
almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time the Special Teams Asst, said you 
could have tender and sensitive intercourse during. The sound of the podiatric impact 
had silenced a major-sport crowd, and a retired USMC flier who always came with 
petroleum-jelly samples he hawked to the knuckle-chapped crowds in the Nickerson 
stands told his cronies in a Brookline watering hole after the game that this Incandenza 
kid's first public punt had sounded just the way Rolling Thunder's big-bellied Berthas had 
sounded, the exaggerated WHUMP of incendiary tonnage, way larger than life. 

After four weeks, Orin's success at kicking big egg-shaped balls was way past anything 
he'd accomplished hitting little round ones. Granted, the tennis and Eschaton hadn't 
hurt. But it wasn't all athletic, this affinity for the public punt. It wasn't all just high-level 
competitive training and high-pressure experience transported inter-sport. He told 
Joelle van Dyne, she of the accent and baton and brainlocking beauty, told her in the 
course of an increasingly revealing conversation after kind of amazingly she had 
approached him at a Columbus Day Major Sport function and asked him to autograph a 
squooshy-sided football he'd kicked a hole through in practice — the deflated bladder 
had landed in the Marching Terriers' sousaphone player's sousaphone and had been 
handed over to Joelle after extrication by the lardy tubist, sweaty and dumb under the 
girl's Actaeonizingly imploring gaze — asked him — Orin now also suddenly damp and 
blank on anything attractive to say or recite — asked him in an emptily resonant drawl 
to inscribe the punctured thing for her Own Personal Daddy, one Joe Lon van Dyne of 
Shiny Prize KY and she said also of the Dyne-Riney Proton Donor Reagent Corp. of 
nearby Boaz KY, and engaged him (0.) in a slowly decreasingly one-sided social-function- 
type conversation — the P.G.O.A.T. was pretty easy to stay in a one-to-one like tete-a- 
tete with, since no other Terrier could bring himself within four meters of her — and 
Orin gradually found himself almost meeting her eye as he shared that he believed it 
wasn't all athletic, punting's pull for him, that a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, 
if there was such a thing anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 
30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul. He invoked the raw numbers. The 
frenzy. He was thinking out loud here. Audience exhortations and approvals so total 
they ceased to be numerically distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one 
big vowel, the sound of the womb, the roar gathering, tidal, amniotic, the voice of what 
might as well be God. None of tennis's prim applause cut short by an umpire's patrician 
shush. He said he was just speculating here, ad-libbing; he was meeting her eye and not 
drowning, his dread now transformed into whatever it had been dread of. He said the 
sound of all those souls as One Sound, too loud to bear, building, waiting for his foot to 
release it: Orin said the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear himself 
think out there, maybe a cliche, but out there transformed, his own self transcended as 
he'd never escaped himself on the court, a sense of a presence in the sky, the crowd- 
sound congregational, the stadium-shaking climax as the ball climbed and inscribed a 
cathedran arch, seeming to take forever to fall ... It never even occurred to him to ask 
her what sort of demeanor she preferred. He didn't have to strategize or even scheme. 
Later he knew what the dread had been dread of. He hadn't had to promise her 



anything, it turned out. It was all for free. 

By the end of his freshman fall and B.U.'s championship of the Yankee Conference, 
plus its nonvictorious but still unprecedented appearance at Las Vegas's dignitary- 
attended K-L-RMKI/Forsythia Bowl, Orin had taken his off-campus housing subsidy and 
moved with Joelle van Dyne the heart-stopping Kentuckian into an East Cambridge co¬ 
op three subway stops distant from B.U. and the all-new inconveniences of being 
publicly stellar at a major sport in a city where people beat each other to death in bars 
over stats and fealty. 

Joelle had done the midnight Thanksgiving dinner at E.T.A., and survived Avril, and 
then Orin spent his first Xmas ever away from home, flying to Paducah and then driving 
a rented 4WD to kudzu-hung Shiny Prize, Kentucky, to drink toddies under a little white 
reusable Xmas tree with all red balls with Joelle and her mother and Personal Daddy and 
his loyal pointers, getting a storm-cellar tour of Joe Lon's incredible Pyrex collection of 
every solution in the known world that can turn blue litmus paper red, little red 
rectangles floating in the flasks for proof, Orin nodding a lot and trying incredibly hard 
and Joelle saying that Mr. van D.'s not once smiling at him was just His Way, was all, the 
way his own Moms had Her Way Joelle'd had trouble with. Orin wired Marlon Bain and 
Ross Real and the strabismic Nickerson that he was by all indications in love with 
somebody. 

Freshman New Year's Eve in Shiny Prize, far from the O.N.A.N.ite upheavals of the new 
Northeast, the last P.M. Before Subsidization, was the first time Orin saw Joelle ingest 
very small amounts of cocaine. Orin had exited his own substance-phase about the time 
he discovered sex, plus of course the N./O.N.A.N.C.A.A.-urine considerations, and he 
declined it, the cocaine, but not in a judgmental or killjoy way, and found he liked being 
with his P.G.O.A.T. straight while she ingested, he found it exciting, a vicariously on-the- 
edge feeling he associated with giving yourself not to any one game's definition but to 
yourself and how you unjudgmentally feel about somebody who's high and feeling even 
freer and better than normal, with you, alone, under the red balls. They were a natural 
match here: her ingestion then was recreational, and he not only didn't mind but never 
made a show of not minding, nor she that he abstained; the whole substance issue was 
natural and kind of free. Another reason they seemed star-fated was that Joelle had in 
her sophomore year decided to concentrate in Film/Cartridge, academically, at B.U. 
Either Film-Cartridge Theory or Film-Cartridge Production. Or maybe both. The 
P.G.O.A.T. was a film fanatic, though her tastes were pretty corporate: she told 0. she 
preferred movies where 'a whole bunch of shit blows up.' 101 Orin in a low-key way 
introduced her to art film, conceptual and highbrow academic avant- and apres-garde 
film, and taught her how to use some of InterLace's more esoteric menus. He blasted up 
the hill to Enfield and brought down The Mad Stork's own Pre-Nuptial Agreement of 
Heaven and Hell, which had a major impact on her. Right after Thanksgiving Himself let 
the P.G.O.A.T. understudy with Leith on the set of The American Century as Seen 
Through a Brick in return for getting to film her thumb against a plucked string. After an 
only mildly disappointing sophomore season 0. flew with her to Toronto to watch part 
of the filming of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Himself would take Orin and his beloved 
out after dailies, entertaining Joelle with his freakish gift for Canadian-cab-hailing while 



Orin stood turtle-headed in his topcoat; and then later Orin would shepherd the two of 
them back to their Ontario Place hotel, stopping the cab to let them both throw up, 
fireman-carrying Joelle while he watched The Mad Stork negotiate his suite by holding 
on to walls. Himself showed them the U. Toronto Conference Center where he and the 
Moms had first met. This might have been the end's start, gradually, in hindsight. Joelle 
that summer declined a sixth summer at the Dixie Baton-Twirling Institute in Oxford MS 
and let Himself give her a stage name and use her in rapid succession in Low 
Temperature Civics, (The) Desire to Desire, and Safe Boating Is No Accident, travelling 
with Himself and Mario while Orin stayed in Boston recuperating from minor surgery on 
a hypertrophied left quadriceps at a Massachusetts General Hospital where no fewer 
than four nurses and P.T.s in the Sports Medicine wing filed for legal separation from 
their husbands, with custody. 

The P.G.O.A.T.'s real ambitions weren't thespian, Orin knew, is one reason he hung in 
so long. Joelle when he'd met her already owned some modest personal film 
equipment, courtesy of her Personal Daddy. And she now had access to nothing if not 
serious digital gear. By Orin's sophomore year she no longer twirled or incited Pep in 
any way. In his first full season she stood behind various white lines with a little Bolex 
R32 digital recorder and BTL meters and lenses, including a bitching Angenieux zoom 
O.'d gone and paid for, as a gesture, and she shot little half-disk-sector clips of #78, B.U. 
Punter, sometimes with Leith in attendance (never Himself), experimenting with speed 
and focal length and digital mattes, extending herself technically. Orin, despite his 
interests in upgrading the P.G.O.A.T.'s commercial tastes, was himself pretty lukewarm 
on film and cartridges and theater and pretty much anything that reduced him to herd¬ 
like spectation, but he respected Joelle's own creative drives, to an extent; and he found 
out that he really did like watching the football footage of Joelle van Dyne, featuring 
pretty much him only, strongly preferred the little .5-sector clips to Himself's cartridges 
or corporate films where things blew up while Joelle bounced in her seat and pointed at 
the viewer; and he found them (her clips of him at play) way more engaging than the 
grainy overcluttered game- and play-celluloids the Head Coach made everybody sit 
through. Orin liked to adjust the co-op's rheostat way down when Joelle wasn't home 
and haul out the diskettes and make Jiffy Pop and watch her little ten-second clips of 
him over and over. He saw something different each time he rewound, something more. 
The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and seemed to reveal him in 
ways he could never have engineered. He sat rapt. It only happened when he watched 
them alone. Sometimes he got an erection. He never masturbated; Joelle came home. 
Still in the last stages of a late puberty and the prettiness getting visibly worse day by 
day, Joelle had been maiden, still, when Orin met her. She'd been shunned theretofore, 
both at B.U. and Shiny Prize-Boaz Consolidated: the beauty had repelled every comer. 
She'd devoted her life to her twirling and amateur film. Disney Leith said she had the 
knack: her camera-hand was rock-steady; even the early clips from the start of the Y.W. 
season looked shot off a tripod. There'd been no audio in the sophomore clips, and you 
could hear the high-pitched noise of the cartridge in the TP's disk drive. A cartridge 
revolving at a digital diskette's 450 rpm sounds a bit like a distant vacuum cleaner. Late- 
night car-noises and sirens drifted in through the bars from as far away as the Storrow 



500. Silence was not part of what Orin was after, watching. (Joelle housekeeps like a 
fiend. The place is always sterile. The resemblance to the Moms's housekeeping he finds 
a bit creepy. Except Joelle doesn't mind a mess or give anybody the creeps worrying 
about hiding that she minds it so nobody's feelings will be hurt. With Joelle the mess 
just disappears sometime during the night and you wake up and the place is sterile. It's 
like elves.) Soon after he started watching the clips in his junior year, Orin had blasted 
up Comm.'s hill and brought Joelle back a Bolex-compatible Tatsuoka recorder w/ sync 
pulse, a cardioid mike, a low-end tripod w/ a barney to muffle the Bolex's whir, a classy 
Pilotone blooper and sync-pulse cords, a whole auracopia. It took Leith three weeks to 
teach her to use the Pilotone. Now the clips had sound. Orin has trouble not burning the 
Jiffy Pop popcorn. It tends to burn as the foil top inflates; you have to take it off the 
stove before the foil forms a dome. No microwave popcorn for Orin, even then. He liked 
to dim the track-lights when Joelle was out and haul out the cartridge-rack and watch 
her little ten-second clips of his punts over and over. Here he is back against Delaware in 
the second Home game of Y.T.M.P. The sky is dull and pale, the five Yankee Conference 
flags — U. Vermont and UNH now history — are all right out straight with the gale off 
the Charles for which Nickerson Field is infamous. It's fourth down, obviously. 
Thousands of kilos of padded meat assume four-point stances and chuff at each other, 
poised to charge and stave. Orin is twelve yards back from scrimmage, his cleated feet 
together, his weight just ahead of himself, his mismatched arms out before him in the 
attitude of the blind before walls. His eyes are fixed on the distant grass-stained 
Valentine of the center's ass. His stance, waiting to receive the snap, is not unlike a 
diver's, he sees. Nine men on line, four-pointed, poised to stave off ten men's assault. 
The other team's deep back is back to receive, seventy yards away or more. The fullback 
whose sole job is to keep Orin from harm is ahead and to the left, bent at the knees, his 
taped fists together and elbows out like a winged thing ready to hurl itself at whatever 
breaches the line and comes at the punter. Joelle's equipment isn't quite pro-caliber but 
her technique is very good. By junior year there's also color. There's only one sound, and 
it is utter: the crowd's noise and its response to that noise, building. Orin's back against 
Delaware, ready, his helmet a bright noncontact white and his head's insides scrubbed 
free for ten seconds of every thought not connected to receiving the long snap and 
stepping martially forward to lob the leather egg beyond sight at an altitude that makes 
the wind no factor. Madame P.G.O.A.T. gets it all, zooming in from the opposite end 
zone. She gets his timing; a punt's timing is minutely precise, like a serve's; it's like a solo 
dance; she gets the ungodly WHUMP against and above the crowd's vowel's climax; she 
captures the pendular 180-arc of Orin's leg, the gluteal follow-through that puts his 
cleat's laces way over his helmet, the perfect right angle between leg and turf. Her 
technique is superb on the Delaware debacle Orin can just barely take reviewing, the 
one time all year the big chuffing center oversnaps and arcs the ball over Orin's upraised 
hands so by the time he's run back and grabbed the crazy-bouncing thing ten yards 
farther back the Delaware defense has breached the line, are through the line, the 
fullback supine and trampled, all ten rushers rushing, wanting nothing more than 
personal physical contact with Orin and his leather egg. Joelle gets him sprinting, a 
three-meter lateral burst as he avoids the first few sets of hands and the beefy curling 



lips and but is just about to get personally contacted and knocked out of his cleats by 
the Delaware strong safety flying in on a slant from way outside when the tiny .5-sector 
of digital space each punt's programmed to require runs out and the crowd-sound moos 
and dies and you can hear the disk-drive stalled at the terminal byte and Orin's chin- 
strapped plastic-barred face is there on the giant viewer, frozen and High-Def in his 
helmet, right before impact, zoomed in on with a quality lens. Of particular interest are 
the eyes. 


14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


Poor Tony Krause had a seizure on the T. It happened on a Gray Line train from 
Watertown to Inman Square, Cambridge. He'd been drinking codeine cough syrup in the 
men's room of the Armenian Foundation Library in horrid central Watertown MA for 
over a week, darting out from cover only to beg a scrip from hideous Equus Reese and 
then dash in at Brooks Pharmacy, wearing a simply vile ensemble of synthetic-fiber 
slacks and suspenders and tweed Donegal cap he'd had to cadge from a longshoremen's 
union hall. Poor Tony couldn't dare wear anything comely, not even the Antitoi 
brothers' red leather coat, not since that poor woman's bag had turned out to have a 
heart inside. He had simply never felt so beset and overcome on all sides as the black 
July day when it fell to his lot to boost a heart. Who wouldn't wonder Why Me? He 
didn't dare dress expressive or ever go back to the Square. And Emil still had him 
marked for de-mapping as a consequence of that horrid thing with Wo and Bobby C last 
winter. Poor Tony hadn't dared show one feather east of Tremont St. or at the Brighton 
Projects or even Delphina's in backwater Enfield since last Xmas, even after Emil simply 
dematerialized from the street-scene; and now since 29 July he was non grata at 
Harvard Square and environs; and even the sight of an Oriental now gave him 
palpitations — say nothing of an Aigner accessory. 

Thus Poor Tony had no way to cop for himself. He could trust no one enough to inject 
their wares. S. T. Cheese and Lolasister were no more trustworthy than he himself; he 
didn't even want them to know where he slept. He began drinking cough syrup. He 
managed to get Bridget Tender hole and the strictly rough-trade Stokely Dark Star to 
cop for him on the wink for a few weeks, until Stokely died in a Fenway hospice and 
then Bridget Tenderhole was shipped by her pimp to Brockton under maddeningly 
vague circumstances. Then Poor Tony had read the dark portents and swallowed the 



first of his pride and hid himself even more deeply in a dumpster-complex behind the 
I.B.P.W.D 102 Local #4 Hall in Fort Point downtown and resolved to stay hidden there for 
as long as he could swallow the pride to send Lolasister out to acquire heroin, accepting 
w/o pride or complaint the shameless rip-offs the miserable bitch perpetrated upon 
him, until a period in October when Lolasister went down with hepatitis-G and the 
supply of heroin dried horribly up and the only people even copping enough to chip 
were people in a position to dash here and there to great beastly lengths under an open 
public-access sky and no friend, no matter how dear or indebted, could afford to cop for 
another. Then, wholly friend- and connectionless. Poor Tony, in hiding, began to 
Withdraw From Heroin. Not just get strung out or sick. Withdraw. The words echoed in 
his neuralgiac and wigless head with the simply most awful sinister-footsteps-echoing- 
in-deserted-corridor quality. Withdrawal. The Wingless Fowl. Turkeyfication. Kicking. 
The Old Cold Bird. Poor Tony had never once had to Withdraw, not all the way down the 
deserted corridor of Withdrawal, not since he first got strung at seventeen. At the very 
worst, someone kind had always found him charming, if things got dire enough to have 
to rent out his charms. Alas thus about the fact that his charms were now at low ebb. He 
weighed fifty kilos and his skin was the color of summer squash. He had terrible 
shivering-attacks and also perspired. He had a sty that had scraped one eyeball as pink 
as a bunny's. His nose ran like twin spigots and the output had a yellow-green tinge he 
didn't think looked promising at oil. There was an uncomely dry-rot smell about him that 
even he could smell. In Watertown he tried to pawn his fine auburn wig w/ removable 
chignon and was cursed at in Armenian because the wig had infestations from his own 
hair below. Let's not even mention the Armenian pawnbroker's critique of his red 
leather coat. 

Poor Tony got more and more ill as he further Withdrew. His symptoms themselves 
developed symptoms, troughs and nodes he charted with morbid attention in the 
dumpster, in his suspenders and horrid tweed cap, clutching a shopping bag with his wig 
and coat and comely habilements he could neither wear nor pawn. The empty Empire 
Displacement Co. dumpster he was hiding in was new and apple-green and the inside 
was bare dimpled iron, and it remained new and unutilized because persons declined to 
come near enough to utilize it. It took some time for Poor Tony to realize why this was 
so; for a brief interval it had seemed like a break, fortune's one wan smile. An E.W.D. 
land-barge crew set him straight in language that left quite a bit of tact to be wished for, 
he felt. The dumpster's green iron cover also leaked when it rained, and it contained 
already a colony of ants along one wall, which insects Poor Tony had ever since a 
neurasthenic childhood feared and detested in particular, ants; and in direct sunlight the 
quarters became a hellish living environment from which even the ants seemed to 
vanish. 

With each step further into the black corridor of actual Withdrawal, Poor Tony Krause 
stamped his foot and simply refused to believe things could feel any worse. Then he 
stopped being able to anticipate when he needed to as it were visit the powder room. A 
fastidious gender-dysphoric's horror of incontinence cannot properly be described. 
Fluids of varying consistency began to pour w/o advance notice from several openings. 
Then of course they stayed there, the fluids, on the summer dumpster's iron floor. 



There they were, not going anywhere. He had no way to clean up and no way to cop. His 
entire set of interpersonal associations consisted of persons who did not care about him 
plus persons who wished him harm. His own late obstetrician father had rended his own 
clothing in symbolic shiva in the Year of the Whopper in the kitchen of the Krause home, 
412 Mount Auburn Street, horrid central Watertown. It was the incontinence plus the 
prospect of 11/4's monthly Social Assistance checks that drove Poor Tony out for a mad 
scampering relocation to an obscure Armenian Foundation Library men's room in 
Watertown Center, wherein he tried to arrange a stall as comfortingly as he could with 
shiny magazine photos and cherished knickknacks and toilet paper laid down around the 
seat, and flushed repeatedly, and tried to keep true Withdrawal at some sort of bay 
with bottles of Codinex Plus. A tiny percentage of codeine gets metabolized into good 
old Ciy-morphine, affording an agonizing hint of what real relief from The Bird might feel 
like. I.e. the cough syrup did little more than draw the process out, extend the corridor 

— it slowed up time. 

Poor Tony Krause sat on the insulated toilet in the domesticated stall all day and night, 
alternately swilling and gushing. He held his high heels up at 1900h. when the library 
staff checked the stalls and turned off all the lights and left Poor Tony in a darkness 
within darkness so utter he had no idea where his own limbs were or went. He left that 
stall maybe once every two days, scampering madly to Brooks in cast-off shades and a 
kind of hood or shawl made pathetically of brown men's-room paper towels. 

Time began to take on new aspects for him, now, as Withdrawal progressed. Time 
began to pass with sharp edges. Its passage in the dark or dim-lit stall was like time was 
being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic 
red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant 
wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony's flesh in compensation as it helped bear 
time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal. By the second week in the 
stall time itself seemed the corridor, lightless at either end. After more time time then 
ceased to move or be moved or be move-throughable and assumed a shape above and 
apart, a huge, musty-feathered, orange-eyed wingless fowl hunched incontinent atop 
the stall, with a kind of watchful but deeply uncaring personality that didn't seem keen 
on Poor Tony Krause as a person at all, or to wish him well. Not one little bit. It spoke to 
him from atop the stall, the same things, over and over. They were unrepeatable. 
Nothing in even Poor Tony's grim life-experience prepared him for the experience of 
time with a shape and an odor, squatting; and the worsening physical symptoms were a 
spree at Bonwit's compared to time's black assurances that the symptoms were merely 
hints, signposts pointing up at a larger, far more dire set of Withdrawal phenomena that 
hung just overhead by a string that unravelled steadily with the passage of time. It 
would not keep still and would not end; it changed shape and smell. It moved in and out 
of him like the very most feared prison-shower assailant. Poor Tony had once had the 
hubris to fancy he'd had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly 
really shivered until time's cadences — jagged and cold and smelling oddly of deodorant 

— entered his body via several openings — cold the way only damp cold is cold — the 
phrase he'd had the gall to have imagined he understood was the phrase chilled to the 
bone — shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and 



he could hear his joints' glassy crunch with every slightest shift of hunched position, 
time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, coldly; and the pain of his 
breath against his teeth. Time came to him in the falcon-black of the library night in an 
orange mohawk and Merry Widow w/ tacky Amalfo pumps and nothing else. Time 
spread him and entered him roughly and had its way and left him again in the form of 
endless gushing liquid shit that he could not flush enough to keep up with. He spent the 
longest morbid time trying to fathom whence all the shit came from when he was 
ingesting nothing at all but Codinex Plus. Then at some point he realized: time had 
become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through him 
now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow. He now weighed more like 45 
kg. His legs were the size his comely arms had been, before Withdrawal. He was 
haunted by the word Zuckung, a foreign and possibly Yiddish word he did not recall ever 
before hearing. The word kept echoing in quick-step cadence through his head without 
meaning anything. He'd naively assumed that going mad meant you were not aware of 
going mad; he'd naively pictured madmen as forever laughing. He kept seeing his 
sonless father again — removing the training wheels, looking at his pager, wearing a 
green gown and mask, pouring iced tea in a pebbled glass, tearing his sportshirt in filial 
woe, grabbing his shoulder, sinking to his knees. Stiffening in a bronze casket. Being 
lowered under the snow at Mount Auburn Cemetery, through dark glasses from a 
distance. 'Chilled to the Zuckung.' When, then, even the funds for the codeine syrup 
were exhausted, he still sat on the toilet of the rear stall of the A.F.L. loo, surrounded by 
previously comforting hung habilements and fashion-magazine photographs he'd 
fastened to the wall with tape cadged on the way in from the Reference desk, sat for 
almost a whole nother night and day, because he had no faith that he could stem the 
flow of diarrhea long enough to make it anywhere — if anywhere to go presented itself 
— in his only pair of gender-appropriate slacks. During hours of lit operation, the men's 
room was full of old men who wore identical brown loafers and spoke Slavic and whose 
rapid-fire flatulence smelled of cabbage. 

Toward the end of the day of the second syrupless afternoon (the day of the seizure) 
Poor Tony Krause began to Withdraw from the cough syrup's alcohol and codeine and 
demethylated morphine, now, as well as from the original heroin, yielding a set of 
sensations for which not even his recent experience had prepared him (the alcohol- 
Withdrawal especially); and when the true D.T.-type big-budget visuals commenced, 
when the first glossy and minutely hirsute army-ant crawled up his arm and refused 
ghostlike to be brushed away or hammered dead. Poor Tony threw his hygienic pride 
into time's porcelain maw and pulled up his slacks — mortifyingly wrinkled from 10+ 
days puddled around his ankles — made what slight cosmetic repairs he could, donned 
his tacky hat with Scotch-taped scarf of paper towels, and lit out in last-ditch 
desperation for Cambridge's Inman Square, for the sinister and duplicitous Antitoi 
brothers, their Glass-Entertainment-'N-Notions-fronted operations center he'd long ago 
vowed never again to darken the door of and but now figured to be his place of very last 
resort, the Antitois, Canadians of the Quebec subgenus, sinister and duplicitous but 
when it came down to it rather hapless political insurgents he'd twice availed of services 
through the offices of Lolasister, now the only persons anywhere he could claim 



somehow owed him a kindness, since the affair of the heart. 

In his coat and skallycap-over-scarf on Watertown Center's underground Gray Line 
platform, when the first hot loose load fell out into the baggy slacks and down his leg 
and out around his high heel — he still had only his red high heels with the crossing 
straps, which the slacks were long enough to mostly hide — Poor Tony closed his eyes 
against the ants formicating up and down his arms' skinny length and screamed a 
soundless interior scream of utter and soul-scalded woe. His beloved boa fit almost 
entirely in one breast pocket, where it stayed in the name of discretion. On the crowded 
train itself, then, he discovered that he'd gone in three weeks from being a colorful and 
comely albeit freakishly comely person to being one of those loathsome urban 
specimens that respectable persons on T-trains slide and drift quietly away from 
without even seeming to notice they're even there. His scarf of paper towels had come 
partly untaped. He smelled of bilirubin and yellow sweat and wore week-old eyeliner 
that simply did not fly if one needed a shave. There had been some negative urine- 
incidents as well, in the slacks, to round matters out. He had simply never in his life felt 
so unattractive or been so sick. He wept silently in shame and pain at the passage of 
each brightly lit public second's edge, and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened 
needle-teethed little insectile mouths to catch the tears. He could feel his erratic pulse 
in his sty. The Gray Line was of the Green- and Orange-Line trundling-behemoth-type 
train, and he sat all alone at one end of the car, feeling each slow second take its cut. 

When it descended, the seizure felt less like a separate distinct health-crisis than 
simply the next exhibit in the corridor of horrors that was the Old Cold Bird. In actual 
fact the seizure — a kind of synaptic firefight in Poor Tony's desiccated temporal lobes 
— was caused entirely by Withdrawal not From Heroin but from plain old grain alcohol, 
which was Codinex Plus cough syrup's primary ingredient and balm. He'd consumed 
upwards of sixteen little Eighty-Proof bottles of Codinex per day for eight days, and so 
was cruising for a real neurochemical bruising when he just up and stopped. The first 
thing that didn't augur very well was a shower of spark-sized phosphenes from the 
ceiling of the swaying train, this plus the fiery violet aura around the heads of the 
respectables who'd quietly retreated as far as possible from the various puddles in 
which he sat. Their clean pink faces looked somehow stricken, each inside a hood of 
violet flame. Poor Tony didn't know that his silent whimpers had ceased to be silent, 
was why everyone in the car had gotten so terribly interested in the floor-tiles between 
their feet. He knew only that the sudden and incongruous smell of Old Spice Stick 
Deodorant, Classic Original Scent — unbidden and unexplainable, his late obstetric 
Poppa's brand, not smelled for years — and the tiny panicked twitters with which 
Withdrawal's ants skittered glossily up into his mouth and nose and disappeared (each 
of course taking its tiny pincered farewell bite as it went) augured some new and vivider 
exhibit on the corridor's horizon. He'd become, at puberty, violently allergic to the smell 
of Old Spice. As he soiled himself and the plastic seat and floor once again the Classic 
Scent of times past intensified. Then Poor Tony's body began to swell. He watched his 
limbs become airy white dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach from him 
and float sluggishly up snout-first into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling rained. He 
suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if 



he were the very space he occupied. 

Then he had a seizure. 103 The floor of the subway car became the ceiling of the 
subway car and he was on his arched back in a waterfall of light, gagging on Old Spice 
and watching his tumid limbs tear-ass around the car's interior like undone balloons. 
The booming Zuckung Zuckung Zuckung was his high heels' heels drumming on the 
soiled floor's tile. He heard a rushing train-roar that was no train on earth and felt a 
vascular roaring rushing that until the pain hit seemed like the gathering of a kind of 
orgasm of the head. His head inflated hugely and creaked as it stretched, inflating. Then 
the pain (seizures hurt, is what few civilians have occasion to know) was the sharp end 
of a hammer. There was a squeak and rush of release inside his skull and something 
shot from him into the air. He saw Bobby ('C') C's blood misting upward in the hot wind 
of the Copley blower. His father knelt beside him on the ceiling in a well-rended 
sleeveless tee-, extolling the Red Sox of Rice and Lynn. Tony wore summer taffeta. His 
body flopped around without OK from HQ. He didn't feel one bit like a puppet. He 
thought of gaffed fish. The gown had 'a thousand flounces and a saucy bodice of lace 
crochet.' Then he saw his father, green-gowned and rubber-gloved, leaning to read the 
headlines off the skin of a fish a newspaper had wrapped. That had never happened. 
The largest-print headline said PUSH. Poor Tony flopped and gasped and pushed down 
inside and the utter red of the blood that feeds sight bloomed behind his fluttering lids. 
Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the 
rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod. Poor Tony 
convulsed and drummed and gasped and fluttered, a fountain of light all around him. He 
felt a piece of nourishing and possibly even intoxicating meat in the back of his throat 
but elected not to swallow it but swallowed it anyway, and was immediately sorry he 
did; and when his father's bloody-rubbered fingers folded his teeth back to retrieve the 
tongue he'd swallowed he refused absolutely to bite down ungratefully on the hand 
that was taking his food, then without authorization he pushed and bit down and took 
the gloved fingers clean off, so there was rubber-wrapped meat in his mouth again and 
his father's head exploded into needled antennae of color like an exploding star 
between his gown's raised green arms and a call for Zuckung while Tony's heels 
drummed and struggled against the widening stirrups of light they were hoisted into 
while a curtain of red was drawn wetly up over the floor he stared down at, Tony, and 
he heard someone yelling for someone to Give In, Err, with a hand on his lace belly as he 
bore down to PUSH and he saw the legs in the stirrups they held would keep spreading 
until they cracked him open and all the way inside-out on the ceiling and his last worry 
was that red-handed Poppa could see up his dress, what was hidden. 


7 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 



UNDERGARMENT 


Each of the eight to ten prorectors at the Enfield Tennis Academy teaches one 
academic class per term, usually a once-a-week Saturday thing. This is mostly for 
certification reasons, 104 plus all but one of the prorectors are low-level touring 
professionals, with low-level professional tennis players in general being not exactly the 
most candent stars in the intellectual Orion. Because of all this, their classes tend to be 
not only electives but Academy jokes, and the E.T.A. Dean of Academic Affairs regards 
prorector-taught classes — e.g., in Fall Y.D.A.U., Corbett Thorp's 'Deviant Geometries,' 
Aubrey deLint's 'Introduction to Athletic Spreadsheets,' or the colon-mad Tex Watson's 
'From Scarcity to Plenty: From Putrid Stuff Out of the Ground to the Atom in the Mirror: 
A Lay Look at Energy Resources from Anthracite to Annular Fusion,' etc. — as not 
satisfying any sort of quadrivial requirement. But the older E.T.A.s, with more latitude 
credit- and elective-wise, still tend to clamor and jostle for spots in the prorectors' 
seminars, not just because the classes can be passed by pretty much anybody who 
shows up and displays vital signs, but because most of the prorectors are (also like low- 
level tennis pros as a genus) kind of bats, and their classes are usually fascinating the 
way plane-crash footage is fascinating. E.g., although any closed room she's in soon 
develops a mysterious and overpowering vitamin-B stink he can just barely stand, E.T.A. 
senior Ted Schacht has taken Mary Esther Thode's perennially batsoid 'The Personal Is 
the Political Is the Psychopathological: the Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological 
Double-Binds' all three times it's been offered. M. E. Thode is regarded by the 
upperclassmen as probably insane, by like clinical standards, although her coaching 
proficiency with the Girls' 16's is beyond dispute. A bit on the old side for an E.T.A. 
prorector, Thode had been a pupil of Coach G. Schtitt back at Schtitt's infamous old 
crop-and-epaulette Harry Hopman program in Winter Park FL and then for a couple 
years at the new E.T.A. as a top and Show-bound if kind of rabidly political and not too 
tightly wrapped female junior. Later blacklisted off both the Virginia Slims and Family 
Circle professional distaff circuits after trying to organize the circuits' more politically 
rabid and unwrapped players into a sort of radical post-feminist grange that would 
compete only in pro tournaments organized, subsidized, refereed, overseen, and even 
attended and cartridge-distributed exclusively to not only women or homosexual 
women, but only by, for, and to registered members of the infamously unpopular early- 
interdependence-era Female Objectification Prevention and Protest Phalanx, 105 given 
the shoe, she'd come, practically with a bandanna-tied stick over her shoulder, back to 
Coach Schtitt, who for historico-national reasons has always had a soft place inside for 
anyone who seems even marginally politically repressed. Last spring's airless and B- 
redolent section of Thode's psycho-political offering, 'The Toothless Predator: Breast- 
Feeding as Sexual Assault,' had been one of the most disorientingly fascinating 
experiences of Ted Schacht's intellectual life so far, outside the dentist's chair, whereas 



this fall's focus on pathologic double-bind-type quandaries was turning out to be not 
quite as compelling but weirdly — almost intuitively — easy: E.g., from today's: 

The Personal Is the Political Is the Psychopathological: The Politics of Contemporary 
Psychopathological Double-Binds 

Midterm Examination 

Ms.THODE 

November 7, Yr. of D.A.U. 

KEEP YOUR ANSWERS BRIEF AND GENDER NEUTRAL 

ITEM 

(la) You are an individual who, is pathologically kleptomaniacal. As a kleptomaniac, 
you are pathologically driven to steal, steal, steal. You must steal. 

(lb) But, you are also an individual who, is pathologically agoraphobic. As an 
agoraphobic, you cannot so much as step off your front step of the porch of your home, 
without undergoing palpitations, drenching sweats, and feelings of impending doom. As 
an agoraphobic, you are driven to pathologically stay home and not leave. You cannot 
leave home. 

(l c) But, from (la) you are pathologically driven to go out and steal, steal, steal. But, 
from (lb) you are pathologically driven to not ever leave home. You live alone. 

Meaning, there is no one else in your home to steal from. Meaning, you must go out, 
into the marketplace to satisfy your overwhelming compulsion to steal, steal, steal. But, 
such is your fear of the marketplace that you cannot under any circumstances, leave 
home. Whether your problem is true personal psychopathology, or merely 
marginalization by a political definition of 'psychopathology,' nevertheless, it is a 
Double-Bind. 

(l d) Thus, respond to the question of, what do you do? 

Schacht was just looping the d in mail fraud when Jim Troeltsch's pseudo-radio 
program, backed by its eustacian-crumpling operatic soundtrack, came over 112 West 
House's E.T.A.-intercom speaker up over the classroom clock. When no away- 
tournaments or meets were going on, WETA student-run 'radio' got to 'broadcast' 
E.T.A.-related news, sports and community affairs for ten or so minutes over the closed- 
circuit intercom every Tuesday and Saturday during the last P.M. class period, like 1435- 
1445h. Troeltsch, who's dreamed of a tennis-broadcast career ever since it became clear 
(very early) that he would be in no way Show-bound — the Troeltsch who spends every 
last fin his folks send him on his staggering InterLace/SPN-pro-match-cartridge library, 
and spends almost every free second calling pro action with his room's TP's viewer's 
volume down; 106 the kind of pathetic Troeltsch who shamelessly kiss-asses the 
InterLace/SPN sportscasters whenever he's on the scene of an l/SPN-recorded jr. 
event, 107 pestering the sportscasters and offering to get them doughnuts and joe, etc.; 
the Troeltsch who already owns a whole rack of generic blue blazers and practices 
combing his hair so that it has that glassy toupee-like look of a real sportscaster — 
Troeltsch's been doing the sports portion of WETA's weekly broadcast ever since 
Schacht's old man died of ulcerative colitis and Ted came up to join his old childhood 
doubles partner at the Academy in the fall of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, which 
had been four months after the late E.T.A. Headmaster's felo de se, when the flags were 



still at half-mast and everybody's bicep was banded in black cotton, which the 
mesomorphic Schacht got excused from because of biceps-size; Troeltsch'd already 
been doing WETA sports when he came, and he's been undislodgeable from the post 
ever since. 

The sports portion of WETA's broadcast is mostly just reporting the outcomes and 
scores of whatever competitive events the E.T.A. squads have been in since the last 
broadcast. 108 Troeltsch, who approaches his twice-a-week duties with all possible verve, 
will say he feels like the hardest thing about his intercom-broadcasts is keeping things 
from getting repetitive as he goes through long lists of who beat whom and by how 
much. His quest for synonyms for beat and got beat by is never-ending and serious and 
a continual source of irritation to his friends. Mary Esther's exams were notorious no- 
brainers and automatic A's if you were careful with your third-person pronouns, and 
even while he listened closely enough to Troeltsch to be able to supply the audience- 
feedback that tonight's dinner-table would be inescapable without, Schacht was already 
on the test's third item, which concerned exhibitionism among the pathologically shy. 
11/7's broadcast results were from E.T.A.'s 71-37 rout of Port Washington's A and B 
teams at the Port Washington annual thing. 

'John Wayne at A-l 18's beat Port Washington's Bob Francis of Great Neck, New New 
York, 6-0, 6-2,' Troeltsch says, 'while A-2 Singles' Hal Incandenza defeated Craig Burda of 
Vivian Park, Utah, 6-2, 6-1; and while A-3 K. D. Coyle went down in a hard-fought loss to 
Port Wash's Shelby van der Merwe of Hempstead, Long Island 6-3, 5-7, 7-5, A-4 Trevor 
"The Axhandle" Axford crushed P.W.'s Tapio Martti out of Sonora, Mexico, 7-5, 6-2.' 

And so on. By the time it's down to Boys A-14's, Troeltsch's delivery gets terser even 
as his attempts at verbiform variety tend to have gotten more lurid, e.g.: 'LaMont Chu 
disembowelled Charles Pospisilova 6-3, 6-2; Jeff Penn was on Nate Millis-Johnson like a 
duck on a Junebug 6-4, 6-7, 6-0; Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some 
sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down 6-4, 7-6, while 14's A-4 Idris Arslanian ground his 
heel into the neck of David Wiere 6-1, 6-4 and P.W.'s 5-man R. Greg Chubb had to be 
just about carried off over somebody's shoulder after Todd Possalthwaite moonballed 
him into a narcoleptic coma 4-6, 6-4, 7-5.' 

Some of Corbett Thorp's class on geometric distortions a lot of kids find hard; likewise 
deLint's class, for the software-inept. And though Tex Watson's overall handle on Cold- 
Containment DT-annulation is shaky, his lay-physics survey of combustion and 
annulation has some sort of academic validity to it, especially because he some terms 
gets Pemulis to guest-lecture when he and Pemulis are in a period of detente. But the 
only really challenging prorected class ever for Hal Incandenza is turning out to be Mile. 
Thierry Poutrincourt's 'Separatism and Return: Quebecois History from Frontenac 
Through the Age of Interdependence,' which to be candid Hal'd never heard much 
positive about and had always deflected his Moms's suggestions that he might 
profitably take until finally this term's schedule-juggling got dicey, and which (the class) 
he finds difficult and annoying but surprisingly less and less dull as the semester wears 
on, and is actually developing something of a layman's savvy for Canadianism and 
O.N.A.N.ite politics, topics he'd previously found for some reason not only dull but 
queerly distasteful. The rub of this particular class's difficulty is that Poutrincourt 



teaches only in Quebecois French, which Hal can get by in because of his youthful tour 
through Orin's real-French Pleiade Classics but has never all that much liked, particularly 
sound-wise, Quebecois being a gurgly, glottal language that seems to require a 
perpetually sour facial expression to pronounce. Hal sees no way of Orin's knowing he 
was taking Poutrincourt's 'Separatism and Return' when he called to ask for help with 
Separatism, which Orin's asking for help from him with anything was strange enough in 
itself. 

'Bernadette Longley reluctantly bowed to P.W.'s Jessica Pearlberg at 18 A-l Singles 6- 
4,4-6, 6-2, though A-2 Diane Prins hopped up and down on the thorax of Port's Marilyn 
Ng-A-Thiep 7-6, 6-1, and Bridget Boone drove a hot thin spike into the right eye of 
Aimee Middleton-Law 6-3, 6-3'; and so on, in classroom after classroom, while 
instructors grade quizzes or read or tap a decreasingly patient foot, every Tues./Sat., 
while Schacht sketches prenatal dentition-charts in his exam's margins w/ a 
concentrated look, not wanting to embarrass Thode by handing the no-brainer exam in 
too soon. 

Most of the early-Quebec stuff about Cartier and Roberval and Cap Rouge and 
Champlain and flocks of Ursuline nuns with frozen wimples covered up to like U.N. Day 
Hal'd found mostly dry and repetitive, the wig-and-jerkin gentlemanly warfare stilted 
and absurd, like slow-motion slapstick, though everyone'd been sort of queasily 
intrigued by the way the English Commander Amherst had handled the Hurons by 
dispensing free blankets and buckskin that had been carefully coated with smallpox 
variola. 

'14's A-3 Felicity Zweig went absolutely SACPOP on P.W.'s Kiki Pfefferblit 7-6, 6-1, 
while Gretchen Holt made PW's Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever even in 
the same room together 6-0, 6-3. At 5, Ann Kittenplan grimaced and flexed her way to a 
7-5, 2-6, 6-3 win over Paisley Steinkamp, right next to where Jolene Criess at 6 was 
doing to P.W.'s Mona Ghent what a quality boot can do to a toadstool, 2 and 2.' 

Saluki-faced Thierry Poutrincourt leans back in her chair and closes her eyes and 
presses her palms hard against her temples and stays like that all the way through every 
WETA broadcast, which always interrupts her last-period lecture and puts this section 
slightly and maddeningly behind Separation & Return's other section, resulting in two 
required lesson-preps instead of one. The sour Saskatchewanese kid next to Hal has 
been making impressive schematic drawings of automatic weaponry in his notebook all 
semester. The kid's assigned ROM-diskettes are always visible in his book-bag still in 
their wrapper, yet the Skatch kid always finishes quizzes in like five minutes. It had taken 
up to the week before Halloween to get through with the B.S. '67 Levesque-Parti-and- 
Bloc Quebecois 109 and early Fronte de la Liberation Nationale stuff and up to the 
present Interdependent era. Poutrincourt's lecture-voice has gotten quieter and quieter 
as history's approached its contemporary limit; and Hal, finding the stuff rather more 
high-concept and less dull than he'd expected — seeing himself as at his innermost core 
apolitical — nevertheless found the Quebecois-Separatism mentality almost impossibly 
convolved and confused and impervious to U.S. parsing, 110 plus was both com- and 
repelled by the fact that the contemporary-anti-O.N.A.N.-insurgence stuff provoked in 
him a queasy feeling, not the glittery disorientation of nightmares or on-court panic but 



a soggier, more furtively nauseous kind of sense, as if someone had been reading mail of 
Hal's that he thought he'd thrown away. 

The proud and haughty Quebecois had been harassing and even terrorizing the rest of 
Canada over the Separation issue for time out of mind. It was the establishment of 
O.N.A.N. and the gerrymandering of the Great Convexity (Poutrincourt's Canadian, 
recall) that turned the malevolent attention of Quebec's worst post-F.L.N. insurgents 
south of the border. Ontario and New Brunswick took the continental Anschluss and 
territorial Reconfiguration like good sports. Certain far-right fringes in Alberta weren't 
too pleased, but not much pleases an Albertan far-rightist anyway. It was, finally, only 
the proud and haughty Quebecois who whinged, 111 and the insurgent cells of Quebec 
who completely lost their political shit. 

Quebec's anti-O.N.A.N. and thus -U.S. Separatisteurs, the different terrorist cells 
formed when Ottawa had been the foe, proved to be not a very nice bunch at all. The 
earliest unignorable strikes involved a then-unknown terrorist cell 112 that apparently 
snuck down from the E.W.D.-blighted Papineau region at night and dragged huge 
standing mirrors across U.S. Interstate 87 at selected dangerous narrow winding 
Adirondack passes south of the border and its Lucite walls. Naively empiricist north¬ 
bound U.S. motorists — a good many of them military and O.N.A.N.ite personnel, this 
close to the Concavity — would see impending headlights and believe some like suicidal 
idiot or Canadian had transversed the median and was coming right for them. They'd 
flash their high beams, but to all appearances the impending idiot would just flash his 
high beams right back. The U.S. motorists — usually not to be fucked with in their 
vehicles, historically, it was well known — would brazen it out as long as anyone right- 
minded possibly could, but right before apparent impact with the impending lights 
they'd always veer wildly and leave shoulderless 1-87 and put their arm over their head 
in that screaming pre-crash way and go ass-over-teakettle into an Adirondack chasm 
with a many-petaled bloom of Hi-Test flame, and the then-unknown Quebecois terrorist 
cell would remove the huge mirror and truck off back up north via checkpointless back 
roads back into the blighted bowels of southern Quebec until next time. There were 
fatalities this way well into the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad before anyone had any 
idea they were diabolic-cell-related. For over twenty months the scores of burnt-out 
hulls piling up in Adirondack chasms were regarded as either suicides or inexplicable 
doze-behind-the-wheel-type single-car accidents by NNY State Troopers who had to 
detach their chinstraps to scratch under their big brown hats over the mysterious 
sleepiness that seemed to afflict Adirondack motorists at what looked to be high- 
adrenaline mountaintop passes. Chief of the new United States Office of Unspecified 
Services Rodney Tine pressed, to his later embarrassment, for a series of anti-driving- 
when-drowsy Public Service spots to be InterLace-disseminated in upstate New New 
York. It was an actual U.S. would-be suicide, a late-stage Valium-addicted Amway dis¬ 
tributor from Schenectady who was at the end of her benzodioxane-rope and all over 
the road anyway, and who by historical accounts saw the sudden impending headlights 
in her northbound lane as Grace and shut her eyes and floored it right for them, the 
lights, never once veering, spraying glass and micronized silver over all four lanes, this 
unwitting civilian who 'SMASHED THE ILLUSION,' 'MADE THE BREAKTHROUGH' (media 



headlines), and brought to light the first tangible evidence of an anti-O.N.A.N. ill will way 
worse than anything aroused by plain old historical Separatism, up in Quebec. 


The first birth of the Incandenzas' second son was a surprise. The tall and eye- 
poppingly curvaceous Avril Incandenza did not show, bled like clockwork; no 
hemorrhoids or gland-static; no pica; affect and appetite normal; she threw up some 
mornings but who didn't in those days? 

It was on a metal-lit November evening in the seventh month of a hidden pregnancy 
that she stopped, Avril, on her husband's long arm as they ascended the maple staircase 
of the Back Bay brownstone they were soon to leave, stopped, turned partly toward 
him, ashen, and opened her mouth in a mute way that was itself eloquent. 

Her husband looked down at her, paling: 'What is it?' 

'It's pain.' 

It was pain. Broken water had made several steps below them gleam. She seemed to 
James Incandenza to sort of turn in toward herself, hold herself low, curl and sink to a 
stairstep she barely made the edge of, hunched, her forehead against her shapely 
knees. Incandenza saw the whole slow thing in a light like he was Vermeer: she sank 
steadily from his side and he bent to hers and she then tried to rise. 

'Wait wait wait wait. Wait.' 

'It's pain.' 

A bit ragged from an afternoon of Wild Turkey and low-temperature holography, 
James had thought Avril was dying right before his eyes. His own father had dropped 
dead on a set of stairs. Luckily Avril's half-brother Charles Tavis was upstairs, using the 
portable StairMaster he'd brought with him for an extended and emotional-battery¬ 
recharging visit the preceding spring, after the horrible snafu with the video-scoreboard 
at Toronto's Skydome; and he heard the commotion and scuttled out and down and 
promptly took charge. 

He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb 
to whose sides he'd been found spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached by 
cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the same 
material. 113 He was a complete surprise and terribly premature, and withered, and he 
spent the next many weeks waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the 
Pyrex ceilings of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires and cupped in 
sterile palms, his head cradled by a thumb. Mario had been given the name of Dr. James 
Incandenza's father's father, a dour and golf-addicted Green Valley AZ oculist who made 
a small fortune, just after Jim grew up and fled east, by inventing those quote X-Ray 
Specs! that don't work but whose allure for mid-'60s pubescent comic-book readers 
almost compelled mail-order, then selling the copyrights to New England novelty- 
industry titan AcmeCo, then promptly in mid-putt died, Mario Sr. did, allowing James 
Incandenza Sr. to retire from a sad third career as the Man From Glad 114 in sandwich- 
bag commercials during the B.S. 1960s and move back to the saguaro-studded desert he 
loathed and efficiently drink himself to a cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway. 

Anyway, Mario M's incomplete gestation and arachnoidal birth left the kid with some 



lifelong character-building physical challenges. Size was one, he being in sixth grade 
about the size of a toddler and at 18+ in a range somewhere between elf and jockey. 
There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a 
hair-raising case of Volkmann's contracture 115 curled out in front of his thorax in 
magiscule S's and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping at 
doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and 
forming a pretend lens-frame to scout scenes through, plus maybe tossing tennis balls 
very short distances to players who wanted them, but not for much else, though the 
arms were impressively — almost familial-dysautonomically — pain-resistant, and could 
be pinched, punctured, singed, and even compressed in a basement optical-device- 
securing viselike thing by Mario's older brother Orin without effect or complaint. 

Bradypedestrianism-wise, Mario had not so much club feet as more like block feet: not 
only flat but perfectly square, good for kicking knob-fumbled doors open with but too 
short to be conventionally employed as feet: together with the lordosis in his lower 
spine, they force Mario to move in the sort of lurchy half-stumble of a vaudeville 
inebriate, body tilted way forward as if into a wind, right on the edge of pitching face- 
first onto the ground, which as a child he did fairly often, whether given a bit of a shove 
from behind by his older brother Orin or no. The frequent forward falls help explain why 
Mario's nose was squished severely in and so flared out to either side of his face but did 
not rise from it, with the consequence that his nostrils tended to flap just a bit, 
particularly during sleep. One eyelid hung lower than the other over his open eyes — 
good and gently brown eyes, if a bit large and protrusive to qualify as conventionally 
human eyes — the one lid hung like an ill-tempered windowshade, and his older brother 
Orin had sometimes tried to give the recalcitrant lid that smart type of downward snap 
that can unstick a dicky shade, but had succeeded only in gradually loosening the lid 
from its sutures, so that it eventually had to be refashioned and reattached in yet 
another blepharoplasty-procedure, because it was in fact not Mario's real eyelid — that 
had been sacrificed when the fist stuck to his face like a tongue to cold metal had been 
peeled away, at nativity — but an extremely advanced blepharoprosthesis of dermal 
fibropolymer studded with horsehair lashes that curved out into space well beyond the 
reach of his other lid's lashes and together with the lazy lid-action itself gave even 
Mario's most neutral expression the character of an oddly friendly pirate's squint. 
Together with the involuntarily constant smile. 

This is probably also the place to mention Hal's older brother Mario's khaki-colored 
skin, an odd dead gray-green that in its corticate texture and together with his atrophic 
in-curled arms and arachnodactylism gave him, particularly from a middle-distance, an 
almost uncannily reptilian/ dinosaurian look. The fingers being not only mucronate and 
talonesque but nonprehensile, which is what made Mario's knifework untenable at 
table. Plus the thin lank slack hair, at once tattered and somehow too smooth, that 
looked at 18+ like the hair of a short plump 48-year-old stress engineer and athletic 
director and Academy Headmaster who grows one side to girlish length and carefully 
combs it so it rides thinly up and over the gleaming yarmulke of bare gray-green- 
complected scalp on top and down over the other side where it hangs lank and fools no 
one and tends to flap back up over in any wind Charles Tavis forgets to carefully keep his 



left side to. Or that he's slow, Hal's brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the 
Brandeis C.D.C. found — but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or 
bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole 
poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the 
manner of all refracted things. 

Or that his status at the Enfield Tennis Academy — erected, along with Dr. and Mrs. Fs 
marriage's third and final home at the northern rear of the grounds, when Mario was 
nine and Hallie eight and Orin seventeen and in his one E.T.A. year B-4 Singles and in the 
U.S.T.A.'s top 75 — that Mario's life there is by all appearances kind of a sad and left- 
out-type existence, the only physically challenged minor in residence, unable even to 
grip a regulation stick or stand unaided behind a boundaried space. That he and his late 
father had been, no pun intended, inseparable. That Mario'd been like an honorary 
assistant production-assistant and carried the late Incandenza's film and lenses and 
filters in a complex backpack the size of a joint of beef for most of the last three years of 
the late-blooming filmmaker's life, attending him on shoots and sleeping with multiple 
pillows in small soft available spaces in the same motel room as Himself and 
occasionally tottering out for a bright-red plastic bottle of something called Big Red Soda 
Water and taking it to the apparently mute veiled graduate-intern down the motel's 
hall, fetching coffee and joe and various pancreatitis-remedies and odds and ends for 
props and helping D. Leith out with Continuity when Incandenza wanted to preserve 
Continuity, basically being the way any son would be whose dad let him into his heart's 
final and best-loved love, lurching gamely but not pathetically to keep up with the tall 
stooped increasingly bats man's slow patient two-meter stride through airports, train 
stations, carrying the lenses, inclined ever forward but in no way resembling any kind of 
leashed pet. 

When required to stand upright and still, like when videotaping an E.T.A.'s service 
motion or manning the light meters on the set of a high-contrast chiaroscuro art film, 
Mario in his forward list is supported by a NNYC-apartrnent-door-style police lock, a .7- 
meter steel pole that extends from a special Velcroed vest and angles about 40° down 
and out to a slotted piece of lead blocking (a bitch to carry, in that complicated pack) 
placed by someone understanding and prehensile on the ground before him. He stood 
thus buttressed on sets Himself had him help erect and furnish and light, the lighting 
usually unbelievably complex and for some parts of the crew sometimes almost 
blinding, sunbursts of angled mirrors and Marino lamps and key-light kliegs, Mario 
getting a thorough technical grounding in a cinematic craft he never even imagined 
being able to pursue on his own until Xmas of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, when 
a gaily wrapped package forwarded from the offices of Incandenza's attorney revealed 
that Himself had designed and built and legally willed (in a codicil) to be gaily wrapped 
and forwarded for Mario's thirteenth Xmas a trusty old Bolex H64 Rex 5 116 tri-lensed 
camera bolted to an oversized old leather aviator's helmet and supported by struts 
whose ends were the inverted tops of training-room crutches and curved nicely over 
Mario's shoulders, so the Bolex H64 required no digital prehensility because it fit over 
Mario's oversized face 117 like a tri-plated scuba mask and was controlled by a sewing- 
machine-adapted foot treadle, and but even then it took some serious getting used to. 



and Mario's earliest pieces of digital juvenilia are marred/enhanced by this palsied, 
pointing-every-which-way quality of like home movies shot at a dead run. 

Five years hence, Mario's facility with the head-mount Bolex attenuates the sadness of 
his status here, allowing him to contribute via making the annual E.T.A. fundraising 
documentary cartridge, videotaping students' strokes and occasionally from over the 
railing of Schtitt's supervisory transom the occasional challenge-match — the taping's 
become part of the pro-instruction package detailed in the E.T.A. catalogue — plus 
producing more ambitious, arty-type things that occasionally find a bit of an a-clef-type 
following in the E.T.A. community. 

After Orin Incandenza left the nest to first hit and then kick collegiate balls, there was 
almost nobody at E.T.A. or its Enfield-Brighton environs who did not treat Mario M. 
Incandenza with the casual gentility of somebody who doesn't pity you or admire you so 
much as just vaguely prefer it when you're around. And Mario — despite rectilinear feet 
and cumbersome police lock the most prodigious walker-and-recorder in three districts 
— hit the unsheltered area streets daily at a very slow pace, a halting constitutional, 
sometimes w/ head-mounted Bolex and sometimes not, and took citizens' kindness and 
cruelty the same way, with a kind of extra-inclined half-bow that mocked his own 
canted posture without pity or cringe. Mario's an especial favorite among the low-rent 
shopkeepers up and down E.T.A.'s stretch of Commonwealth Ave., and photographic 
stills from some of his better efforts adorn the walls behind certain Comm. Ave. deli 
counters and steam presses and Korean-keyed cash registers. The object of a strange 
and maybe kind of cliquey affection from Lyle the Spandexed sweat-guru, to whom he 
sometimes brings Caffeine-Free Diet Cokes to cut the diet's salt, Mario sometimes finds 
younger E.T.A.s referred to him by Lyle on really ticklish matters of injury and incapacity 
and character and rallying-what-remains, and never much knows what to say. Trainer 
Barry Loach all but kisses the kid's ring, since it's Mario who through coincidence saved 
him from the rank panhandling underbelly of Boston Common's netherworld and more 
or less got him his job. 118 Plus of course there's the fact that Schtitt himself 
constitutionalizes with him, of certain warm evenings, and lets him ride in his surplus 
sidecar. An object of some weird attracto-repulsive gestalt for Charles Tavis, Mario 
treats C.T. with the quiet deference he can feel his possible half-uncle wanting, and 
stays out of his way as much as possible, for Tavis's sake. Players at Denny's, when they 
all get to go to Denny's, almost vie to see who gets to cut up the cut-upable parts of 
Mario's under-12-size Kilobreakfast. 

And his younger and way more externally impressive brother Hal almost idealizes 
Mario, secretly. God-type issues aside, Mario is a (semi-) walking miracle, Hal believes. 
People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like 
what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise. Withered saurian 
homodontic 119 Mario floats, for Hal. He calls him Booboo but fears his opinion more 
than probably anybody except their Moms's. Hal remembers the unending hours of 
blocks and balls on the hardwood floors of early childhood's 36 Belle Ave., Weston MA, 
tangrams and See 'N Spell, huge-headed Mario hanging in there for games he could not 
play, for make-believe in which he had no interest other than proximity to his brother. 
Avril remembers Mario still wanting Hal to help him with bathing and dressing at 



thirteen — an age when most unchallenged kids are ashamed of the very space their 
sound pink bodies take up — and wanting the help for Hal's sake, not his own. Despite 
himself (and showing a striking lack of insight into his Moms's psyche), Hal fears that 
Avril sees Mario as the family's real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no 
classifiable type, a very rare and shining thing, even if his intuition — slow and silent — 
scares her, his academic poverty breaks her heart, the smile he puts on each A.M. 
without fail since the suicide of their father makes her wish she could cry. This is why 
she tries so terribly hard to leave Mario alone, not to hover or wring, to treat him so less 
specially than she wants: it is for him. It is kind of noble, pitiable. Her love for the son 
who was born a surprise transcends all other experiences and informs her life. Hal 
suspects. It was Mario, not Avril, who obtained Hal his first copies of the unabridged 
O.E.D. at a time when Hal was still being shunted around for the assessment of possible 
damage, Booboo pulling them home in a wagon by his bicuspids over the fake-rural 
blacktop roads of upscale Weston, months before Hal tested out at Whatever's Beyond 
Eidetic on the Mnemonic Verbal Inventory designed by a dear and trusted colleague of 
the Moms at Brandeis. It was Avril, not Hal, who insisted that Mario live not in HmH 
with her and Charles Tavis but with Hal in an E.T.A. subdorm. But in the Year of Dairy 
Products From the American Heartland it was Hal, not she, who, when the veiled legate 
from the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed showed up at the E.T.A. 
driveway's portcullis to discuss with Mario issues of blind inclusion v. visual 
estrangement, of the openness of concealment the veil might afford him, it was Hal, 
even as Mario laughed and half-bowed, it was Hal, brandishing his Dunlop stick, who 
told the guy to go peddle his linen someplace else. 


30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


The sky of U.S.A.'s desert was clotted with blue stars. Now it was deep at night. Only 
above the U.S.A. city was the sky blank of stars; its color was pearly and blank. Marathe 
shrugged. 'Perhaps in you is the sense that citizens of Canada are not involved in the 
real root of the threat.' 

Steeply shook the head in seeming annoyance. 'What's that supposed to mean?' he 
said. The lurid wig of him slipped when he moved the head with any abrupt force. 

The first way Marathe betrayed anything of emotion was to smooth rather too fussily 
at the blanket on his lap. 'It is meaning that it will not of finality be Quebecers making 



this kick to I'alne des Etats Unis. Look: the facts of the situation speak loudly. What is 
known. This is a U.S.A. production, this Entertainment cartridge. Made by an American 
man in the U.S.A. The appetite for the appeal of it: this also is U.S.A. The U.S.A. drive for 
spectation, which your culture teaches. This I was saying: this is why choosing is 
everything. When I say to you choose with great care in loving and you make ridicule it 
is why I look and say: can I believe this man is saying this thing of ridicule?' Marathe 
leaned slightly forward on his stumps, leaving the machine pistol to use both his hands 
in saying. Steeply could tell this was important to Marathe; he really believed it. 

Marathe made small emphatic circles and cuts in the air while he spoke: 'These facts 
of situation, which speak so loudly of your Bureau's fear of this samizdat: now is what 
has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A 
U.S.A. that would die — and let its children die, each one — for the so-called perfect 
Entertainment, this film. Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure 
with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving: Hugh Steeply, in complete 
seriousness as a citizen of your neighbor I say to you: forget for a moment the Entertain¬ 
ment, and think instead about a U.S.A. where such a thing could be possible enough for 
your Office to fear: can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive 
as a nation of peoples? To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other 
peoples? If these are other peoples who still know what it is to choose? who will die for 
something larger? who will sacrifice the warm home, the loved woman at home, their 
legs, their life even, for something more than their own wishes of sentiment? who 
would choose not to die for pleasure, alone?' 

Steeply removed with cool deliberation another Belgian cigarette and lit it, this time 
on the first match. Waving the match out with a circular flourish and snap. All this took 
time of his silence. Marathe settled back. Marathe wondered why the presence of 
Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed. 
An aftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when with 
Americans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief. 

Steeply rested his one elbow on the forearm of the other arm across his prostheses, to 
smoke like a woman: 'You're saying that the administration wouldn't even be concerned 
about the Entertainment if we didn't know we were fatally weak. As in as a nation. 
You're saying the fact that we're worried speaks volumes about the nation itself.' 

Marathe shrugged. 'Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes. 
We will make only available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to 
partake or choose not to.' Smoothing slightly at his lap's blanket. 'How will U.S.A.s 
choose? Who has taught them to choose with care? How will your Offices and Agencies 
protect them, your people? 

By laws? By killing Quebecois?' Marathe rose, but very slightly. 'As you were killing 
Colombians and Bolivians to protect U.S.A. citizens who desire their narcotics? How well 
did this work for your Agencies and Offices, the killing? How long was it before the 
Brazilians replaced the dead of Colombia?' 

Steeply's wig had slipped hard to starboard. 'Remy, no. Drug-dealers don't want you 
dead, necessarily; they just want your money. There's a difference. You people seem to 
want us dead. Not just the Concavity re-demised. Not just secession for Quebec. The 



F.L.Q., maybe they're like the Bolivians. But Fortier wants us dead.' 

'Again you pass over what is important. Why B.S.S. cannot understand us. You cannot 
kill what is already dead.' 

'Just you wait and see if we're dead, paisano.' 

Marathe made a gesture as if striking his own head. 'Again passing over the important. 
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose — this appetite of 
your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. What you call the death, the 
collapsing: this will be the formality only. Do you not see? This was the genius of 
Guillaume DuPlessis, what M. DuPlessis taught the cells, even if F.L.Q. and les Fils did 
not understand. Much less the Albertans, all crazy inside their head. We of the A.F.R., 
we understand. This is why this cell of Quebecers, that danger of Entertainment so fine 
it will kill the viewer, if so — the exact way does not matter. The exact time of death and 
way of death, this no longer matters. Not for your peoples. You wish to protect them? 
But you can only delay. Not save. The Entertainment exists. The attache and gendarmes 
of the razzle incident — more proof. It is there, existing. The choice for death of the 
head by pleasure now exists, and your authorities know, or you would not be now trying 
to stop the pleasure. Your Sans-Christe Gentle was in this one part correct: "Someone is 
to blame." 

'That had nothing to do with the Reconfiguration. The Reconfiguration was self- 
preservation.' 

'That: forget it. There is the villain he saw you needed, all of you, to delay this splitting 
apart. To keep you together, the hating some other. Gentle is crazy in his head, but in 
this "fault of someone" he was correct in saying it. Un ennemi commun. But not 
someone outside you, this enemy. Someone or some people among your own history 
sometime killed your U.S.A. nation already, Flugh. Someone who had authority, or 
should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But someone 
sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it 
was the only thing of importance, choosing. So completely forgetting that when I say 
choose to you you make expressions with your face such as "Herrrrrre we are going," 
Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and 
promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for 
finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of 
permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget 
the old things which made happiness possible. Flow is it you say: "Anything is going'"?' 

'And this is why we shudder at what a separate Quebec would be like. Choose what 
we tell you, neglect your own wish and desires, sacrifice. For Quebec. For the State.' 

Marathe shrugged. 'L'etatprotecteur.' 

Steeply said 'Does this sound a little familiar, Remy? The National Socialist Neofascist 
State of Separate Quebec? You guys are worse than the worst Albertans. Totalitarity. 
Cuba with snow. Ski immediately to your nearest reeducation camp, for instructions on 
choosing. Moral eugenics. China. Cambodia. Chad. Unfree.' 

'Unhappy.' 

'There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead 
inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us — these are just the 



hazards of being free.' 

'But what does this U.S.A. expression want to mean, this Buckeroo?' 

Steeply turned to face away into the space they were above. 'And now here we go. 
Now you will say how free are we if you dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help 
ourselves from temptation. And we say "human" to you. We say that one cannot be 
human without freedom.' 

Marathe's chair squeaked slightly as his weight shifted. 'Always with you this freedom! 
For your walled-up country, always to shout "Freedom! Freedom!" as if it were obvious 
to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your 
freedom is the freedom -from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what 
they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress.' 
Marathe over Steeply's shoulder suddenly could realize why the skies above the cor¬ 
uscating city were themselves erased of stars: it was the fumes from the exhaust's 
wastes of the moving autos' pretty lights that rose and hid stars from the city and made 
the city Tucson's lume nacreous in the dome's blankness of it. 'But what of the freedom- 
to? Not just fr ee-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not 
see this. What of freedom-to. Flow for the person to freely choose? Flow to choose any 
but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the 
person how to choose? Flow is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to 
choose?' 

Steeply threw away a cigarette and faced partly Marathe, from the edge: 'Now the 
story of the rich man.' 

Marathe said 'The rich father who can afford the cost of candy as well as food for his 
children: but if he cries out "Freedom!" and allows his child to choose only what is 
sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak 
and sick: is the rich man who cries "Freedom!" the good father?' 

Steeply made four small noises. Excitement of some belief made the American's 
electrolysis's little pimples of rash redden even in the milky dilute light of lume and low 
stars. The moon over the Mountains of Rincon was on its side, its color the color of a fat 
man's face. Marathe could believe he could hear some young U.S.A. voices shouting and 
laughing in a young gathering somewhere out on the desert floor below, but saw no 
headlights or young persons. Steeply stamped a high heel in frustration. Steeply said: 

'But U.S. citizens aren't presumed by us to be children, to paternalistically do their 
thinking and choosing for them. Fluman beings are not children.' 

Marathe pretended again to sniff. 

'Ah, yes, but then you say: No?' Steeply said. 'No? you say, not children? You say: 
What is the difference, please, if you make a recorded pleasure so entertaining and 
diverting it is lethal to persons, you find a Copy-Capable copy and copy it and 
disseminate it for us to choose to see or turn off, and if we cannot choose to resist it, 
the pleasure, and cannot choose instead to live? You say what your Fortier believes, that 
we are children, not human adults like the noble Quebecers, we are children, bullies but 
still children inside, and will kill ourselves for you if you put the candy within the arms' 
reach.' 

Marathe tried to make his face expressive of anger, which was difficult for him. 'This is 



what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then 
become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, 
inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, 
possibly, for listening to.' 

Unmentioned by either man was how in heaven's name either man expected to get up 
or down from the mountainside's shelf in the dark of the U.S. desert's night. 


8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


INTERDEPENDENCE DAY 

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR 

Every year at E.T.A., maybe a dozen of the kids between maybe like twelve and fifteen 
— children in the very earliest stages of puberty and really abstract-capable thought, 
when one's allergy to the confining realities of the present is just starting to emerge as 
weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew 120 — maybe a dozen of these kids, 
mostly male, get fanatically devoted to a homemade Academy game called Eschaton. 
Eschaton is the most complicated children's game anybody around E.T.A.'d ever heard 
of. No one's entirely sure who brought it to Enfield from where. But you can pretty 
easily date its conception from the mechanics of the game itself. Its basic structure had 
already pretty much coalesced when Allston's Michael Pemulis hit age twelve and 
helped make it way more compelling. Its elegant complexity, combined with a 
dismissive-reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the 
present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it's almost addictively compelling, 
and shocks the tall. 

This year it's been Otis P. Lord, a thirteen-year-old baseliner and calculus phenom 
from Wilmington DE, who 'Wears the Beanie' as Eschaton's game-master and 
statistician of record, though Pemulis, since he's still around and is far and away the 
greatest Eschaton player in E.T.A. history, has a kind of unofficial emeritus power of 
correction over Lord's calculations and mandate. 

Eschaton takes eight to twelve people to play, w/ 400 tennis balls so dead and bald 
they can't even be used for service drills anymore, plus an open expanse equal to the 
area of four contiguous tennis courts, plus a head for data-retrieval and coldly logical 
cognition, along with at least 40 megabytes of available RAM and wide array of tennis 
paraphernalia. The vade-mecumish rulebook that Pemulis in Y.P.W. got Hal Incandenza 
to write — with appendices and sample c:\Pink 2 \Mathpak\EndStat-path Decision-Tree 
diagrams and an offset of the most accessible essay Pemulis could find on applied game 



theory — is about as long and interesting as J. Bunyan's stupefying Pilgrim's Progress 
from This World to That Which Is to Come, and a pretty tough nut to compress into 
anything lively (although every year a dozen more E.T.A. kids memorize the thing at such 
a fanatical depth that they sometimes report reciting mumbled passages under light 
dental or cosmetic anesthesia, years later). But if Hal had a Luger pointed at him and 
were under compulsion to try, he'd probably start by explaining that each of the 400 
dead tennis balls in the game's global arsenal represents a 5-mega-ton thermonuclear 
warhead. Of the total number of a given day's players, 121 three compose a theoretical 
Anschluss designated AMNAT, another three SOVWAR, one or two REDCHI, another one 
or two the wacko but always pesky LIBSYR or more formidable IRUBSYR, and that the 
day's remaining players, depending on involved random considerations, can form 
anything from SOUTHAF to INDPAK to like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 
50-click Howitzer and big ideas. Each team is called a Combatant. On the open expanse 
of contiguous courts. Combatants are arrayed in positions corresponding to their 
location on the planet earth as represented in The Rand McNally Slightly Rectangular 
Hanging Map of the World. 122 Practical distribution of total megatonnage requires a 
working knowledge of the Mean-Value Theorem for Integrals, 123 but for Hal's synoptic 
purposes here it's enough to say that megatonnage is distributed among Combatants 
according to an integrally regressed ratio of (a) Combatant's yearly military budget as 
percentage of Combatant's yearly GNP to (b) the inverse of stratego-tactical 
expenditures as percentage of Combatant's yearly military budget. In quainter days. 
Combatants' balls were simply doled out by throws of shiny red Yahtzee-dice. Quaint 
chance is no longer required, because Pemulis has downloaded Mathpak Unltd.'s 
elegant EndStat 124 stats-cruncher software into the late James Incandenza's fearsome 
idle drop-clothed D.E.C. 2100, and has shown Otis P. Lord how to dicky the lock to 
Schtitt's office at night with a dining-hall meal card and plug the D.E.C. into a three- 
prong that's under the lower left corner of the enormous print of Durer's 'The 
Magnificent Beast' on the wall by the relevant edge of Schtitt's big glass desk, so Schtitt 
or deLint won't even know it's on, when it's on, then link it by cellular modem to a slick 
Yushityu portable with color monitor out on the courts' nuclear theater. AMNAT and 
SOVWAR usually end up with about 400 total megatons each, with the rest 
inconsistently divided. It's possible to complicate Pemulis's Mean-Value equation for 
distribution by factoring in stuff like historical incidences of bellicosity and 
appeasement, unique characteristics of perceived national interests, etc., but Lord, the 
son of not one but two bankers, is a straight bang-for-buck type of apportioner, a stance 
the equally bottom-line-minded Michael Pemulis endorses with both thumbs. Pieces of 
tennis gear are carefully placed within each Combatant's territories to mirror and map 
strategic targets. Folded gray-on-red E.T.A. T-shirts are MAMAs — Major Metro Areas. 
Towels stolen from selected motels on the junior tour stand for airfields, bridges, 
satellite-linked monitoring facilities, carrier groups, conventional power plants, 
important rail convergences. Red tennis shorts with gray trim are CONFORCONs — 
Conventional-Force Concentrations. The black cotton E.T.A. armbands — for when God 
forbid there's a death — designate the noncontemporary game-era's atomic power 
plants, uranium-/ plutonium-enrichment facilities, gaseous diffusion plants, breeder 



reactors, initiator factories, neutron-scattering-reflector labs, tritium-production reactor 
vessels, heavy-water plants, semiprivate shaped-charge concerns, linear accelerators, 
and the especially point-heavy Annular Fusion research laboratories in North Syracuse 
NNY and Presque Isle ME, Chyonskrg Kurgistan and Pliscu Romania, and possibly 
elsewhere. Red shorts with gray trim (few in number because strongly disliked by the 
travelling squads) are SSTRACs — equally low-number but point-intensive Sites of 
Strategic Command. Socks are either missile installations or antimissile installations or 
isolated silo-clusters or Cruise-capable B2 or SS5 squadrons — let's draw the curtain of 
charity across any more MILABBREVs — depending on whether they're boys' tennis 
socks or boys' street-shoe socks or girls' tennis socks with the little bunny-tail at the heel 
or girls' tennis socks w/o the bunny-tail. Toe-worn cast-off corporate-supplied sneakers 
sit open-mouthed and serenely lethal, strongly suggesting the subs they stand for. 

In the game. Combatants' 5-megaton warheads can be launched only with hand-held 
tennis racquets. Hence the requirement of actual physical targeting-skill that separates 
Eschaton from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs 
around kitchen tables. The paraboloid transcontinental flight of a liquid-fuel strategic 
delivery vehicle closely resembles a topspin lob. One reason the E.T.A. administration 
and staff unofficially permit Eschaton to absorb students' attention and commitment 
might be that the game's devotees tend to develop terrific lobs. Pemulis's lobs can nail a 
coin on the baseline two out of three times off either side, is why it's idiotic that he 
rushes the net so much instead of letting the other guy come in more. Warheads can be 
launched independently or packed into an intricately knotted athletic supporter 
designed to open out in midflight and release Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles — 
MIRVs. MIRVs, being a profligate use of a Combatant's available megatonnage, tend to 
get used only if a game of Eschaton metastasizes from a controlled set of Spasm 
Exchanges — SPASEX — to an all-out apocalyptic series of punishing Strikes Against 
Civilian Populations — SACPOP. Few Combatants will go to SACPOP unless compelled by 
the remorseless logic of game theory, since SACPOP-exchanges usually end up costing 
both Combatants so many points they're eliminated from further contention. A given 
Eschaton's winning team is simply that Combatant with the most favorable ratio of 
points for INDDIR — Infliction of Death, Destruction, and Incapacitation of Response — 
to SUFDDIR — self-evident — though the assignment of point-values for each 
Combatant's shirts, towels, shorts, armbands, socks, and shoes is statistically icky, plus 
there are also wildly involved corrections for initial megatonnage, population density, 
Land-Sea-Air delivery distributions, and EM-pulse-resistant civil-defense expenditures, 
so that the official victor takes three hours of EndStat number-crunching and at least 
four Motrin for Otis P. Lord to confirm. 

Another reason why each year's master statistician has to be a special combination of 
tech-wonk and compulsive is that the baroque apparatus of each Eschaton has to be 
worked out in advance and then sold to a kind of immature and easily bored community 
of world leaders. A quorum of the day's Combatants has to endorse a particular 
simulated World Situation as Lord's stayed up well past several bedtimes to develop it: 
Land-Sea-Air force-distributions; ethnic, sociologic, economic, and even religious demo¬ 
graphics for each Combatant, plus broadly sketched psych-profiles of all relevant heads 



of state; prevailing weather in all the map's quadrants; etc. Then everybody playing that 
day is assigned to a Combatant's team, and they all sit down over purified water and 
unfatted chips to hash out between Combatants stuff like mutual-defense alliances, 
humane-war pacts, facilities for inter-Combatant communication, DEFCON-gradients, 
city-trading, and so on. Since each Combatant's team knows only their own Situation- 
profile and total available megatonnage — and since even out in the four-court theater 
the stockpiled warheads are hidden from view inside the identical white plastic cast-off 
industrial-solvent buckets all academies and serious players use for drill-balls 125 — there 
can be a lot of poker-facing about response-resolve, willingness to go SACPOP, 
nonnegotiable interests, EM-pulse-immunity, distribution of strategic forces, and 
commitment to geopolitical ideals. You should have seen Michael Pemulis just about eat 
the whole world alive during pre-Eschaton summits, back when he played. His teams 
won most games before the first lob landed. 

What often takes the longest to get a quorum on is each game's Triggering Situation. 
Here Lord, like many stellar statistics-wonks, shows a bit of an Achilles' heel 
imagination-wise, but he's got a good five or six years of Eschaton precedents to draw 
on. A Russo-Chinese border dispute goes tactical over Sinkiang. An AMNAT 
computracker in the Aleutians misreads a flight of geese as three SOVWAR SSios on 
reentry. Israel moves armored divisions north and east through Jordan after an El Al 
airbus is bombed in midflight by a cell linked to both H'sseins. Black Albertan wackos 
infiltrate an isolated silo at Ft. Chimo and get two MIRVs through SOUTHAF's defense 
net. North Korea invades South Korea. Vice versa. AMNAT is within 72 hours of putting 
an impregnable string of antimissile satellites on line, and the remorseless logic of game 
theory compels SOVWAR to go SACPOP while it still has the chance. 

On Interdependence Day, Sunday 11/8, game-master Lord's Triggering Situation 
unwinds nicely, on Pemulis's view. Explosions of suspicious origin occur at AMNAT 
satellite-receiver stations from Turkey to Labrador as three high-level Canadian defense 
ministers vanish and then a couple of days later are photographed at a Volgograd bistro 
hoisting shots of Stolichnaya with Slavic bimbos on their knee. 126 Then two SOVWAR 
trawlers just inside international waters off Washington are strafed by MiGs on patrol 
out of Cape Flattery Naval Base. Both AMNAT and SOVWAR go from DEFCON 2 to 
DEFCON 4. REDCHI goes to DEFCON 3, in response to which SOVWAR airfields and 
antimissile networks from Irkutsk to the Dzhugdzhur Range go to DEFCON 5, in response 
to which AMNAT-SAC bombers and antimissile-missile silos in Nebraska and South 
Dakota and Saskatchewan and eastern Spain assume a Maximum Readiness posture. 
SOVWAR's bald and port-wine-stained premier calls AMNAT's wattle-chinned 127 
president on the Hot Line and asks him if he's got Prince Albert in a can. Another pretty 
shady explosion levels a SOVWAR Big Ear monitoring station on Sakhalin. General 
Atomic Inc.'s gaseous diffusion uranium-enrichment facility in Portsmouth OH reports 
four kilograms of enriched uranium hexafluoride missing and then suffers a cataclysmic 
fire that forces evacuation of six downwind counties. An AMNAT minesweeper of the 
Sixth Fleet on maneuvers in the Red Sea is hit and sunk with REDCHI Silkworm 
torpedoes fired by LIBSYR MiG25s. Italy, in an apparently bizarre EndStat-generated 
development Otis P. Lord will only smile enigmatically about, invades Albania. SOVWAR 



goes apeshit. Apoplectic premier rings AMNAT's president, only to be asked if his 
refrigerator's running. LIBSYR shocks the Christian world by air-bursting a half-megaton 
device two clicks over Tel Aviv, causing deaths in the low six figures. Everybody and his 
brother goes to DEFCON 5. Air Force One leaves the ground. SOUTFIAF and REDCHI 
announce neutrality and plead for cool heads. Israeli armored columns behind heavy 
tactical-artillery saturation push into Syria all the way to Abu Kenal in twelve hours: 
Damascus has firestorms; En Nebk is reportedly just plain gone. Several repressive right- 
wing regimes in the Third World suffer coups d'etat and are replaced by repressive left- 
wing regimes. Tehran and Baghdad announce full dip-mil support of LIBSYR, thus 
reconstituting LIBSYR as IRLIBSYR. AMNAT and SOVWAR activate all civil defense 
personnel and armed forces reserves and commence evacuation of selected MAMAs. 
IRLIBSYR is today represented by Evan Ingersoll, whom Axford keeps growling at under 
his breath, Hal can hear. A shifty-eyed member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff vanishes 
and isn't photographed anywhere. Albania sues for terms. Crude and apparently 
amateur devices in the low-kiloton range explode across Israel from Haifa to Ashqelon. 
Tripoli is incommunicado after at least four thermonuclear explosions cause second- 
degree burns as far away as Medenine Tunisia. A 10-kiloton tactical-artillery device air- 
bursts over the Command Center of the Czech 3rd Army in Ostrava, resulting in what 
one Pentagon analyst calls 'a serious wienie roast.' Despite the fact that nobody but 
SOVWAR itself has anybody close enough to hit Ostrava from Howitzer-distance, 
SOVWAR stonewalls AMNAT's denials and regrets. AMNAT's president tries ringing 
SOVWAR's premier from the air and gets only the premier's answering machine. AMNAT 
is unable to determine whether the string of explosions at its radar installations all along 
the Arctic Circle are conventional or tactical. CIA/NSA reports that 64% of the civilian 
populations of SOVWAR's MAMAs have been successfully relocated below ground in 
hardened shelters. AMNAT orders evacuation of all MAMAs. SOVWAR MiG25s engage 
REDCHI aircraft over seas off Tientsin. Air Force Two tries to leave the ground and gets a 
flat tire. A single one-megaton SS10 evades antimissile missiles and detonates just over 
Provo UT, from which all communications abruptly cease. Eschaton's game-master now 
posits — but does not go so far as to actually assert — that EndStat's game-theoretic 
Decision Tree now dictates a SPASEX response from AMNAT. 

Uninitiated adults who might be parked in a nearby mint-green advertorial Ford sedan 
or might stroll casually past E.T.A.'s four easternmost tennis courts and see an atavistic 
global-nuclear-conflict game played by tanned and energetic little kids and so this might 
naturally expect to see fuzzless green warheads getting whacked indiscriminately 
skyward all over the place as everybody gets blackly drunk with thanatoptic fury in the 
crisp November air — these adults would more likely find an actual game of Eschaton 
strangely subdued, almost narcotized-looking. Your standard round of Eschaton moves 
at about the pace of chess between adepts. For these devotees become, on court, 
almost parodically adult — staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world 
leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities — 
responsibilities to nation, globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both 
the living and the unborn — not to let the terrible agony they feel at the arrival of this 
day — this dark day the leaders've prayed would never come and have taken every 



conceivable measure rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to 
prevent — not to let the agonizing weight of responsibility compromise their resolve to 
do what they must to preserve their people's way of life. So they play, logically, 
cautiously, so earnest and deliberate in their calculations they appear thoroughly and 
queerly adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance. A couple gulls fly overhead. A mint- 
green Ford sedan has passed through the gate's raised portcullis and is trying to parallel 
park between two dumpsters in the circular drive behind West House, which is behind 
and to the neck-straining left of the Gatorade pavilion. There's an autumnal tang to the 
air and a brittle gray shell of cloud-cover, plus the constant faraway hum of Sunstrand 
Plaza's ATHSCME fan-line. 

Strategic acumen and feel for realism vary from kid to kid, of course. When IRUBSYR's 
Evan Ingersoll starts lobbing warheads at SOVWAR's belt of Third-Wave reserve silos in 
the Kazakh, and it becomes pretty clear that AMNAT has won IRUBSYR to its side by 
making sinister promises about the ultimate disposition of Israel, Israel, even though 
nobody's Israel out there today, seems in a fit of pique to have somehow persuaded 
SOUTHAF, who today is Brooklyn NY's little hard-ass Josh Gopnik — the same Josh 
Gopnik who by the way subscribes to Commentary — to expend all sixteen of its green 
fuzzy warheads in a debilitating enfilade against AMNAT dams, bridges, and bases from 
Florida to Baja. Everybody involved orders total displacement of MAMA populations. 
Then, without any calculation whatever, INDPAK, who today is J. J. Penn — a high- 
ranked thirteen-year-old but not exactly the brightest log on the Yuletide fire — dumps 
three poorly tied jockstraps' worth of MIRVs on Israel, landing most of the megatonnage 
in sub-Beersheba desert areas that didn't look much different before the blasts. When 
roundly kibitzed from the shelter of the Gatorade pavilion under Schtitt's tower by 
Troeltsch, Axford, and Incandenza, Penn shrilly reminds them that Pakistan is a Muslim 
state and sworn foe to all infidelic enemies of Islam, but can do little but fiddle with the 
strings of his launcher when Pemulis cheerfully reminds him that nobody's Israel today 
and there isn't so much as a Combatant's sock on that part of the courts. It is not a 
matter of the principle of thing, ever, in Eschaton. 

Except for the SOUTHAF flurry and INDPAK boner, 11/8's game proceeds with much 
probity and cold deliberation, with even more pauses and hushed, chin-stroking 
conferences today than tend to be the norm. The only harried-looking person on the 
1300-m. 2 map is Otis P. Lord, who has to keep legging it from one continent to another, 
pushing a rolling double-shelf stainless steel food cart purloined from St. John of God 
Hospital with a blinking Yushityu portable on one shelf and a 256-capacity diskette case 
about two-thirds full on the other, the shelves' sides hung with clattering clipboards. 
Lord having to dramatize manually the effortless dictates of real logic and necessity, 
verifying that command decisions are allowable functions of situation and capacity (he'd 
shrugged his shoulders in a neutral Whatever at SOUTHAF and INDPAK), locating 
necessary data for subterranean premiers and dictators and airsick presidents, removing 
vaporized articles of clothing from sites of devastating hits and just woppsing them up 
or folding them over at the sites of near-hits and fizzle yields, triangulating EM-pulse 
estimates from confirmed hits to authorize or deny communication-capacity, it's a 
nerve-racking job, he's more or less having to play God, tallying kill-ratios and radiation- 



levels and parameters of fallout, strontium-90 and iodine levels and the likelihood of 
conflagrations v. firestorms in MAMAs with different Mean-Value skyscraper-heights 
and combustible-capital indices. Despite chapped hands and a badly running nose. 
Lord's response-time to requests for data is impressive, thanks mainly to the sly D.E.C. 
hookup and the detailed decision-algorithm files Pemulis had authored three years 
back. Otis P. Lord informs SOVWAR and AMNAT that Peoria IL's topographic flatness ups 
the effective kill-radius for SOVWAR's 5-megaton direct hit to 10.1 clicks, meaning half 
of this MAMA-POP burns to death in evacuatory traffic jams out on Interstate 74. An 
AMNAT Minuteman can hold an absolute maximum of eight MIRVs irregardless of 
whether the titanic jockstrap little LaMont Chu promoted out of the sedated Teddy 
Schacht's gear bag on the bus Friday night can hold thirteen dead tennis balls. Given 
standard climatic conditions, the fire area from an air-burst will be 2/r times larger than 
the blast area. Toronto has enough sub-code skyscrapers within its total area to 
guarantee a firestorm off a minimum of two strikes within 

_ 2r _ 

(1 / total Toronto area in m. 2 ) 

of target center. Five megatons of heavy-hydrogen fusion yields at least 1,400,000 
curies worth of strontium-90, meaning microcephalic kids in Montreal for roughly 
twenty-two generations, and yes wiseacre McKenna of AMNAT the world will probably 
notice the difference. Struck and Trevor Axford hoot loudly from under the green 
GATORADE THIRST AID awning of the open-air pavilion outside the fence along the 
south side of the East Courts, where (the pavilion) they and Michael Pemulis and Jim 
Troeltsch and Hal Incandenza are splayed on reticulate-mesh patio chairs in street 
clothes and with their street-sneakers up on reticulate-mesh footstools. Struck and 
Axford with suspiciously bracing Gatorades and what looks like a hand-rolled 
psychochemical cigarette of some sort being passed between them. 11/8 is an E.T.A. 
day of mandatory total R&R, though the public intoxicants are a bit much. Pemulis has a 
bag of red-skinned peanuts he hasn't eaten much of. Trevor Axford has overinhaled 
from the cigarette and is hunched coughing, his forehead purple. Hal Incandenza is 
squeezing a tennis ball and leaning out far to starboard to spit into a NASA glass on the 
ground and struggling with a strong desire to get high again for the second time since 
breakfast v. a strong distaste about smoking dope with/in front of all these others, 
especially out in the open in front of Little Buddies, which seems to him to violate some 
sort of issue of taste that he struggles to articulate satisfactorily to himself. A tooth way 
back on the upper left is twinging electrically in the cold air. Pemulis, though from his 
twitchy right eye he's clearly had recent recourse to some Tenuate (which helps explain 
the uneaten nuts), is currently abstaining and sitting on his hands for warmth, peanuts 
on the floor well away from Hal's NASA glass. The pavilion is open on all sides and 
compliments of Stokely-van Camp Corp. and little more than like a big fancy tent with a 
green felt cover over the expanse's real grass and white-iron patio furniture with 
reticulate plastic mesh; it's mostly used for civilians' spectation during exhibition 
matches on the East Show Courts 7, 8, 9; sometimes E.T.A.s cluster under it during drill- 
breaks in the summer in the heat of the day. The green awning gets taken down when 
they go into the Lung for the winter. Eschaton traditionally commandeers Courts 6-9, 



the really nice East Courts, unless there's legit tennis going on. All the upperclass 
spectators except Jim Struck are former Eschaton devotees, though Hal and Troeltsch 
were both marginal. Troeltsch, who's also pretty clearly had some Tenuate, is left-eye- 
nystagmic and is calling the action into a disconnected broadcast-headset, but Es- 
chaton's tough to enliven, verbally, even for the stimulated. Being generally too slow 
and cerebral. 

Struck is telling Axford to put his hands over his head and Pemulis is telling Axford to 
hold his breath. Now, in a stress-heightened voice, Otis P. Lord says he needs Pemulis to 
real quick come zip inside through the Cyclone-fence gate south of Court 12 and walk 
across the theater's four-court map to show Lord how to access the EndStat calculation 
that every thousand Roentgens of straight X and gamma produces 6.36 deaths per 
hundred POP and for the other 93.64 means reduced lifespans of 

(Total R - 100) (,0636(Total R-100) 2 ) 

years, meaning nobody's exactly going to have to be pricing dentures in Minsk, so to 
speak, in the future. And so on. 

After about half the planet's extant megatonnage has been expended, things are 
looking pretty good for the AMNAT crew. Even though they and SOVWAR are SPASEXing 
back and forth with chilling accuracy — SOVWAR's designated launcher is the butch and 
suspiciously muscular Ann Kittenplan (who at twelve-and-a-half looks like a Belorussian 
shot-putter and has to buy urine more than quarter-annually and has a way more lush 
and impressive mustache than for instance Hal himself could raise, and who gets these 
terrible rages) but so Kittenplan's landed nothing worse than an indirect hit all 
afternoon, while AMNAT's launchman is Todd ('Postal Weight') Possalthwaite, an 
endomorphic thirteen-year-old from Edina MN whose whole infuriating tennis-game 
consists of nothing but kick serves and topspin lobs, and who's been the Eschaton 
MVL 128 for the last two years, and accuracy-wise has to be seen to be believed — still, 
both sides have artfully avoided the escalation to SACPOP that often takes both super- 
Combatants right out of the game; and AMNAT's president LaMont Chu has used the 
excuse of Gopnik's emotional strikes against the U.S. South, plus Penn's arational 
lobbing at an Israel that at the summit was explicitly placed under AMNAT's mutual- 
defense umbrella, has used these as golden tactical geese, racking up serious INDDIR- 
points against a SOUTHAF and INDPAK whose hasty defensive alliance and shaky aim 
produce nothing more than a lot of irradiated cod off Gloucester. Whenever there's a 
direct hit, Troeltsch sits up straight and gets to use the exclamation he's hit on for a kind 
of announcerial trademark: 'Ho-ly CROW!' But SOVWAR, beset from two vectors by 
AMNAT and IRLIBSYR (whose occasional lob Israel's way AMNAT, drawing a storm of 
diplomatic protest from SOUTHAF and INDPAK, keeps instructing Lord to log as 
'regrettable mistargetings'), even with cutting-edge civil defense and EMP-resistant 
communications, poor old SOVWAR is absorbing such serious collateral SUFDDIR that 
it's being inexorably impelled by game-theoretic logic to a position where it's going to 
pretty much have no choice but to go SACPOP against AMNAT. 

Now SOVWAR premier Timmy ('Sleepy T.P.') Peterson petitions 0. P. Lord for 
capacity/authorization to place a scrambled call to Air Force One. 'Scrambled call' means 
they don't yell at each other publicly across the courts' map; Lord has to ferry messages 



from one side the other, complete with inclined heads and hushed tones etc. Premier 
and president exchange standard formalities. Premier apologizes for the Prince Albert 
crack. Hal, who's declining all public chemicals, he's decided, has a gander at Pemulis's 
rough tallies of Combatants' INDDIR/SUFDDIR ratios so far and agrees to bet Axford a 
U.S. finski no way AMNAT accepts SOVWAR's invitation to possible terms. During 
actionless diplomatic intervals like this, Troeltsch is reduced to saying 'What a beautiful 
day for an Eschaton' over and over and asking people for their thoughts on the game 
until Pemulis tells him he's cruising to get dope-slapped. There's pretty much nobody 
around: Tavis and Schtitt are off giving what are essentially recruiting-talks at indoor 
clubs in the west suburbs; Pemulis'd let Tall Paul Shaw take the multi-emblazoned tow 
truck to take Mario down to the Public Gardens to watch the public l.-Day festivities 
with the Bolex H64; the local kids often go home for the day; a lot of the rest like to lie 
in the Viewing Rooms barely moving all I. Day until the dinner gala. Lord tear-asses back 
and forth between Courts 6 ana 8, food cart clattering (the food cart, which Pemulis and 
Axford picked up from a kind of a seedy-looking orderly at SJOG hospital that Pemulis 
knew from Allston, has one of those crazy left front wheels that e.g. seems always to 
afflict only your particular grocery cart in supermarkets, and makes a hell of a clattering 
racket when rushed), ferrying messages which the 18-and-Under guys can tell AMNAT 
and SOVWAR are making deliberately oblique and obtuse so Lord has to do that much 
more running: God is never a particularly popular role to have to play, and Lord this fall 
has already been the victim of several boarding-school-type pranks too puerile even to 
detail. J. A. L. Struck Jr., who as usual has made a swine of himself with the suspiciously 
bracing cups of Gatorade, is abruptly ill all over his own lap and then sort of slumps to 
one side in his patio-chair with his face slack and white and doesn't hear Pemulis's quick 
analysis that Hal might as well give Axhandle the $ right now, because LaMont Chu can 
parse a Decision Tree with the best of them, and the D. Tree's now indicating peace 
terms in whatever a D. Tree's version of neon letters is, because the biggest priority for 
AMNAT right at 1515h. is to avoid having to SACPOP with SOVWAR, since if the game 
stops right now AMNAT's probably won, whereas if they SACPOP with SOVWAR, trading 
massive infliction of INDDIR for massive body-shots of SUFDDIR, staying more or less 
even with each other, AMNAT'll still be the same number of points ahead of SOVWAR 
overall, but it'll have taken such heavy SUFDDIR debits that IRLIBSYR — never forget 
IRLIBSYR, brilliantly if obnoxiously Imam'd today by eleven-year-old eyebrowless Evan 
Ingersoll of Binghamton NNY — by staying out of the SACPOP-fest and lobbing 
sporadically at SOVWAR just often enough to rack up serious INDDIR but not quite 
enough to piss SOVWAR off enough to provoke the retaliatory SSIO-wave that would 
mean significant SUFDDIR, could well have a serious shot at overtaking AMNAT for the 
overall Eschaton, especially when you factored in the f(x) advantages for bellicosity and 
nonexistent civil defense. At some point Axford has passed the remainder of the 
cigarette back over toward Struck without looking to see that Struck is no longer in his 
chair, and Hal finds himself taking the proffered duBois and smoking dope in public 
without even thinking about it or having consciously decided to go ahead. Sure enough, 
poor red-faced runny-nosed Lord is making way too many clattering trips between 
Courts 6 and 8 for it to mean anything but peace terms. Evan Ingersoll is positively strip- 



mining his right nostril. Finally Lord stops with the running back and forth and positions 
himself in the ad service box of Court 7 and loads a new diskette into the Yushityu. 
Struck moans something in a possibly foreign tongue. All the other upperclass 
spectators have scooted their chairs well away from Struck. Troeltsch extends a blood- 
blistered palm and rubs the tips of the hand's fingers together at Hal, and Hal forks over 
the fin without handing the thin cigarette back over to Axford, somehow. Pemulis has 
leaned forward intently with his pointy chin in his hands; he seems completely ab¬ 
sorbed. 

Interdependence Day Y.D.A.U.'s Eschaton enters probably its most crucial phase. Lord, 
at his cart and portable TP, puts on the white beanie (n.b.: not the black or the red 
beanie) that signals a temporary cessation of SPASEX between two Combatants but 
allows all other Combatants to go on pursuing their strategic interests as they see fit. 
SOVWAR and AMNAT are thus pretty vulnerable right now. SOVWAR's Premier Peterson 
and Air Marshal Kittenplan, carrying their white janitorial stockpile-bucket between 
them, walk across Europe and the Atlantic to parley with AMNAT President Chu and 
Supreme Commander Possalthwaite in what looks to be roughly Sierra Leone. Various 
territories smolder quietly. The other players are mostly standing around beating their 
arms against their chests to stay warm. A few hesitant white flakes appear and swirl 
around and melt into dark stars the moment they hit court. A couple ostensible world 
leaders run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with their open mouths 
directed at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall's first snow. Yesterday it had been 
warmer and rained. Axford speculates about whether snow will mean Schtitt might 
consent to inflate the Lung even before the Fundraiser two weeks hence. Struck is 
threatening to fall out of his chair. Pemulis, leaning forward intently, wearing his Mr. 
Howell yachting cap, ignores everyone. He hates to type and keeps his tallies via pencil 
and clipboard a la deLint. The idling Ford sedan is conspicuous for the excruciated full- 
color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of its right rear door. Hal and Axford are 
passing what looks to the Combatants like a suckerless Tootsie-Roll stick back and forth 
between them, and occasionally to Troeltsch. Trevor ('The Axhandle') Axford has a total 
of only three-and-a-half digits on his right hand. From West House you can hear Mrs. 
Clarke and the time-and-a-half holiday kitchen staff preparing the Interdependence Day 
gala dinner, which always includes dessert. 

Now REDCHI, itself quietly trying to rack up some unanswered INDDIR, sends a 
towering topspin Job into INDPAK's quadrant, scoring what REDCHI claims is a direct hit 
on Karachi and what warheadless INDPAK claims is only an indirect hit on Karachi. It's an 
uneasy moment: a dispute such as this would never occur in the real God's real world, 
since the truth would be manifest in the actual size of the actual wienie roast in the 
actual Karachi. But God here is played by Otis P. Lord, and Lord is number-crunching so 
fiendishly at the cart's Yushityu, trying to confirm the verisimilitude of the peace terms 
AMNAT and SOVWAR are hashing out, that he can't even pretend to have seen where 
REDCHI's strike against INDPAK landed w/ respect to Karachi's T-shirt — which is 
admittedly kind of mashed and woppsed up, though this could be primarily from 
breezes and feet — and in his lapse of omniscience cannot see how he's supposed to 
allocate the relevant INDDIR- and SUFDDIR-points. Troeltsch doesn't know whether to 



say 'Holy CROW!' or not. Lord, vexed by a lapse it's tough to see how any mortal could 
have avoided, appeals over to Michael Pemulis for an independent ruling; and when 
Pemulis gravely shakes his white-hatted head, pointing out that Lord is God and either 
sees or doesn't, in Eschaton, Lord has an intense little crying fit that's made abruptly 
worse when now J. J. Penn of INDPAK all of a sudden gets the idea to start claiming that 
now that it's snowing the snow totally affects blast area and fire area and pulse- 
intensity and maybe also has fallout implications, and he says Lord has to now 
completely redo everybody's damage parameters before anybody can form realistic 
strategies from here on out. 

Pemulis's chairlegs shriek and make red-skin peanuts spill out in a kind of cornucopic 
cone-shape and he's up in his capacity as sort of eminence grise of Eschaton and 
ranging up and down just outside the theater's chain-link fencing, giving J. J. Penn the 
very roughest imaginable side of his tongue. Besides being real sensitive to any theater- 
boundary-puncturing threats to the map's integrity — threats that've come up before, 
and that as Pemulis sees it threaten the game's whole sense of animating realism (which 
realism depends on buying the artifice of 1300 m. 2 of composition tennis court 
representing the whole rectangular projection of the planet earth) — Pemulis is also a 
sworn foe of all Penns for all time: it had been J. J. Penn's much older brother Miles 
Penn, now twenty-one and flailing away on the grim Third-World Satellite pro tour, 
playing for travel-expenses in bleak dysenteric locales, who when Pemulis first arrived at 
E.T.A. at age eleven had christened him Michael Penisless and had had Pemulis 
convinced for almost a year that if he pressed on his belly-button his ass would fall 
off. 129 

'It's snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!' Pemulis yells at Penn, 
whose lower lip is out and quivering. Pemulis's face is the face of a man who will 
someday need blood-pressure medication, a constitution the Tenuate doesn't help one 
bit. Troeltsch is sitting up straight and speaking very intensely and quietly into his 
headset. Hal, who in his day never wore the beanie, and usually portrayed some 
marginal nation somewhere out in the nuclear boondocks, finds himself more intrigued 
by Penn's map/ territory faux pas than upset by it, or even amused. 

Pemulis turns back to the pavilion and seems to be looking at Hal in some kind of 
appeal: 'Jaysusl' 

'Except is the territory the real world, quote unquote, though!' Axford calls across to 
Pemulis, who's pacing like the fence is between him and some sort of prey. Axford 
knows quite well Pemulis can be fucked with when he's like this: when he's hot he 
always cools down and becomes contrite. 

Struck tries to yell out a Kertwang on Pemulis but can't get the megaphone he makes 
of his hands to fit over the mouth. 

'The real world's what the map here stands for!' Lord lifts his head from the Yushityu 
and cries over at Axhandle, trying to please Pemulis. 

'Kind of looks like real-world-type snow from here, M.P.,' Axford calls out. His 
forehead's still maroon from the coughing fit. Troeltsch is trying to describe the 
distinction between the symbolic map of the gear-littered courts and the global 
strategic theater it stands for using all and only sports-broadcast cliches. Hal looks from 



Axhandle to Pemulis to Lord. 

Struck finally falls out of his chair with a clunk but his legs are still somehow entangled 
in the legs of the chair. It starts to snow harder, and dark stars of melt begin to multiply 
and then merge all over the courts. Otis Lord is trying to type and wipe his nose on his 
sleeve at the same time. J. Gopnik and K. McKenna are running around well outside 
their assigned quadrants with their tongues outstretched. 

'Real-world snow isn't a factor if it's falling on the fucking map!' 

Ann Kittenplan's crew-cutted head now protrudes from the kind of rugby-scrum 
AMNAT's and SOVWAR's heads of state form around Lord's computational food cart. 
'For Christ's sake leave us alone!' she shrieks at Pemulis. Troeltsch is going 'Oh, my' into 
his headset. 0. Lord is struggling with the cart's protective umbrella, his head's beanie's 
little white propeller rotating in a rising wind. A light dusting of snow is starting to 
appear in the players' hair. 

'It's only real-world snow if it's already in the scenario!' Pemulis keeps directing 
everything at Penn, who hasn't said a word since his original suggestion and is busy sort 
of casually kicking the Karachi-shirt over into the Arabian Sea, clearly hoping the original 
detonation will get forgotten about in all the metatheoretical fuss. Pemulis rages along 
the East Courts' western fence. The combination of several Tenuate spansules plus 
Eschaton-adrenaline bring his blue-collar Irish right out. He's a muscular but funda¬ 
mentally physically narrow guy: head, hands, the sharp little wad of cartilage at the tip 
of Pemulis's nose — everything about him seems to Hal to taper and come to a point, 
like a bad El Greco. Hal leans to spit and watches him pace like a caged thing as Lord 
works feverishly over EndStat's peace-terms decision-matrix. Hal wonders, not for the 
first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and 
Pemulis, then whether the fact that he's capable of wondering whether he's a snob 
attenuates the possibility that he's really a snob. Though Hal hasn't had more than four 
or five total very small hits off the public duBois, this is a prime example of what's 
sometimes called 'marijuana thinking.' You can tell because Hal's leaned way over to spit 
but has gotten lost in a paralytic thought-helix and hasn't yet spit, even though he's right 
in bombing-position over the NASA glass. It also occurs to him that he finds the real- 
snow/unreal-snow snag in the Eschaton extremely abstract but somehow way more 
interesting than the Eschaton itself, so far. 

IRLIBSYR's strongman Evan Ingersoll, all of 1.3 m. tall, warmed by baby-fat and high- 
calorie cerebral endeavor, has been squatting on his heels like a catcher just west of 
Damascus, spinning his Rossignol launcher idly in his hand, watching the one-sided 
exchange between Pemulis and Ingersoll's roommate J. J. Penn, who's now threatening 
to quit and go in for cocoa if they can't for once play Eschaton without the big guys 
horning in again like always. There's a tiny whirring sound as Ingersoll's mental gears 
grind. From the duration of the little Sierra Leone summit and the studious blankness on 
everybody's face it's pretty clear that SOVWAR and AMNAT are going to come to terms, 
and the terms are likely to involve SOVWAR agreeing not to go SACPOP against AMNAT 
in return for AMNAT letting SOVWAR go SACPOP against Ingersoll's IRLIBSYR, because if 
SOVWAR goes SACPOP against an IRLIBSYR that can't have many warheads left in the 
old bucket by now (Ingersoll knows they know) then SOVWAR'II get to rack up a lot of 



INDDIR without much SUFDDIR, while inflicting such SUFDDIR on IRUBSYR that 
IRUBSYR'II be effectively eliminated as a threat to AMNAT's commanding lead in points, 
which is what has the most utility in the old game-theoretic matrix right now. The exact 
utility transformations are too oogly for an Ingersoll who's still grappling with fractions, 
but he can see clearly that this'd be the most remorselessly logical best-interest- 
conducive scenario for both LaMont Chu and especially the Sleepster, Peterson, who's 
hated Ingersoll for months now anyway without any good reason or cause or anything, 
Ingersoll can just somehow tell. 

Hal, paralyzed and absorbed, watches Ingersoll bob on his haunches and shift his stick 
from hand to hand and cerebrate furiously and logically conclude, then, that IRUBSYR's 
highest possible strategic utility lies in AMNAT and SOVWAR failing to come to terms. 

Hal can almost visualize a dark lightbulb going on above Ingersoll's head. Pemulis is 
telling Penn that there's a critical distinction between horning in and letting asswipes 
like Jeffrey Joseph Penn run roughshod over the delimiting boundaries that are 
Eschaton's very life-blood. Chu and Peterson are nodding soberly at little things they're 
saying to each other while Kittenplan cracks her knuckles and Possalthwaite bounces a 
warhead idly on his strings. 

So now Evan Ingersoll rises from his squat now only to bend again and take a warhead 
out of IRUBSYR's ordnance-bucket, and Hal seems to be the only one who sees Ingersoll 
line up the vector very carefully with his slim thumb and take a lavish backswing and fire 
the ball directly at the little circle of super-Combatant leaders in West Africa. It's not a 
lob. It flies straight as if shot from a rifle and strikes Ann Kittenplan right in the back of 
the head with a loud thock. She whirls to face east, a hand at the back of her bristly 
skull, scanning and then locking on Damascus, her face a stony Toltec death-mask. 

Pemulis and Penn and Lord and everyone else all freeze, shocked and silent, so there's 
just the weird glittered hiss of falling snow and the sounds of a couple crows interfacing 
in the pines over by HmH. The ATHSCME fans are silent, and four sweatsock-shaped 
clouds of exhaust hang motionless over the Sunstrand stacks. Nothing moves. No 
Eschaton Combatant has ever intentionally struck another Combatant's physical person 
with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon. No matter how frayed players' nerves, it's 
never made a lick of sense. A Combatant's megatonnage is too precious to waste on 
personal attacks outside the map. It's been like this unspoken but very basic rule. 

Ann Kittenplan is so shocked and enraged that she stands there transfixed, quivering, 
her sights locked on Ingersoll and his smoking Rossignol. Otis P. Lord feels at his beanie. 

Ingersoll now makes a show of examining the tiny nails of his left hand and casually 
suggests that IRLIBSYR has just scored a direct 5-megaton contact-burst against 
SOVWAR's entire launch capacity, namely Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan, and that plus also 
AMNAT's own launch capacity, plus both Combatants' ordnance and heads of state, all 
lie well within the blast's kill-radius — which by Ingersoll's rough calculations extends 
from the Ivory Coast to the doubles alley's Senegal. Unless of course that kill-radius is 
somehow altered by the possible presence of climatic snow, he adds, beaming. 

Pemulis and Kittenplan now each let loose with a linear series of anti-lngersoll 
invectives that drown each other out and make the trees' crows take slow flight. 

But Otis Lord — who's watched the exchange, ashen, and has called up something 



relevant on EndStat's TREEMASTER metadecision subdirectory — now, to everyone's 
horror, removes from around his neck a shoelace with a little nickel-colored key and 
bends to the small locked solander box on the food cart's bottom shelf and as everyone 
watches in horror opens the box and with near-ceremonial care exchanges the white 
beanie on his head for the red beanie that signifies Utter Global Crisis. The dreaded red 
UGC beanie has been donned by an Eschaton game-master only once before, and that 
was over three years ago, when human input-error on EndStat tallies of aggregate 
SUFDDIR during a three-way SACPOP free-for-all yielded an apparent ignition of the 
earth's atmosphere. 

Now a real-world chill descends over the grainily white-swirled landscape of the 
nuclear theater. 

Pemulis tells Lord he cannot believe his fucking eyes. He tells Lord how dare he don 
the dreaded red beanie over such an obvious instance of map-not-territory 
equivocationary horseshit as Ingersoll's trying to foist. 

Lord, bent to the cart's blinking Yushityu, responds that there seems to be a problem. 

IngersolI is whistling and pretending to do the Charleston between Abu Kemal and Es 
Suweida, using his racquet like a hoofer's cane. 

Hal finally spits. 

Under Pemulis's wild-eyed stare. Lord clears his throat and calls out to Ingersoll, 
tentatively positing that today's pre-game Triggering-Situation negotiations established 
no valid strategic target areas in the postage-stamp-sized nation of Sierra Leone. 

Ingersoll calls back across the Mediterranean that target areas of keen strategic 
interest appeared in Sierra Leone at the exact moment the heads of state and total 
launch capacities of AMNAT and SOVWAR took it upon themselves to traipse into Sierra 
Leone. That Sierra Leone thenceforward as of that moment has, or rather had, he 
pretends to correct with a smile, become a de facto SSTRAC. If presidents and premiers 
wanted to leave the protection of their territories' defense-nets and hold cliquey little 
other-Combatant-excluding parleys in some hut somewhere that was up to them, but 
Lord had been wearing the white beanie that explicitly authorized the overexploited and 
underdeveloped defenders of the One True Faith of the world to keep on pursuing their 
strategic interests, and IRLIBSYR was now keenly interested in the aggregate INDDIR- 
points it had coming to them for just now vaporizing both super-Combatants' strategic 
capacities with one Flaming-Sword-of-The-Most-High-like strike. 

Ann Kittenplan keeps taking a couple quivery steps toward Ingersoll and getting 
restrained and pulled back by LaMont Chu. 

'Sleepy T.P.' Peterson, who always looks a little dazed even in the best of 
circumstances, asks Otis P. Lord to define eguivocationary for him, causing Hal 
Incandenza to laugh out loud despite himself. 

Just outside the theater's fence, Pemulis is bug-eyed with fury — not impossibly 
'drine-aggravated — and is literally jumping up and down in one spot so hard that his 
yachting cap jumps slightly off his head with each impact, which Troeltsch and Axford 
confer and agree they have previously seen occur only in animated cartoons. Pemulis 
howls that Lord is in his vacillation appeasing Ingersoll in Ingersoll's effort to fatally fuck 
with the very breath and bread of Eschaton. 130 Players themselves can't be valid targets. 



Players aren't inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. 
They're part of the map. It's snowing on the players but not on the territory. They're 
part of the map, not the cluster-fucking territory. You can only launch against the 
territory. Not against the map. It's like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps 
Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom 
and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order. You do not get points for 
hitting anybody real. Only the gear that maps what's real. Pemulis keeps looking back 
over his shoulder to the pavilion and screaming 'Joysus!' 

IngersolPs roommate J. J. Penn tries to claim that the vaporized Ann Kittenplan is 
wearing several articles of gear worth mucho INDDIR, and everyone tells him to shut up. 
The snow is now coming down hard enough to compose an environment, and 
everybody outside the sheltered pavilion looks gauzily shrouded, from Hal's perspective. 

Lord is crunching madly away at the TP under the just-opened protection of an old 
beach umbrella a previous game-master had welded to the top of the food cart. Lord 
wipes his nose against the same shoulder that's clamping a phone to his ear, awkwardly, 
and reports he's checked the D.E.C.'s Eschaton-Axiom directory via Pink 2 -capable 
modem and that unfortunately with all due respect to Ann and Mike it doesn't seem to 
explicitly say players with strategic functions can't become target-areas if they traipse 
around outside their defense-nets. LaMont Chu says how come point-values for actual 
players have never been assigned, then, for Pete's sake, and Pemulis shouts across that 
that's so totally beside the point it doesn't matter, that the reason players aren't 
explicitly exempted in the ESCHAX.DIR is that their exemption is what makes Eschaton 
and its axioms fucking possible in the first place. A kind of pale boat-wake of exhaust 
exits the idling Ford sedan off behind the pavilion and widens as it rises, dispersing. 
Pemulis says because otherwise use your heads otherwise nonstrategic emotions would 
get aroused and Combatants would be whacking balls at each other's physical persons 
all the time and Eschaton wouldn't even be possible in its icily elegant game-theoretical 
form. He's stopped jumping up and down, at least, Troeltsch observes. Players' 
exemption from strikes goes without saying, Pemulis says; it's like preaxiomatic. Pemulis 
tells Lord to consider what he's doing very carefully, because from where Pemulis is 
standing Lord looks to be willing to very possibly compromise Eschaton's map for all 
time. Girls 16's/18's prorector Mary Esther Thode putts from left to right behind the 
pavilion on the long driveway from the circular drive to the portcullis and halts her 
scooter and lifts her helmet's tinted visor and yells across for Kittenplan to put a hat on 
if she's going to play in the snow in a crew-cut. This even though Kittenplan isn't even 
strictly in Ms. Thode's like umbrella of authority, Axford observes to Troeltsch, who 
relays this fact into his headset. Hal moves his mouth around to try to gather up spit in a 
mouth that's gotten rather dry, which when you have a plug of Kodiak in is not very 
pleasant. Ann Kittenplan has been suffering from what look like almost Parkinsonian 
tremors for the last few minutes, her face writhing and her mustache almost standing 
right out straight. LaMont Chu repeats his claim that there's no way players even with 
strategic functions can ever be legit target-areas if no INDDIR/SUFDDIR values have 
been entered for them in EndStat's tally-function. Pemulis orders Chu not to distract 
Otis Lord from the incredibly potent and lethal ground Lord's letting Ingersoll lead them 



onto. He says none of them have ever even seen the true meaning of the word crisis yet. 
Ingersoll calls over to Pemulis that his emeritus veto-power is only over Lord's 
calculations, not over today's game's God's decisions about what's part of the game and 
what isn't. Pemulis invites Ingersoll to do something anatomically impossible. Pemulis 
asks LaMont Chu and Ann Kittenplan if they're just going to stand there with their 
thumbs in their bottoms and let Lord let Ingersoll eliminate Eschaton's map for keeps 
for one slimy cheesy victory in just one day's apocalypse. Kittenplan has been trembling 
and feeling at the back of her vein-laced head and looking across the Mediterranean at 
Ingersoll like somebody who knows they'll go to prison for what they want to do. Axford 
posits certain very unlikely physical conditions under which what Pemulis told Ingersoll 
to do to himself wouldn't be totally impossible. Hal spits thickly and gathers and tries to 
spit again, watching. Troeltsch broadcasts the fact that there's always a queer vague 
vitaminish stink about Mary Esther Thode that he never can quite place. There's the 
sudden tripartite whump of three Empire Waste Displacement vehicles being propelled 
above the cloud-cover to points far north. Hal identifies Thode's ambient odor as the 
stink of thiamine, which for reasons best known to Thode she takes a lot of; and 
Troeltsch broadcasts the datum and refers to Hal as a 'close source,' which strikes Hal as 
odd and somehow off in a way he can't quite name. Kittenplan shakes Chu's arm loose 
and darts over and extracts a warhead from SOVWAR's portable stockpile and shouts 
out that well OK then if players can be targets then in that case: and she fires a real 
screamer at IngersolPs head, which Ingersoll barely blocks with his Rossignol and shrieks 
that Kittenplan can't launch anything at anything because she's been vaporized by a 5- 
megaton contact-burst. Kittenplan tells Ingersoll to write his congressman about it and 
over LaMont Chu's pleas for reasoned discussion takes several more theoretically valu¬ 
able warheads out of the industrial-solvent bucket and gets truly serious about hitting 
Ingersoll, moving steadily east across Nigeria and Chad, causing Ingersoll to run due 
north across the courts' map at impressive speed, abandoning IRLIBSYR's ammo-bucket 
and tear-assing up through Siberia crying Foul. Lord's mewing ineffectually for order, but 
some of the other Combatants' staffs have begun to smell that Evan Ingersoll's become 
fair game for cruelty — the way kids can seem to smell this sort of thing out with such 
uncanny acuity — and REDCHPs General Secretary and an AMNAT vector-planning 
specialist and Josh Gopnik all start moving northeast over the map firing balls as hard as 
they can at Ingersoll, who's dropped his launcher and is shaking frantically at the 
chained gate on the fence's north side, where Mrs. Incandenza has decided she doesn't 
want kids exiting the East Courts and trampling her calliopsis; and these little kids can hit 
balls exceptionally hard. Hal is now unable to gather enough spit to spit. One warhead 
hits Ingersoll in the neck and another solidly in the meat of the thigh. Ingersoll begins to 
limp around in small circles holding his neck, crying in that slow-motion shuddery way 
little kids have when they're crying more at the fact of being hurt than at the hurt itself. 
Pemulis is walking backwards away from the south fence back toward the pavilion and 
has both arms up in either appeal or fury or something else. Axford tells Hal and 
Troeltsch he wishes he didn't feel the dark thrill he felt watching Ingersoll get 
pummeled. Some filmy red peanut-skin has gotten into Jim Struck's hair as he lies there 
motionless. 0. P. Lord attempts to rule that Ingersoll is no longer on the four courts of 



Eschaton's earth-map and so isn't even theoretically a valid target-area. It doesn't 
matter. Several kids close in on Ingersoll, triangulating their bombardment, T. Peterson 
on point. Ingersoll is hit several times, once right near the eye. Jim Troeltsch is up and 
running to the fence wanting to stop the thing, but Pemulis catches him by his headset's 
cord and tells him to let them all lie in their own bed. Hal, now leaning forward, steeple¬ 
fingered, finds himself just about paralyzed with absorption. Trevor Axford, fist to his 
chin, asks Hal if he's ever just simply fucking hated somebody without having any idea 
why. Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so 
terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking 
about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated 
with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress. Now INDPAK's Penn 
and AMNAT's McKenna, who have long-standing personal bones to pick with Ann 
Kittenplan, peel off and gather ordnance and execute a pincer movement on Ann 
Kittenplan. She is hit twice from behind at close range. Ingersoll has long since gone 
down and is still getting hit. Lord is ruling at the top of his lungs that there's no way 
AMNAT can launch against itself when he gets tagged right on the breastbone by an 
errant warhead. Clutching his chest with one hand, with the other he flicks the red 
beanie's propeller, never before flicked, whose flicked spin heralds a worst-case-&- 
utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type situation. Timmy Peterson takes a ball in the 
groin and goes down like a sack of refined flour. Everybody's scooping up spent 
warheads and totally unrealistically refiring them. The fences shudder and sing as balls 
rain against them. Ingersoll now resembles some sort of animal that's been run over in 
the road. Troeltsch, who's looking for the first time at the idling sedan by West House's 
dumpsters and asking if anybody knew anybody who drove a Nunhagen-Aspirin- 
adverting Ford, is the only upperclass spectator who doesn't seem utterly silently 
engrossed. Ann Kittenplan has dropped her racquet and is charging McKenna. She takes 
two contact-bursts in the breast-area before she gets to him and lays McKenna out with 
an impressive left cross. LaMont Chu tackles Todd Possalthwaite from behind. Struck 
looks to have wet his pants in his sleep. J. J. Penn slips on a grounded warhead near Fiji 
and goes spectacularly down. The snowfall makes everything gauzy and terribly clear at 
the same time, eliminating all visual background so that the map's action seems stark 
and surreal. Nobody's using tennis balls now anymore. Josh Gopnik punches LaMont 
Chu in the stomach, and LaMont Chu yells that he's been punched in the stomach. Ann 
Kittenplan has Kieran McKenna in a headlock and is punching him repeatedly on the top 
of the skull. Otis P. Lord lets down the beach umbrella and starts pushing his crazy¬ 
wheeled food cart at a diskette-rattling clip toward 12's open south gate, still flicking 
furiously at the red beanie's propeller. Struck's hair is steadily accreting nut-skins. 
Pemulis is under cover but still standing, his legs well apart and his arms folded. The 
figure in the green Ford still hasn't moved once. Troeltsch says he for his own part 
wouldn't be just sitting and lying there if any of the Little Buddies under his personal 
charge were out there getting potentially injured, and Hal reflects that he does feel a 
certain sort of intense anxiety, but can't sort through the almost infinite-seeming 
implications of what Troeltsch is saying fast enough to determine whether the anxiety is 
over something about what he's seeing or something in the connection between what 



Troeltsch is saying and the degree to which he's absorbed in what's going on out inside 
the fence, which is a degenerative chaos so complex in its disorder that it's hard to tell 
whether it seems choreographed or simply chaotically disordered. LaMont Chu is 
throwing up into the Indian Ocean. Todd Possalthwaite has his hands to his face and is 
shrieking something about his 'doze.' It is now, beyond any argument or equivocation, 
snowing. The sky is off-white. Lord and his cart are now literally making tracks for the 
edge of the map. Evan Ingersoll hasn't moved in several minutes. Penn lies in a 
whitening service box with one leg bent beneath him at an impossible angle. Someone 
way off behind them has been blowing an athletic whistle. Ann Kittenplan begins to 
chase REDCHI's General Secretary south across the Asian subcontinent at top speed. 
Pemulis is telling Hal he hates to say he told them so. Hal can see Axford leaning way 
forward sheltering something tiny from the wind as he flicks at it with a spent lighter. It 
occurs to him this is the third anniversary of Axhandle losing a right finger and half his 
right thumb. Fierce little J. Gopnik is flailing at the air and telling whoever wants it to 
come on, come on. Otis P. Lord and his cart sail clattering across Indochina toward the 
southern gate. Hal is suddenly aware that Troeltsch and Pemulis are wincing but is not 
himself wincing and isn't sure why they are wincing and is looking out into the fray 
trying to determine whether he should be wincing when REDCHI's General Secretary, 
calling loudly for his mother and in full flight as he looks over his shoulder at Ann 
Kittenplan's contorted face, barrels directly into Lord's speeding food cart. There's a 
noise like the historical sum of all cafeteria accidents everywhere. 3.6-MB diskettes take 
flight like mad bats across what uncovered would be the baseline of Court 12. Different- 
colored beanies spill from the rolling solander box, whose lock's hasp is broken and 
protrudes like a tongue as it rolls. The TP's monitor and modem and Yushityu chassis, 
with most of Eschaton's nervous system on its hard drive, assume a parabolic southwest 
vector. The heavy equipment's altitude is impressive. An odd silent still moment hangs, 
the TP aloft. Pemulis bellows, his hands to his cheeks. Otis P. Lord hurdles the bent 
forms of food cart and General Secretary and sprints low over the court's map's snow, 
trying to save hardware that's now at the top of its rainbow's arc. It's clear Lord won't 
make it. It's a slow-motion moment. The snowfall's more than heavy enough now, Hal 
thinks, to excuse Lord's not seeing LaMont Chu directly before him, on his hands and 
knees, throwing up. Lord impacts Chu's arched form at about knee-level and is 
spectacularly airborne. The idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver's-side 
window. Axford is holding the lighter's chassis up to his ear and shaking it. Ann 
Kittenplan is ramming REDCHI's leader's face repeatedly into the mesh of the south 
fence. Lord's flight's parabola is less spectacular on the y-axis than the TP's has been. 
The Yushityu's hard-drive chassis makes an indescribable sound as it hits the earth and 
its brightly circuited guts come out. The color monitor lands on its back with its screen 
blinking ERROR at the white sky. Hal and everyone else can project Lord's flight's own 
terminus an instant before impact. For a brief moment that Hal will later regard as 
completely and uncomfortably bizarre, Hal feels at his own face to see whether he is 
wincing. The distant whistle patweets. Lord does indeed go headfirst down through the 
monitor's screen, and stays there, his sneakers in the air and his warm-up pants sagging 
upward to reveal black socks. There'd been a bad sound of glass. Penn flails on his back. 



Possalthwaite, Ingersoll, and McKenna bleed. The second shift's 1600h. siren down at 
Sunstrand Power & Light is creepily muffled by the no-sound of falling snow. 


8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


INTERDEPENDENCE DAY 

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR 

Boston AA is Jike AA nowhere else on this planet. Just like AA everyplace else, Boston 
AA is divided into numerous individual AA Groups, and each Group has its particular 
Group name like the Reality Group or the Allston Group or the Clean and Sober Group, 
and each Group holds its regular meeting once a week. But almost all Boston Groups' 
meetings are speaker meetings. That means that at the meetings there are recovering 
alcoholic speakers who stand up in front of everybody at an amplified podium and 
'share their experience, strength, and hope.' 131 And the singular thing is that these 
speakers are not ever members of the Group that's holding the meeting, in Boston. The 
speakers at one certain Group's weekly speaker meeting are always from some other 
certain Boston AA Group. The people from the other Group who are here at like your 
Group speaking are here on something called a Commitment. Commitments are where 
some members of one Group commit to hit the road and travel to another Group's 
meeting to speak publicly from the podium. Then a bunch of people from the host 
Group hit the opposite lane of the same road on some other night and go to the visiting 
Group's meeting, to speak. Groups always trade Commitments: you come speak to us 
and we'll come speak to you. It can seem bizarre. You always go elsewhere to speak. At 
your own Group's meeting you're a host; you just sit there and listen as hard as you can, 
and you make coffee in 60-cup urns and stack polystyrene cups in big ziggurats and sell 
raffle tickets and make sandwiches, and you empty ashtrays and scrub out urns and 
sweep floors when the other Group's speakers are through. You never share your 
experience, strength, and hope on-stage behind a fiberboard podium with its cheap 
nondigital PA system's mike except in front of some other metro Boston Group. 132 Every 
night in Boston, bumper-stickered cars full of totally sober people, wall-eyed from 
caffeine and trying to read illegibly scrawled directions by the dashboard lights, 
crisscross the city, heading for the church basements or bingo halls or nursing-home 
cafeterias of other AA Groups, to put on Commitments. Being an active member of a 
Boston AA Group is probably a little bit like being a serious musician or like athlete, in 
terms of constant travel. 

The White Flag Group of Enfield MA, in metropolitan Boston, meets Sundays in the 
cafeteria of the Provident Nursing Home on Hanneman Street, off Commonwealth 



Avenue a couple blocks west of Enfield Tennis Academy's flat-topped hill. Tonight the 
White Flag Group is hosting a Commitment from the Advanced Basics Group of Concord, 
a suburb of Boston. The Advanced Basics people have driven almost an hour to get here, 
plus there's always the problem of signless urban streets and directions given over the 
phone. On this coming Friday night, a small horde of White Flaggers will drive out to 
Concord to put on a reciprocal Commitment for the Advanced Basics Group. Travelling 
long distances on signless streets trying to parse directions like 'Take the second left off 
the rotary by the driveway to the chiropractor's' and getting lost and shooting your 
whole evening after a long day just to speak for like six minutes at a plywood podium is 
called 'Getting Active With Your Group'; the speaking itself is known as '12th-Step Work' 
or 'Giving It Away.' Giving It Away is a cardinal Boston AA principle. The term's derived 
from an epigrammatic description of recovery in Boston AA: 'You give it up to get it back 
to give it away.' Sobriety in Boston is regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic loan. 
You can't pay the loan back, but you can pay it forward, by spreading the message that 
despite all appearances AA works, spreading this message to the next new guy who's 
tottered in to a meeting and is sitting in the back row unable to hold his cup of coffee. 
The only way to hang onto sobriety is to give it away, and even just 24 hours of sobriety 
is worth doing anything for, a sober day being nothing short of a daily miracle if you've 
got the Disease like he's got the Disease, says the Advanced Basics member who's 
chairing this evening's Commitment, saying just a couple public words to the hall before 
he opens the meeting and retires to a stool next to the podium and calls his Group's 
speakers by random lot. The chairperson says he didn't used to be able to go 24 lousy 
minutes without a nip, before he Came In. 'Coming In' means admitting that your 
personal ass is kicked and tottering into Boston AA, ready to go to any lengths to stop 
the shit-storm. The Advanced Basics chairperson looks like a perfect cross between 
pictures of Dick Cavett and Truman Capote 133 except this guy's also like totally, almost 
flamboyantly bald, and to top it off he's wearing a bright-black country-western shirt 
with baroque curlicues of white Nodie-piping across the chest and shoulders, and a 
string tie, plus sharp-toed boots of some sort of weirdly imbricate reptile skin, and 
overall he's riveting to look at, grotesque in that riveting way that flaunts its 
grotesquerie. There are more cheap metal ashtrays and Styrofoam cups in this broad 
hall than you'll see anywhere else ever on earth. Gately's sitting right up front in the first 
row, so close to the podium he can see the tailor's notch in the chairperson's outsized 
incisors, but he enjoys twisting around and watching everybody come in and mill around 
shaking water off their outerwear, trying to find empty seats. Even on the night of the I.- 
Day holiday, the Provident's cafeteria is packed by 2000h. AA does not take holidays any 
more than the Disease does. This is the big established Sunday P.M. meeting for AAs in 
Enfield and Allston and Brighton. Regulars come every week from Watertown and East 
Newton, too, often, unless they're out on Commitments with their own Groups. The 
Provident cafeteria walls, painted an indecisive green, are tonight bedecked with 
portable felt banners emblazoned with AA slogans in Cub-Scoutish blue and gold. The 
slogans on them appear way too insipid even to mention what they are. E.g. 'ONE DAY 
AT A TIME,' for one. The effete western-dressed guy concludes his opening exhortation, 
leads the opening Moment of Silence, reads the AA Preamble, pulls a random name out 



of the Crested Beaut cowboy hat he's holding, makes a squinty show of reading it, says 
he'd like to call Advanced Basics' first random speaker of the evening, and asks if his 
fellow Group-member John L. is in the house, here, tonight, John L. gets up to the 
podium and says, 'That is a question I did not used to be able to answer.' This gets a 
laugh, and everybody's posture gets subtly more relaxed, because it's clear that John L. 
has some sober time in and isn't going to be one of those AA speakers who's so wracked 
with self-conscious nerves he makes the empathetic audience nervous too. Everybody in 
the audience is aiming for total empathy with the speaker; that way they'll be able to 
receive the AA message he's here to carry. Empathy, in Boston AA, is called 
Identification. 

Then John L. says his first name and what he is, and everybody calls Hello. 

White Flag is one of the area AA meetings Ennet House requires its residents to 
attend. You have to be seen at a designated AA or NA meeting every single night of the 
week or out you go, discharged. A House Staff member has to accompany the residents 
when they go to the designated meetings, so they can be officially seen there. 134 The 
residents' House counselors suggest that they sit right up at the front of the hall where 
they can see the pores in the speaker's nose and try to Identify instead of Compare. 
Again, Identify means empathize. Identifying, unless you've got a stake in Comparing, 
isn't very hard to do, here. Because if you sit up front and listen hard, all the speakers' 
stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike, and like your own: fun with 
the Substance, then very gradually less fun, then significantly less fun because of like 
blackouts you suddenly come out of on the highway going 145 kph with companions 
you do not know, nights you awake from in unfamiliar bedding next to somebody who 
doesn't even resemble any known sort of mammal, three-day blackouts you come out 
of and have to buy a newspaper to even know what town you're in; yes gradually less 
and less actual fun but with some physical need for the Substance, now, instead of the 
former voluntary fun; then at some point suddenly just very little fun at all, combined 
with terrible daily hand-trembling need, then dread, anxiety, irrational phobias, dim 
siren-like memories of fun, trouble with assorted authorities, knee-buckling headaches, 
mild seizures, and the litany of what Boston AA calls Losses — 'Then come the day I lost 
my job to drinking.' Concord's John L. has a huge hanging gut and just no ass at all, the 
way some big older guys' asses seem to get sucked into their body and reappear out 
front as gut. Gately, in sobriety, does nightly sit-ups out of fear this'll all of a sudden 
happen to him, as age thirty approaches. Gately is so huge no one sits behind him for 
several rows. John L. has the biggest bunch of keys Gately's ever seen. They're on one of 
those pull-outable-wire janitor's keychains that clips to a belt loop, and the speaker 
jangles them absently, unaware, his one tip of the hat to public nerves. He's also 
wearing gray janitor's pants. 'Lost my damn job,' he says. 'I mean to say I still knew 
where it was and whatnot. I just went in as usual one day and there was some other 
fellow doing it,' which gets another laugh. 

— then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the 
pain of the mounting Losses, and of course you're in Denial about it being the Substance 
that's causing the very Losses it's consoling you about — 

'Alcohol destroys slowly but thoroughly is what a fellow said to me the first night I 



Come In, up in Concord, and that fellow ended up becoming my sponsor.' 

— then less mild seizures, D.T.s during attempts to taper off too fast, introduction to 
subjective bugs and rodents, then one more binge and more formicative bugs; then 
eventually a terrible acknowledgment that some line has been undeniably crossed, 
and fist-at-the-sky, as-God-is-my-witness vows to buckle down and lick this thing for 
good, to quit for all time, then maybe a few white-knuckled days of initial success, then 
a slip, then more pledges, clock-watching, baroque self-regulations, repeated slips back 
into the Substance's relief after like two days' abstinence, ghastly hangovers, head¬ 
flattening guilt and self-disgust, superstructures of additional self-regulations (e.g. not 
before 0900h. not on a worknight, only when the moon is waxing, only in the company 
of Swedes) which also fail — 

'When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,' 
John L. says; 'I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that's not livin, that's a fuckin 
death-in-life.' 

— then unbelievable psychic pain, a kind of peritonitis of the soul, psychic agony, fear 
of impending insanity (why can't I quit if I so want to quit, unless I'm insane?), 
appearances at hospital detoxes and rehabs, domestic strife, financial free-fall, eventual 
domestic Losses — 

'And then I lost my wife to drinking. I mean I still knew where she was and whatnot. I 
just went in one day and there was some other fellow doing it,' at which there's not all 
that much laughter, lots of pained nods: it's often the same all over, in terms of 
domestic Losses. 

— then vocational ultimatums, unemployability, financial ruin, pancreatitis, 
overwhelming guilt, bloody vomiting, cirrhotic neuralgia, incontinence, neuropathy, 
nephritis, black depressions, searing pain, with the Substance affording increasingly 
brief periods of relief; then, finally, no relief available anywhere at all; finally it's 
impossible to get high enough to freeze what you feel like, being this way; and now you 
hate the Substance, hate it, but you stiJl find yourself unable to stop doing it, the 
Substance, you find you finally want to stop more than anything on earth and it's no fun 
doing it anymore and you can't believe you ever liked doing it and but you still can't 
stop, it's like you're totally fucking bats, it's like there's two yous; and when you'd sell 
your own dear Mum to stop and still, you find, can't stop, then the last layer of jolly 
friendly mask comes off your old friend the Substance, it's midnight now and all masks 
come off, and you all of a sudden see the Substance as it really is, for the first time you 
see the Disease as it really is, really has been all this time, you look in the mirror at 
midnight and see what owns you, what's become what you are — 

'A fuckin livin death, I tell you it's not being near alive, by the end I was undead, not 
alive, and I tell you the idea of dyin was nothing compared to the idea of livin like that 
for another five or ten years and only then dyin,' with audience heads nodding in rows 
like a wind-swept meadow; boy can they ever Identify. 

— and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, 
deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, 
that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the 
Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre. 



has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, 
and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your 
worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the 
Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool-and 
Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand 
there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be 
beating, in its exposed chest's center and center-less eyes is just a lightless hole, more 
teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see 
you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some 
stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It's your 
enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is unde¬ 
niable and you still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but 
you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they 
say. Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and 
you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in 
every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns 
them around. You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom, though the 
term is misleading, because everybody here agrees it's more like someplace very high 
and unsupported: you're on the edge of something tall and leaning way out forward... 

If you listen for the similarities, all these speakers' Substance-careers seem to 
terminate at the same cliff's edge. You are now Finished, as a Substance-user. It's the 
jumping-off place. You now have two choices. You can either eliminate your own map 
for keeps — blades are the best, or else pills, or there's always quietly sucking off the 
exhaust pipe of your re-possessable car in the bank-owned garage of your familyless 
home. Something whimpery instead of banging. Better clean and quiet and (since your 
whole career's been one long futile flight from pain) painless. Though of the alcoholics 
and drug addicts who compose over 70% of a given year's suicides, some try to go out 
with a last great garish Balaclavan gesture: one longtime member of the White Flag 
Group is a prognathous lady named Louise B. who tried to take a map-eliminating dive 
off the old Hancock Building downtown in B.S. '81 but got caught in the gust of a rising 
thermal only six flights off the roof and got blown cartwheeling back up and in through 
the smoked-glass window of an arbitrage firm's suite on the thirty-fourth floor, ending 
up sprawled prone on a high-gloss conference table with only lacerations and a 
compound of the collarbone and an experience of willed self-annihilation and external 
intervention that has left her rabidly Christian — rabidly, as in foam — so that she's 
comparatively ignored and avoided, though her AA story, being just like everybody 
else's but more spectacular, has become metro Boston AA myth. But so when you get to 
this jumping-off place at the Finish of your Substance-career you can either take up the 
Luger or blade and eliminate your own personal map — this can be at age sixty, or 
twenty-seven, or seventeen — or you can get out the very beginning of the Yellow 
Pages or InterNet Psych-Svce File and make a blubbering 0200h. phone call and admit to 
a gentle grandparentish voice that you're in trouble, deadly serious trouble, and the 
voice will try to soothe you into hanging on until a couple hours go by and two 
pleasantly earnest, weirdly calm guys in conservative attire appear smiling at your door 



sometime before dawn and speak quietly to you for hours and leave you not 
remembering anything from what they said except the sense that they used to be eerily 
like you, just where you are, utterly fucked, and but now somehow aren't anymore, 
fucked like you, at least they didn't seem like they were, unless the whole thing's some 
incredibly involved scam, this AA thing, and so but anyway you sit there on what's left of 
your furniture in the lavender dawnlight and realize that by now you literally have no 
other choices besides trying this AA thing or else eliminating your map, so you spend the 
day killing every last bit of every Substance you've got in one last joyless bitter farewell 
binge and resolve, the next day, to go ahead and swallow your pride and maybe your 
common sense too and try these meetings of this 'Program' that at best is probably just 
Unitarian happy horseshit and at worst is a cover for some glazed and canny cult-type 
thing where they'll keep you sober by making you spend twenty hours a day selling 
cellophane cones of artificial flowers on the median strips of heavy-flow roads. And 
what defines this cliffish nexus of exactly two total choices, this miserable road-fork 
Boston AA calls your Bottom, is that at this point you feel like maybe selling flowers on 
median strips might not be so bad, not compared to what you've got going, personally, 
at this juncture. And this, at root, is what unites Boston AA: it turns out this same 
resigned, miserable, brainwash-and-exploit-me-if-that's-what-it-takes-type desperation 
has been the jumping-off place for just about every AA you meet, it emerges, once 
you've actually gotten it up to stop darting in and out of the big meetings and start 
walking up with your wet hand out and trying to actually personally meet some Boston 
AAs. As the one particular tough old guy or lady you're always particularly scared of and 
drawn to says, nobody ever Comes In because things were going really well and they 
just wanted to round out their P.M. social calendar. Everybody, but everybody Comes In 
dead-eyed and puke-white and with their face hanging down around their knees and 
with a well-thumbed firearm-and-ordnance mail-order catalogue kept safe and available 
at home, map-wise, for when this last desperate resort of hugs and cliches turns out to 
be just happy horseshit, for you. You are not unique, they'll say: this initial hopelessness 
unites every soul in this broad cold salad-bar'd hall. They are like Hindenburg-survivors. 
Every meeting is a reunion, once you've been in for a while. 

And then the palsied newcomers who totter in desperate and miserable enough to 
Hang In and keep coming and start feebly to scratch beneath the unlikely insipid surface 
of the thing, Don Gately's found, then get united by a second common experience. The 
shocking discovery that the thing actually does seem to work. Does keep you Substance- 
free. It's improbable and shocking. When Gately finally snapped to the fact, one day 
about four months into his Ennet House residency, that quite a few days seemed to 
have gone by without his playing with the usual idea of slipping over to Unit #7 and 
getting loaded in some nonuremic way the courts couldn't prove, that several days had 
gone without his even thinking of oral narcotics or a tightly rolled duBois or a cold 
foamer on a hot day ... when he realized that the various Substances he didn't used to 
be able to go a day without absorbing hadn't even like occurred to him in almost a week, 
Gately hadn't felt so much grateful or joyful as just plain shocked. The idea that AA 
might actually somehow work unnerved him. He suspected some sort of trap. Some 
new sort of trap. At this stage he and the other Ennet residents who were still there and 



starting to snap to the fact that AA might work began to sit around together late at night 
going batshit together because it seemed to be impossible to figure out just how AA 
worked. It did, yes, tentatively seem maybe actually to be working, but Gately couldn't 
for the life of him figure out how just sitting on hemorrhoid-hostile folding chairs every 
night looking at nose-pores and listening to cliches could work. Nobody's ever been able 
to figure A A out, is another binding commonality. And the folks with serious time in AA 
are infuriating about questions starting with How. You ask the scary old guys How AA 
Works and they smile their chilly smiles and say Just Fine. It just works, is all; end of 
story. The newcomers who abandon common sense and resolve to Hang In and keep 
coming and then find their cages all of a sudden open, mysteriously, after a while, share 
this sense of deep shock and possible trap; about newer Boston AAs with like six months 
clean you can see this look of glazed suspicion instead of beatific glee, an expression like 
that of bug-eyed natives confronted suddenly with a Zippo lighter. And so this unites 
them, nervously, this tentative assemblage of possible glimmers of something like hope, 
this grudging move toward maybe acknowledging that this unromantic, unhip, cliched 
AA thing — so unlikely and unpromising, so much the inverse of what they'd come too 
much to love — might really be able to keep the lover's toothy maw at bay. The process 
is the neat reverse of what brought you down and In here: Substances start out being so 
magically great, so much the interior jigsaw's missing piece, that at the start you just 
know, deep in your gut, that they'll never let you down; you just know it. But they do. 
And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans 
and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame you just know there's no way it could 
ever possibly work except for the utterest morons... and then Gately seems to find out 
AA turns out to be the very loyal friend he thought he'd had and then lost, when you 
Came In. And so you Hang In and stay sober and straight, and out of sheer hand-burned- 
on-hot-stove terror you heed the improbable-sounding warnings not to stop pounding 
out the nightly meetings even after the Substance-cravings have left and you feel like 
you've got a grip on the thing at last and can now go it alone, you still don't try to go it 
alone, you heed the improbable warnings because by now you have no faith in your 
own sense of what's really improbable and what isn't, since AA seems, improbably 
enough, to be working, and with no faith in your own senses you're confused, 
flummoxed, and when people with AA time strongly advise you to keep coming you nod 
robotically and keep coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill 
stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and you keep getting ritually down on your big 
knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished 
shield against all who would ask aid of it — how can you pray to a 'God' you believe only 
morons believe in, still? — but the old guys say it doesn't yet matter what you believe or 
don't believe. Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism without any kind of 
independent human will you do exactly like you're told, you keep coming and coming, 
nightly, and now you take pains not to get booted out of the squalid halfway house 
you'd at first tried so hard to get discharged from, you Hang In and Hang In, meeting 
after meeting, warm day after cold day ...; and not only does the urge to get high stay 
more or less away, but more general life-quality-type things — just as improbably 
promised, at first, when you'd Come In — things seem to get progressively somehow 



better, inside, for a while, then worse, then even better, then for a while worse in a way 
that's still somehow better, realer, you feel weirdly unblinded, which is good, even 
though a lot of the things you now see about yourself and how you've lived are horrible 
to have to see — and by this time the whole thing is so improbable and unparsable that 
you're so flummoxed you're convinced you're maybe brain-damaged, still, at this point, 
from all the years of Substances, and you figure you'd better Hang In in this Boston AA 
where older guys who seem to be less damaged — or at least less flummoxed by their 
damage — will tell you in terse simple imperative clauses exactly what to do, and where 
and when to do it (though never How or Why); and at this point you've started to have 
an almost classic sort of Blind Faith in the older guys, a Blind Faith in them born not of 
zealotry or even belief but just of a chilled conviction that you have no faith whatsoever 
left in yourself; and now if the older guys say Jump you ask them to hold their hand at 
the desired height, and now they've got you, and you're free. 135 Another Advanced 
Basics Group speaker, whose first name Gately loses in the crowd's big Hello but whose 
last initial is E., an even bigger guy than John L., a green-card Irishman in a skallycap and 
Sinn Fein sweatshirt, with a belly like a swinging sack of meal and a thoroughly visible 
ass to back it up, is sharing his hope's experience by listing the gifts that have followed 
his decision to Come In and put the plug in the jug and the cap on the phentermine- 
hydrochloride 136 bottle and stop driving long-haul truck routes in unbroken 96-hour 
metal-pedalled states of chemical psychosis. The rewards of his abstinence, he stresses, 
have been more than just spiritual. Only in Boston A A can you hear a fifty-year-old 
immigrant wax lyrical about his first solid bowel movement in adult life. 

' 'd been a confarmed bowl-splatterer for yars b'yond contin'. 'd been barred from 
t'facilities at o't' troock stops twixt hair'n Nork for yars. T'wallpaper in de loo a t'ome 
hoong in t'ese carled sheets froom t'wall, ay till yo. But now woon dey... ay'll 
remaember't'always. T'were a wake to t'day ofter ay stewed oop for me ninety-dey 
chip. Ay were tray moents sobber. Ay were thar on t'throne a't'ome, yo new. No't'put 
too fain a point'on it, ay prodooced as er uzhal and ... and ay war soo amazed as to 
no't'belaven' me yairs. 'Twas a sone so wonefamiliar at t'first ay tought ay'd droped me 
wallet in t'loo, do yo new. Ay tought ay'd droped me wallet in t'loo as Good is me 
wetness. So doan ay bend twixt m'knays and'ad a luke in t'dim o't'loo, and codn't belave 
me'yize. So gud paple ay do then ay drope to m'knays by t'loo an't'ad a rail luke. A 
leaver's luke, d'yo new. And friends t'were loavely past me pur poewers t'say. T'were a 
tard in t'loo. A rail tard. T'were farm an' teppered an' aiver so jaintly aitched. T'luked... 
conestroocted instaid've sprayed. T'luked as ay fel't'in me 'eart Good 'imsailf maint a 
tard t'luke. Me friends, this tard'o'mine practically had a poolse. Ay sted doan own 
m'knays an tanked me Har Par, which ay choose t'call me Har Par Good, an' ay been 
tankin me Har Par own m'knays aiver sin, marnin and natetime an in t'loo's'well, aiver 
sin.' The man's red-leather face radiant throughout. Gately and the other White Flaggers 
fall about, laugh from the gut, a turd that practically had a pulse, an ode to a solid 
dump; but the lightless eyes of certain palsied back-row newcomers widen with a very 
private Identification and possible hope, hardly daring to imagine... A certain Message 
has been Carried. 



Gately's biggest asset as an Ennet House live-in Staffer — besides the size thing, which 
is not to be discounted when order has to be maintained in a place where guys come in 
fresh from detox still in Withdrawal with their eyes rolling like palsied cattle and an 
earring in their eyelid and a tattoo that says BORN TO BE UNPLEASANT — besides the 
fact that his upper arms are the size of cuts of beef you rarely see off hooks, his big plus 
is he has this ability to convey his own experience about at first hating AA to new House 
residents who hate AA and resent being forced to go and sit up in nose-pore-range and 
listen to such limply improbable cliched drivel night after night. Limp AA looks, at first, 
and actually limp it sometimes really is, Gately tells the new residents, and he says no 
way he'd expect them to believe on just his say-so that the thing'll work if they're 
miserable and desperate enough to Hang In against common sense for a while. But he 
says he'll clue them in on a truly great thing about AA: they can't kick you out. You're In 
if you say you're In. Nobody can get kicked out, not for any reason. Which means you 
can say anything in here. Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of 
shit is small potatoes. Gately says he defies the new Ennet House residents to try and 
shock the smiles off these Boston AAs' faces. Can't be done, he says. These folks have 
literally heard it all. Enuresis. Impotence. Priapism. Onanism. Projectile-incontinence. 
Autocastration. Elaborate paranoid delusions, the grandiosest megalomania. 
Communism, fringe-Birchism, National-Socialist-Bundism, psychotic breaks, sodomy, 
bestiality, daughter-diddling, exposures at every conceivable level of indecency. 
Coprophilia and -phagia. Four-year White Flagger Glenn K.'s personally chosen Higher 
Power is Satan, for fuck's sake. Granted, nobody in White Flag much likes Glenn K., and 
the thing with the hooded cape and makeup and the candelabrum he carries around 
draw some mutters, but Glenn K. is a member for exactly as long as he cares to Hang In. 

So say anything you want, Gately invites them. Go to the Beginner Meeting at 1930h. 
and raise your shaky mitt and tell the unlacquered truth. Free-associate. Run with it. 
Gately this morning, just after required A.M. meditation, Gately was telling the tatt- 
obsessed little new lawyer guy Ewell, with the hypertensive flush and little white beard, 
telling him how he, Gately, had perked up considerably at 30 days clean when he found 
he could raise his big mitt in Beginner Meetings and say publicly just how much he hates 
this limp AA drivel about gratitude and humility and miracles and how he hates it and 
thinks it's horseshit and hates the AAs and how they all seem like limp smug moronic 
self-satisfied shit-eating pricks with their lobotomized smiles and goopy sentiment and 
how he wishes them all violent technicolor harm in the worst way, new Gately sitting 
there spraying vitriol, wet-lipped and red-eared, trying to get kicked out, purposely 
trying to outrage the AAs into giving him the boot so he could quick-march back to 
Ennet House and tell crippled Pat Montesian and his counselor Gene M. how he'd been 
given the boot at AA, how they'd pleaded for honest sharing of innermost feelings and 
OK he'd honestly shared his deepest feelings on the matter of them and the grinning 
hypocrites had shaken their fists and told him to screw... and but so in the meetings the 
poison would leap and spurt from him, and how but he found out all that these veteran 
White Flaggers would do as a Group when he like vocally wished them harm was nod 
furiously in empathetic Identification and shout with maddening cheer 'Keep Coming!' 
and one or two Flaggers with medium amounts of sober time would come up to him 



after the meeting and say how it was so good to hear him share and holy mackerel could 
they ever Identify with the deeply honest feelings he'd shared and how he'd done them 
the service of giving them the gift of a real 'Remember-When'-type experience because 
they could now remember feeling just exactly the same way as Gately, when they first 
Came In, only they confess not then having the spine to honestly share it with the 
Group, and so in a bizarre improbable twist they'd have Gately ending up standing there 
feeling like some sort of AA hero, a prodigy of vitriolic spine, both frustrated and elated, 
and before they bid him orevwar and told him to come back they'd make sure to give 
him their phone numbers on the back of their little raffle tickets, phone numbers Gately 
wouldn't dream of actually calling up (to say what, for chrissakes?) but which he found 
he rather liked having in his wallet, to just carry around, just in case of who knew what; 
and then plus maybe one of these old Enfield-native White Flag guys with geologic 
amounts of sober time in AA and a twisted ruined old body and clear bright-white eyes 
would hobble sideways like a crab slowly up to Gately after a meeting in which he'd 
spewed vitriol and reach way up to clap him on his big sweaty shoulder and say in their 
fremitic smoker's croak that Well you at least seem like a ballsy little bastard, all full of 
piss and vinegar and whatnot, and that just maybe you'll be OK, Don G., just maybe, just 
Keep Coming, and, if you'd care for a spot of advice from somebody who likely spilled 
more booze in his day than you've even consumed in yours, you might try to just simply 
sit down at meetings and relax and take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your 
mouth and shut the fuck up and just listen, for the first time perhaps in your life really 
listen, and maybe you'll end up OK; and they don't offer their phone numbers, not the 
really old guys, Gately knows he'd have to eat his pride raw and actually request the 
numbers of the old ruined grim calm longtimers in White Flag, 'The Crocodiles' the less 
senior White Flaggers call them, because the old twisted guys all tend to sit clustered 
together with hideous turd-like cigars in one corner of the Provident cafeteria under a 
16 X 20 framed glossy of crocodiles or alligators sunning themselves on some verdant 
riverbank somewhere, with the maybe-joke legend OLD-TIMERS CORNER somebody had 
magisculed across the bottom of the photo, and these old guys cluster together under 
it, rotating their green cigars in their misshapen fingers and discussing completely 
mysterious long-sober matters out of the sides of their mouths. Gately sort of fears 
these old AA guys with their varicose noses and flannel shirts and white crew cuts and 
brown teeth and coolly amused looks of appraisal, feels like a kind of low-rank tribal 
knucklehead in the presence of stone-faced chieftains who rule by some unspoken 
shamanistic fiat, 137 and so of course he hates them, the Crocodiles, for making him feel 
like he fears them, but oddly he also ends up looking forward a little to sitting in the 
same big nursing-home cafeteria with them and facing the same direction they face, 
every Sunday, and a little later finds he even enjoys riding at 30 kph tops in their 
perfectly maintained 25-year-old sedans when he starts going along on White Flag 
Commitments to other Boston AA Groups. He eventually heeds a terse suggestion and 
starts going out and telling his grisly personal story publicly from the podium with other 
members of White Flag, the Group he gave in and finally officially joined. This is what 
you do if you're new and have what's called The Gift of Desperation and are willing to go 
to any excruciating lengths to stay straight, you officially join a Group and put your 



name and sobriety-date down on the Group secretary's official roster, and you make it 
your business to start to get to know other members of the Group on a personal basis, 
and you carry their numbers talismanically in your wallet; and, most important, you get 
Active With Your Group, which here in Gately's Boston AA Active means not just 
sweeping the footprinty floor after the Lord's Prayer and making coffee and emptying 
ashtrays of gasper-butts and ghastly spit-wet cigar ends but also showing up regularly at 
specified P.M. times at the White Flag Group's regular haunt, the Elit (the final e's neon's 
ballast's out) Diner next to Steve's Donuts in Enfield Center, showing up and pounding 
down tooth-loosening amounts of coffee and then getting in well-maintained 
Crocodilian sedans whose suspensions' springs Gately's mass makes sag and getting 
driven, wall-eyed with caffeine and cigar fumes and general public-speaking angst, to 
like Lowell's Joy of Living Group or Charlestown's Plug In The Jug Group or Bridgewater 
State Detox or Concord Honor Farm with these guys, and except for one or two other 
pale wall-eyed newcomers with The Gift of utter Desperation it's mostly Crocodiles with 
geologic sober time in these cars, it's mostly the guys that've stayed sober in White Flag 
for decades who still go on every single booked Commitment, they go every time, 
dependable as death, even when the Celtics are on Spontaneous-Dis they hit the old 
Commitment trail, they remain rabidly Active With Their Group; and the Crocodiles in 
the car invite Gately to see the coincidence of long-term contented sobriety and rabidly 
tireless AA Activity as not a coincidence at all. The backs of their necks are complexly 
creased. The Crocodiles up front look into the rearview mirror and narrow their baggy 
bright-white eyes at Gately in the sagging backseat with the other new guys, and the 
Crocodiles say they can't even begin to say how many new guys they've seen Come In 
and then get sucked back Out There, Come In to AA for a while and Hang In and put 
together a little sober time and have things start to get better, head-wise and life- 
quality-wise, and after a while the new guys get cocky, they decide they've gotten 'Well,' 
and they get really busy at the new job sobriety's allowed them to get, or maybe they 
buy season Celtics tickets, or they rediscover pussy and start chasing pussy (these 
withered gnarled toothless totally post-sexual old fuckers actually say pussy), but one 
way or another these poor cocky clueless new bastards start gradually drifting away 
from rabid Activity In The Group, and then away from their Group itself, and then little 
by little gradually drift away from any AA meetings at all, and then, without the 
protection of meetings or a Group, in time — oh there's always plenty of time, the 
Disease is fiendishly patient — how in time they forget what it was like, the ones that've 
cockily drifted, they forget who and what they are, they forget about the Disease, until 
like one day they're at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers game, and the good old Fleet/First 
Interstate Center's hot, and they think what could just one cold foamer hurt, after all 
this sober time, now that they've gotten 'Well.' Just one cold one. What could it hurt. 
And after that one it's like they'd never stopped, if they've got the Disease. And how in a 
month or six months or a year they have to Come Back In, back to the Boston AA halls 
and their old Group, tottering, D.T.ing, with their faces hanging down around their 
knees all over again, or maybe it's five or ten years before they can get it up to get back 
In, beaten to shit again, or else their system isn't ready for the recurred abuse again 
after some sober time and they die Out There — the Crocodiles are always talking in 



hushed, 'Nam-like tones about Out There — or else, worse, maybe they kill somebody in 
a blackout and spend the rest of their lives in MCl-Walpole drinking raisin jack 
fermented in the seatless toilet and trying to recall what they did to get in there. Out 
There; or else, worst of all, these cocky new guys drift back Out There and have nothing 
sufficiently horrible to Finish them happen at all, just go back to drinking 24/7/365, to 
not-living, behind bars, undead, back in the Disease's cage all over again. The Crocodiles 
talk about how they can't count the number of guys that've Come In for a while and 
drifted away and gone back Out There and died, or not gotten to die. They even point 
some of these guys out — gaunt gray spectral men reeling on sidewalks with all that 
they own in a trashbag — as the White Flaggers drive slowly by in their well-maintained 
cars. Old emphysemic Francis G. in particular likes to slow his LeSabre down at a corner 
in front of some jack-legged loose-faced homeless fuck who'd once been in AA and 
drifted cockily out and roll down his window and yell 'Live it up!' 

Of course — the Crocodiles dig at each other with their knobby elbows and guffaw 
and wheeze — they say when they tell Gately to either Hang In AA and get rabidly Active 
or else die in slime of course it's only a suggestion. They howl and choke and slap their 
knees at this. It's your classic in-type joke. There are, by ratified tradition, no 'musts' in 
Boston AA. No doctrine or dogma or rules. They can't kick you out. You don't have to do 
what they say. Do exactly as you please — if you still trust what seems to please you. 
The Crocodiles roar and wheeze and pound on the dash and bob in the front seat in 
abject AA mirth. 

Boston AA's take on itself is that it's a benign anarchy, that any order to the thing is a 
function of Miracle. No regs, no musts, only love and support and the occasional humble 
suggestion born of shared experience. A non-authoritarian, dogma-free movement. 
Normally a gifted cynic, with a keen bullshit-antenna, Gately needed over a year to 
pinpoint the ways in which he feels like Boston AA really is actually sub-rosa dogmatic. 
You're not supposed to pick up any sort of altering Substance, of course; that goes 
without saying; but the Fellowship's official line is that if you do slip or drift or fuck up or 
forget and go Out There for a night and absorb a Substance and get all your Disease's 
triggers pulled again they want you to know they not only invite but urge you to come 
on back to meetings as quickly as possible. They're pretty sincere about this, since a lot 
of new people slip and slide a bit, total-abstinence-wise, in the beginning. Nobody's 
supposed to judge you or snub you for slipping. Everybody's here to help. Everybody 
knows that the returning slippee has punished himself enough just being Out There, and 
that it takes incredible desperation and humility to eat your pride and wobble back In 
and put the Substance down again after you've fucked up the first time and the 
Substance is calling to you all over again. There's the sort of sincere compassion about 
fucking up that empathy makes possible, although some of the AAs will nod smugly 
when they find out the slippee didn't take some of the basic suggestions. Even 
newcomers who can't even start to quit yet and show up with suspicious flask-sized 
bulges in their coat pockets and list progressively to starboard as the meeting 
progresses are urged to keep coming. Hang In, stay, as long as they're not too 
disruptive. Inebriates are discouraged from driving themselves home after the Lord's 
Prayer, but nobody's going to wrestle your keys away. Boston AA stresses the utter 



autonomy of the individual member. Please say and do whatever you wish. Of course 
there are about a dozen basic suggestions, 138 and of course people who cockily decide 
they don't wish to abide by the basic suggestions are constantly going back Out There 
and then wobbling back in with their faces around their knees and confessing from the 
podium that they didn't take the suggestions and have paid full price for their willful 
arrogance and have learned the hard way and but now they're back, by God, and this 
time they're going to follow the suggestions to the bloody letter just see if they don't. 
Gately's sponsor Francis ('Ferocious Francis') G., the Crocodile that Gately finally got up 
the juice to ask to be his sponsor, compares the totally optional basic suggestions in 
Boston AA to, say for instance if you're going to jump out of an airplane, they 'suggest' 
you wear a parachute. But of course you do what you want. Then he starts laughing 
until he's coughing so bad he has to sit down. 

The bitch of the thing is you have to want to. If you don't want to do as you're told — I 
mean as it's suggested you do — it means that your own personal will is still in control, 
and Eugenio Martinez over at Ennet Flouse never tires of pointing out that your personal 
will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still. The will you call your own ceased to 
be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago. It's now shot 
through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease. His own experience's term for the 
Disease is: The Spider. 139 You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will. 
This is why most people will Come In and Flang In only after their own entangled will has 
just about killed them. You have to want to surrender your will to people who know 
how to Starve The Spider. You have to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by 
the traditions of anonymity, humility, surrender to the Group conscience. If you don't 
obey, nobody will kick you out. They won't have to. You'll end up kicking yourself out, if 
you steer by your own sick will. This is maybe why just about everybody in the White 
Flag Group tries so hard to be so disgustingly humble, kind, helpful, tactful, cheerful, 
nonjudgmental, tidy, energetic, sanguine, modest, generous, fair, orderly, patient, 
tolerant, attentive, truthful. It isn't like the Group makes them do it. It's more like that 
the only people who end up able to hang for serious time in AA are the ones who 
willingly try to be these things. This is why, to the cynical newcomer or fresh Ennet 
Flouse resident, serious AAs look like these weird combinations of Gandhi and Mr. 
Rogers with tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth who used to beat wives and diddle 
daughters and now rhapsodize about their bowel movements. It's all optional; do it or 
die. 

So but like e.g. Gately puzzled for quite some time about why these AA meetings 
where nobody kept order seemed so orderly. No interrupting, fist-icuffery, no heckled 
invectives, no poisonous gossip or beefs over the tray's last Oreo. Where was the hard- 
ass Sergeant at Arms who enforced these principles they guaranteed would save your 
ass? Pat Montesian and Eugenio Martinez and Ferocious Francis the Crocodile wouldn't 
answer Gately's questions about where's the enforcement. They just all smiled coy 
smiles and said to Keep Coming, an apothegm Gately found just as trite as 'Easy Does It!' 
'Live and Let Live!' 

How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un-but anti- 
interesting? Because every one of the seminal little mini-epiphanies you have in early 



AA is always polyesterishly banal, Gately admits to residents. He'll tell how, as a 
resident, right after that one Harvard Square industrial-grunge post-punk, this guy 
whose name was Bernard but insisted on being called Plasmatron-7, right after old 
Plasmatron-7 drank nine bottles of NyQuil in the men's upstairs head and pitched 
forward face-first into his instant spuds at supper and got discharged on the spot, and 
got fireman-carried by Calvin Thrust right out to Comm. Ave.'s Green Line T-stop, and 
Gately got moved up from the newest guys' 5-Man room to take Plasmatron-7's old 
bunk in the less-new guys' 3-Man room, Gately had an epiphanic AA-related nocturnal 
dream he'll be the first to admit was banally trite. 140 In the dream Gately and row after 
row of totally average and non-unique U.S. citizens were kneeling on their knees on 
polyester cushions in a crummy low-rent church basement. The basement was your 
average low-rent church basement except for this dream-church's basement walls were 
of like this weird thin clean clear glass. Everybody was kneeling on these cheap but 
comfortable cushions, and it was weird because nobody seemed to have any clear idea 
why they were all on their knees, and there was like no tier-boss or sergeant-at-arms- 
type figure around coercing them into kneeling, and yet there was this sense of some 
compelling unspoken reason why they were all kneeling. It was one of those dream 
things where it didn't make sense but did. And but then some lady over to Gately's left 
got off her knees and all of a sudden stood up, just like to stretch, and the minute she 
stood up she was all of a sudden yanked backward with terrible force and sucked out 
through one of the clear glass walls of the basement, and Gately had winced to get 
ready for the sound of serious glass, but the glass wall didn't shatter so much as just let 
the cartwheeling lady sort of melt right through, and healed back over where she'd 
melted through, and she was gone. Her cushion and then Gately notices a couple other 
polyester cushions in some of the rows here and there were empty. And it was then, as 
he was looking around, that Gately in his dream looked slowly up overhead at the 
ceiling's exposed pipes and could now all of a sudden see, rotating slow and silent 
through the basement a meter above the different-shaped and -colored heads of the 
kneeling assembly, he could see a long plain hooked stick, like the crook of a giant 
shepherd, like the hook that appears from stage-left and drags bad acts out of tomato- 
range, moving slowly above them in French-curled circles, almost demurely, as if quietly 
scanning; and when a mild-faced guy in a cardigan happened to stand up and was 
hooked by the hooked stick and pulled ass-over-teakettle out through the soundless 
glass membrane Gately turned his big head as far as he could without leaving the 
cushion and could see, now, just outside the wall's clean pane, trolling with the big stick, 
an extraordinarily snappily dressed and authoritative figure manipulating the giant 
shepherd's crook with one hand and coolly examining the nails of his other hand from 
behind a mask that was simply the plain yellow smily-face circle that accompanied 
invitations to have a nice day. The figure was so impressive and trustworthy and casually 
self-assured as to be both soothing and compelling. The authoritative figure radiated 
good cheer and abundant charm and limitless patience. It manipulated the big stick in 
the coolly purposeful way of the sort of angler who you know isn't going to throw back 
anything he catches. The slow silent stick with the hook he held was what kept them all 
kneeling below the baroque little circumferences of its movement overhead. 



One of Ennet House's live-in Staffers' rotating P.M. jobs is to be awake and on-call in 
the front office all night for Dream Duty — people in early recovery from Substances 
often get hit with real horror-show dreams, or else traumatically seductive Substance- 
dreams, and sometimes trite but important epiphanic dreams, and the Staffer on Dream 
Duty is required to be up doing paperwork or sit-ups or staring out the broad bay 
window in the front office downstairs, ready to make coffee and listen to the residents' 
dreams and offer the odd practical upbeat Boston-AA-type insight into possible 
implications for the dreamer's progress in recovery — but Gately had no need to clomp 
downstairs for a Staffer's feedback on this one, since it was so powerfully, tritely 
obvious. It had come clear to Gately that Boston AA had the planet's most remorselessly 
hard-ass and efficient sergeant at arms. Gately lay there, overhanging all four sides of 
his bunk, his broad square forehead beaded with revelation: Boston AA's Sergeant at 
Arms stood outside the orderly meeting halls, in that much-invoked Out There where 
exciting clubs full of good cheer throbbed gaily below lit signs with neon bottles 
endlessly pouring. AA's patient enforcer was always and everywhere Out There: it stood 
casually checking its cuticles in the astringent fluorescence of pharmacies that took 
forged Talwin scrips for a hefty surcharge, in the onionlight through paper shades in the 
furnished rooms of strung-out nurses who financed their own cages' maintenance with 
stolen pharmaceutical samples, in the isopropyl reek of the storefront offices of stooped 
old chain-smoking MD's whose scrip-pads were always out and who needed only to hear 
'pain' and see cash. In the home of a snot-strangled Canadian VIP and the office of an 
implacable Revere A.D.A. whose wife has opted for dentures at thirty-five. AA's 
disciplinarian looked damn good and smelled even better and dressed to impress and 
his blank black-on-yellow smile never faltered as he sincerely urged you to have a nice 
day. Just one more last nice day. Just one. 

And that was the first night that cynical Gately willingly took the basic suggestion to 
get down on his big knees by his undersized spring-shot Ennet House bunk and Ask For 
Help from something he still didn't believe in, ask for his own sick Spider-bit will to be 
taken from him and fumigated and squished. 

But and plus in Boston AA there is, unfortunately, dogma, too, it turns out; and some 
of it is both dated and smug. And there's an off-putting jargon in the Fellowship, a 
psychobabbly dialect that's damn near impossible to follow at first, says Ken Erdedy, the 
college-boy ad exec semi-new at Ennet House, complaining to Gately at the White Flag 
meeting's raffle-break, Boston AA meetings are unusually long, an hour and a half 
instead of the national hour, but here they also have this formal break at about 45 
minutes where everybody can grab a sandwich or Oreo and a sixth cup of coffee and 
stand around and chat, and bond, where people can pull their sponsors aside and 
confide some trite insight or emotional snafu that the sponsor can swiftly, privately 
validate but also place in the larger imperative context of the primary need not to 
absorb a Substance today, just today, no matter what happens. While everybody's 
bonding and interfacing in a bizarre system of catchphrases, there's also the raffle, 
another Boston idiosyncrasy: the newest of the White Flag newcomers trying to Get 
Active In Group Service wobble around with rattan baskets and packs of tickets, one for 
a buck and three for a fin, and the winner eventually gets announced from the podium 



and everyone hisses and shouts 'Fix!' and laughs, and the winner wins a Big Book or an 
As Bill Sees It or a Came To Believe, which if he's got some sober time in and already 
owns all the AA literature from winning previous raffles he'll stand up and publicly offer 
it to any newcomer who wants it, which means any newcomer with enough humble 
desperation to come up to him and ask for it and risk being given a phone number to 
carry around in his wallet. 

At the White Flag raffle-break Gately usually stands around chainsmoking with the 
Ennet Flouse residents, so that he's casually available to answer questions and 
empathize with complaints. Fie usually waits til after the meeting to do his own 
complaining to Ferocious Francis, with whom Gately now shares the important duty of 
'breaking down the hall,' sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays and wiping down the 
long cafeteria tables, which F.F.G.'s function is limited because he's on oxygen and his 
function consists mostly of standing there sucking oxygen and holding an unlit cigar 
while Gately breaks down the hall. Gately rather likes Ken Erdedy, who came into the 
Flouse about a month ago from some cushy Belmont rehab. Erdedy's an upscale guy, 
what Gately's mother would have called a yuppie, an account executive at Viney and 
Veals Advertising downtown his Intake form said, and though he's about Gately's age 
he's so softly good-looking in that soft mannequinish way Flarvard and Tufts schoolboys 
have, and looks so smooth and groomed all the time even in jeans and a plain cotton 
sweater, that Gately thinks of him as much younger, totally ungrizzled, and refers to him 
mentally as 'kid.' Erdedy's in the Flouse mainly for 'marijuana addiction,' which Gately 
has a hard time Identifying with anybody getting in enough trouble with weed to leave 
his job and condo to bunk in a room full of tattooed guys who smoke in their sleep, and 
to work like pumping gas (Erdedy just started his nine-month humility job at the Merit 
station down by North Flarvard St. in Allston) for 32 minimum-wage hours a week. Or to 
have his leg be joggling like that all the time from tensions of Withdrawal: from fucking 
grass? But it's not Gately's place to say what's bad enough to make somebody Come In 
and what isn't, not for anybody else but himself, and the shapely but big-time-troubled 
new girl Kate Gompert — who mostly just stays in her bed in the new women's 5- 
Woman room when she isn't at meetings, and is on a Suicidality Contract with Pat, and 
isn't getting the usual pressure to get a humility job, and gets to get some sort of scrip- 
meds out of the meds locker every morning — Kate Gompert's counselor Danielle S. 
reported at the last Staff Meeting that Kate had finally opened up and told her she'd 
mostly Come In for weed, too, and not the lightweight prescription tranqs she'd listed 
on her Intake form. Gately used to treat weed like tobacco. Fie wasn't like some other 
narcotics addicts who smoked weed when they couldn't get anything else; he always 
smoked weed and could always get something else and simply smoked weed while he 
did whatever else he could get. Gately doesn't miss weed much. The shocker-type AA 
Miracle is he doesn't much miss the Demerol, either, today. 

A hard November wind is spattering goopy sleet against the broad windows all around 
the hall. The Provident Nursing Flome cafeteria is lit by a checkerboard array of 
oversized institutional bulbs overhead, a few of which are always low and give off 
fluttery strobes. The fluttering bulbs are why Pat Montesian and all the other photic- 
seizure-prone area AAs never go to White Flag, opting for the Freeway Group over in 



Brookline or the candyass Lake Street meeting up in West Newton on Sunday nights, 
which Pat M. bizarrely drives all the way up from her home down on the South Shore in 
Milton to get to, to hear people talk about their analysts and Saabs. There is no way to 
account for people's taste in AA. The White Flag hall is so brightly lit up all Gately can 
see out any of the windows is a kind of shiny drooling black against everybody's pale 
reflection. 

Miracle's one of the Boston AA terms Erdedy and the brand-new and very shaky veiled 
girl resident standing over him complain they find hard to stomach, as in 'We're All 
Miracles Here' and 'Don't Leave Five Minutes Before The Miracle Happens' and 'To Stay 
Sober For 24 Hours Is A Miracle.' 

Except the brand-new girl, either Joelle V. or Joelle D., who said she'd hit the 
occasional meeting in the past before her Bottom and had been roundly repelled, and is 
still pretty much cynical and repelled, she said on the way down to Provident under 
Gately's direct new-resident supervision, says she finds even the word Miracle 
preferable to the constant AA talk about 'the Grace of God,' which reminds her of 
wherever she grew up, where she's indicated places of worship were often aluminum 
trailers or fiberboard shacks and church-goers played with copperheads in the services 
to honor something about serpents and tongues. 

Gately's also observed how Erdedy's also got that Tufts-Harvard way of speaking 
without seeming to move his lower jaw. 

'It's as if it's its own country or something,' Erdedy complains, legs crossed in maybe a 
bit of a faggy schoolboy way, looking around at the raffle-break, sitting in Gately's 
generous shadow. 'The first time I ever talked, over at the St. E's meeting on 
Wednesday, somebody comes up after the Lord's Prayer and says "Good to hear you, I 
could really I.D. with that bottom you were sharing about, the isolating, the can't-and- 
can't, it's the greenest I've felt in months, hearing you." And then gives me this raffle 
ticket with his phone number that I didn't ask for and says I'm right where I'm supposed 
to be, which I have to say I found a bit patronizing.' 

The best noise Gately produces is his laugh, which booms and reassures, and a certain 
haunted hardness goes out of his face when he laughs. Like most huge men, Gately has 
kind of a high hoarse speaking voice; his larynx sounds compressed. 'I still hate that 
right-where-you're-supposed-to-be thing,' he says, laughing. He likes that Erdedy, 
sitting, looks right up at him and cocks his head slightly to let Gately know he's got his 
full attention. Gately doesn't know that this is a requisite for a white-collar job where 
you have to show you're attending fully to clients who are paying major sums and get to 
expect an overt display of full attention. Gately is still not yet a good judge of anything 
about upscale people except where they tend to hide their valuables. 

Boston AA, with its emphasis on the Group, is intensely social. The raffle-break goes 
on and on. An intoxicated street-guy with a venulated nose and missing incisors and 
electrician's tape wrapped around his shoes is trying to sing 'Volare' up at the empty 
podium microphone. He is gently, cheerfully induced offstage by a Crocodile with a 
sandwich and an arm around the shoulders. There's a certain pathos to the Crocodile's 
kindness, his clean flannel arm around the weatherstained shoulders, which pathos 
Gately feels and likes being able to feel it, while he says 'But at least the "Good to hear 



you" I quit minding. It's just what they say when somebody's got done speaking. They 
can't say like "Good job" or "You spoke well," cause it can't be anybody's place here to 
judge if anybody else did good or bad or whatnot. You know what I'm saying. Tiny, 
there?' 

Tiny Ewell, in a blue suit and laser chronometer and tiny shoes whose shine you could 
read by, is sharing a dirty aluminum ashtray with Nell Gunther, who has a glass eye 
which she amuses herself by usually wearing so the pupil and iris face in and the dead 
white and tiny manufacturer's specifications on the back of the eye face out. Both of 
them are pretending to study the blond false wood of the tabletop, and Ewell makes a 
bit of a hostile show of not looking up or responding to Gately or entering into the 
conversation in any way, which is his choice and on him alone, so Gately lets it go. Wade 
McDade has a Walkman going, which is technically OK at the raffle-break although it's 
not a real good idea. Chandler Foss is flossing his teeth and pretending to throw the 
used floss at Jennifer Belbin. Most of the Ennet House residents are mingling 
satisfactorily. The couple of residents that are black are mingling with other blacks. 141 
The Diehl kid and Doony Glynn are amusing themselves telling homosexuality jokes to 
Morris Hanley, who sits smoothing his hair with his fingertips, pretending to not even 
acknowledge, his left hand still bandaged. Alfonso Parias-Carbo is standing with three 
Allston Group guys, smiling broadly and nodding, not understanding a word anybody 
says. Bruce Green has gone downstairs to the men's head and amused Gately by asking 
his permission first. Gately told him to go knock himself out. Green has good big arms 
and no gut, even after all the Substances, and Gately suspects he might have played 
some ball at some point. Kate Gompert is totally by herself at a nonsmoking table over 
by a window, ignoring her pale reflection and making little cardboard tents out of her 
raffle tickets and moving them around. Clenette Henderson clutches another black girl 
and laughs and says 'Girl!' several times. Emil Minty is clutching his head. Geoff Day in 
his black turtleneck and blazer keeps lurking on the fringes of various groups of people 
pretending he's part of the conversations. No immediate sign of Burt F. Smith or 
Charlotte Treat. Randy Lenz, in his cognito white mustache and sideburns, is doubtless 
at the pay phone in the northeast corner of the Provident lobby downstairs: Lenz spends 
nearly unacceptable amounts of time either on a phone or trying to get in position to 
use a phone. 'Cause what I like,' Gately says to Erdedy (Erdedy really is listening, even 
though there's a compellingly cheap young woman in a brief white skirt and absurd 
black mesh stockings sitting with her legs nicely crossed — one-strap low-spike black 
Ferragamos, too — at the periphery of his vision, and the woman is with a large man, 
which makes her even more compelling; and also the veiled new girl's breasts and her 
hips' clefs are compelling and distracting, next to him, even in a long baggy loose blue 
sweater that matches the embroidered selvage around her veil), 'What I think I like is 
how "It was good to hear you" ends up, like, saying two separate things together.' 
Gately's also saying this to Joelle, who it's weird but you can tell she's looking at you, 
even through the linen veil. There's maybe half a dozen or so other veiled people in the 
White Flag hall tonight; a decent percentage of people in the 11-Step Union of the 
Hideously and Improbably Deformed are also in 12-Step fellowships for other issues 
besides hideous deformity. Most of the room's veiled AAs are women, though there is 



this one male veiled U.H.I.D. guy that's an active White Flagger, Tommy S. or F., who 
years ago nodded out on a stuffed acrylic couch with a bottle of Remy and a lit Tiparillo 
— the guy now wears U.H.I.D. veils and a whole spectrum of silk turtlenecks and as¬ 
sorted hats and classy lambskin driving gloves. Gately's had the U.H.I.D.-and-veil 
philosophy explained to him in passing a couple times but still doesn't much get it, it 
seems like a gesture of shame and concealment, still, to him, the veil. Pat Montesian 
had said there's been a few other U.H.I.D.s who'd gone through Ennet House prior to 
the Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland, which is when new resident 
Gately came wobbling in, but this Joelle van Dyne, who Gately feels he has zero handle 
on yet as a person or how serious she is about putting down Substances and Coming In 
to really get straight, this Joelle is the first veiled resident Gately's had under him, as a 
Staffer. This Joelle girl, that wasn't even on the two-month waiting list for Intake, got in 
overnight under some private arrangement with somebody on the House's Board of 
Directors, upscale Enfield guys into charity and directing. There'd been no Intake 
interview with Pat at the House; the girl just showed up two days ago right after supper. 
She'd been up at Brigham and Women's for five days after some sort of horrific O.D.- 
type situation said to have included both defib paddles and priests. She'd had real 
luggage and this like Chinese portable dressing-screen thing with clouds and pop-eyed 
dragons that even folded lengthwise took both Green and Parias-Carbo to lug upstairs. 
There's been no talk of a humility job for her, and Pat's counseling the girl personally. 
Pat's got some sort of privately directed arrangement with the girl; Gately's already seen 
enough private-type arrangements between certain Staffers and residents to feel like 
it's maybe kind of a character defect of Ennet House. A girl from the Brookline Young 
People's Group over in a cheerleader skirt and slut-stockings is ignoring all the ashtrays 
and putting her extra-long gasper out on the bare tabletop two rows over as she laughs 
like a seal at something an acne'd guy in a long camelhair car coat he hasn't taken off 
and sockless leather dance-shoes Gately's never seen at a meeting before says. And he's 
got his hand on hers as she grinds the gasper out. Something like putting a cigarette out 
against the wood-grain plastic tabletop, which Gately can already see the ragged black 
burn-divot that's formed, it's something the rankness of which would never have struck 
him one way or the other, before, until Gately took on half the break-down-the-hall- 
and-wipe-down-the-tables job at Ferocious Francis G.'s suggestion, and now he feels 
sort of proprietary about the Provident's tabletops. But it's not like he can go over and 
take anybody else's inventory and tell them how to behave. He settles for imagining the 
girl pinwheeling through the air toward a glass wall. 

'When they say it it sort of means like what you said was good for them, it helped 
them out somehow,' he says, 'but plus now also I like saying it myself because if you 
think about it it also means it was good to be able to hear you. To really hear.' He's 
trying subtly to alternate and look at Erdedy and Joelle both, like he's addressing them 
both. It's not something he's good at. His head's too big to be subtle with. 'Because I 
remember for like the first sixty days or so I couldn't hear shit. I didn't hear nothing. I'd 
just sit there and Compare, I'd go to myself, like, "I never rolled a car," "I never lost a 
wife," "I never bled from the rectum." Gene would tell me to just keep coming for a 
while and sooner or later I'd start to be able to both listen and hear. He said it's hard to 



really hear. But he wouldn't say what was the difference between hearing and listening, 
which pissed me off. But after a while I started to really hear. It turns out — and this is 
just for me, maybe — but it turned out hearing the speaker means like all of a sudden 
hearing how fucking similar the way he felt and the way I felt were. Out There, at the 
Bottom, before we each Came In. Instead of just sitting here resenting being here and 
thinking how he bled from the ass and I didn't and how that means I'm not as bad as 
him yet and I can still be Out There.' 

One of the tricks to being of real service to newcomers is not to lecture or give advice 
but only talk about your own personal experience and what you were told and what you 
found out personally, and to do it in a casual but positive and encouraging way. Plus 
you're supposed to try and Identify with the newcomer's feelings as much as possible. 
Ferocious Francis G. says this is one of the ways guys with just a year or two sober can 
be most helpful: being able to sincerely ID with the newly Sick and Suffering. Ferocious 
Francis told Gately as they were wiping down tables that if a Crocodile with decades of 
sober AA time can still sincerely empathize and Identify with a whacked-out bug-eyed 
Disease-ridden newcomer then there's something deeply fucked up about that 
Crocodile's recovery. The Crocodiles, decades sober, live in a totally different spiritual 
galaxy, inside. One long-timer describes it as he has a whole new unique interior 
spiritual castle, now, to live in. 

Part of this new Joelle girl's pull for Ken Erdedy isn't just the sexual thing of her body, 
which he finds made way sexier by the way the overlarge blue coffee-stained sweater 
tries to downplay the body thing without being so hubristic as to try to hide it — sloppy 
sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window — but it's also the veil, 
wondering what horrific contrast to the body's allure lies swollen or askew under that 
veil; it gives the pull a perverse sideways slant that makes it even more distracting, and 
so Erdedy cocks his head a little more up at Gately and narrows his eyes to make his 
listening-look terribly intense. Fie doesn't know that there's an abstract distance in the 
look that makes it seem like he's studying a real bitch of a 7-iron on the tenth rough or 
something; the look doesn't communicate what he thinks his audience wants it to. 

The raffle-break is winding down as everybody starts to want their own ashtray. Two 
more big urns of coffee emerge from the kitchen door over by the literature table. 
Erdedy is probably the second-biggest leg-and-foot-joggler in present residence, after 
Geoffrey D. Joelle v. D. now says something very strange. It's a very strange little 
moment, right at the end of the raffle-break, and Gately later finds it impossible to 
describe it in his Log entry for the P.M. shift. It is the first time he realizes that Joelle's 
voice — crisp and rich and oddly empty, her accent just barely Southern and with a 
strange and it turns out Kentuckian lapse in the pronunciation of all apicals except s — is 
familiar in a faraway way that both makes it familiar and yet lets Gately be sure he's 
never once met her before. Out There. She inclines the plane of her blue-bordered veil 
briefly toward the floor's tile (very bad tile, scab-colored, nauseous, worst thing about 
the big room by far), brings it back up level (unlike Erdedy she's standing, and in flats is 
nearly Gately's height), and says that she's finding it especially hard to take when these 
earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say they're 'Here But For the Grace of God,' except 
that's not the strange thing she says, because when Gately nods hard and starts to 



interject about 'It was the same for —' and wants to launch into a fairly standard Boston 
AA agnostic-soothing riff about the 'God' in the slogan being just shorthand for a totally 
subjective and up-to-you 'Higher Power' and AA being merely spiritual instead of 
dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective spirit, Joelle cuts off his 
interjection and says that but that her trouble with it is that 'But For the Grace of God' is 
a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a 
conditional clause, like e.g. 'But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly 
Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that an indicative transposition like 'I'm here But For the 
Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or 
not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say 
what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the 
thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of 
language she has to have Blind Faith in. Gately looks at a rectangular blue-selvaged 
expanse of clean linen whose gentle rises barely allude to any features below, he looks 
at her and has no idea whether she's serious or not, or whacked, or trying like Dr. Geoff 
Day to erect Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish showing-off, and 
he doesn't know what to say in reply, he has absolutely nothing in his huge square head 
to Identify with her with or latch onto or say in encouraging reply, and for an instant the 
Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own heart grips him like an infant 
rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost 
unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point in his life he's 
going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the 
blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen on which might well be projected a 
casual and impressive black and yellow smily-face, grinning, and he feels all the muscles 
in his own face loosen and descend kneeward; and the moment hangs there, distended, 
until the White Flag raffle coordinator for November, Glenn K., glides up to the podium 
mike in his scarlet velour caparison and makeup and candelabrum with candles the 
same color as the floor tile and uses the plastic gavel to formally end the break and 
bring things back to whatever passes here for order, for the raffle drawing. The 
Watertown guy with middle-level sober time who wins the Big Book publicly offers it to 
any newcomer that wants it, and Gately is pleased to see Bruce Green raise a big hand, 
and decides he'll just turn it over and ask Ferocious Francis G. for feedback on 
subjunctives and countersexuals, and the infant leaves its playpen alone inside him, and 
the rivets of the long table his seat's attached to make a brief distressed noise as he sits 
and settles in for the second half of the meeting, asking silently for help to be 
determined to try to really hear or die trying. 

NNYC's harbor's Liberty Island's gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what 
looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a 
product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes. 

But it's funny what they'll find funny, AAs at Boston meetings, listening. The next 
Advanced Basics guy summoned by their gleamingly bald western-wear chairman to 
speak is dreadfully, transparently unfunny: painfully new but pretending to be at ease, 
to be an old hand, desperate to amuse and impress them. The guy's got the sort of 
professional background where he's used to trying to impress gatherings of persons. 



He's dying to be liked up there. He's performing. The White Flag crowd can see all this. 
Even the true morons among them see right through the guy. This is not a regular 
audience. A Boston AA is very sensitive to the presence of ego. When the new guy 
introduces himself and makes an ironic gesture and says, 'I'm told I've been given the 
Gift of Desperation. I'm looking for the exchange window,' it's so clearly unspontaneous, 
rehearsed—plus commits the subtle but cardinal Message-offense of appearing to 
deprecate the Program rather than the Self—that just a few polite titters resound, and 
people shift in their seats with a slight but signal discomfort. The worst punishment 
Gately's seen inflicted on a Commitment speaker is when the host crowd gets 
embarrassed for him. Speakers who are accustomed to figuring out what an audience 
wants to hear and then supplying it find out quickly that this particular audience does 
not want to be supplied with what someone else thinks it wants. It's another 
conundrum Gately finally ran out of cerebral steam on. Part of finally getting 
comfortable in Boston AA is just finally running out of steam in terms of trying to figure 
stuff like this out. Because it literally makes no sense. Close to two hundred people all 
punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying 
right there with him, for him, up there at the podium. The applause when this guy's 
done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of 'Keep Coming!' are so 
sincere it's almost painful. 

But then in equally paradoxical contrast have a look at the next Advanced Basics 
speaker — this tall baggy sack of a man, also painfully new, but this poor bastard here 
completely and openly nerve-racked, wobbling his way up to the front, his face shiny 
with sweat and his talk full of blank cunctations and disassociated leaps — as the guy 
speaks with terrible abashed chagrin about trying to hang on to his job Out There as his 
A.M. hangovers became more and more debilitating until he finally got so shaky and 
aphasiac he just couldn't bear to even face the customers who'd come knocking on his 
Department's door — he was, from 0800 to 1600h., the Complaint Department of 
Filene's Department Store — 

— 'What I did finally, Jesus I don't know where I got such a stupid idea from, I brought 
this hammer in from home and brought it in and kept it right there under my desk, on 
the floor, and when somebody knocked at the door I'd just... I'd sort of dive onto the 
floor and crawl under the desk and grab up the hammer, and I'd start in to pounding on 
the leg of the desk, real hard-like, whacketa whacketa, like I was fixing something down 
there. And if they opened the door finally and came in anyhow or came in to bitch about 
me not opening the door I'd just stay out of sight under there pounding away like hell 
and I'd yell out I was going to be a moment, just a moment, emergency repairs, be with 
them momentarily. I guess you can guess how all that pounding felt, you know, under 
there, what with the big head I had every morning. I'd hide under there and pound and 
pound with the hammer till they finally gave up and went away, I'd watch from under 
the desk and tell when they finally went away, from I could see their feet from under 
the desk.' 

— And about how the hiding-under-the-desk-and-pounding thing worked, 
incredibly enough, for almost the whole last year of his drinking, which ended around 
this past Labor Day, when one vindictive complainant finally figured out where in 



Filene's to go to complain about the Complaint Dept. — the White Flaggers all fell about, 
they were totally pleased and amused, the Crocodiles removed their cigars and roared 
and wheezed and stomped both feet on the floor and showed scary teeth, everyone 
roaring with Identification and pleasure. This even though, as the speaker's confusion at 
their delight openly betrays, the story wasn't meant to be one bit funny: it was just the 
truth. 

Gately's found it's got to be the truth, is the thing. He's trying hard to really hear the 
speakers — he's stayed in the habit he'd developed as an Ennet resident of sitting right 
up where he could see dentition and pores, with zero obstructions or heads between 
him and the podium, so the speaker fills his whole vision, which makes it easier to really 
hear — trying to concentrate on receiving the Message instead of brooding on that odd 
old dark moment of aphasiac terror with this veiled like psuedo-intellectual-type girl 
who was probably just in some sort of complex Denial, or on whatever doubtlessly grim 
place he feels like he knows that smooth echoless slightly Southern voice from. The 
thing is it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can't be a calculated crowd- 
pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An 
ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone. Same with sly 
disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity. Sincerity with an ulterior motive is some¬ 
thing these tough ravaged people know and fear, all of them trained to remember the 
coyly sincere, ironic, self-presenting fortifications they'd had to construct in order to 
carry on Out There, under the ceaseless neon bottle. 

This doesn't mean you can't pay empty or hypocritical lip-service, however. 
Paradoxically enough. The desperate, newly sober White Flaggers are always 
encouraged to invoke and pay empty lip-service to slogans they don't yet understand or 
believe — e.g. 'Easy Does It!' and 'Turn It Over!' and 'One Day At a Time!' It's called Take 
It Till You Make It,' itself an oft-invoked slogan. Everybody on a Commitment who gets 
up publicly to speak starts out saying he's an alcoholic, says it whether he believes he is 
yet or not; then everybody up there says how Grateful he is to be sober today and how 
great it is to be Active and out on a Commitment with his Group, even if he's not 
grateful or pleased about it at all. You're encouraged to keep saying stuff like this until 
you start to believe it, just like if you ask somebody with serious sober time how long 
you'll have to keep schlepping to all these goddamn meetings he'll smile that infuriating 
smile and tell you just until you start to want to go to all these goddamn meetings. 
There are some definite cultish, brainwashy elements to the AA Program (the term 
Program itself resonates darkly, for those who fear getting brainwashed), and Gately 
tries to be candid with his residents re this issue. But he also shrugs and tells them that 
by the end of his oral-narcotics and burglary careers he'd sort of decided the old brain 
needed a good scrub and soak anyway. Fie says he pretty much held his brain out and 
told Pat Montesian and Gene M. to go ahead and wash away. But he tells his residents 
he's thinking now that the Program might be more like deprogramming than actual 
washing, considering the psychic job the Disease's Spider has done on them all. Gately's 
most marked progress in turning his life around in sobriety, besides the fact that he no 
longer drives off into the night with other people's merchandise, is that he tries to be 
just about as verbally honest as possible at almost all times, now, without too much 



calculation about how a listener's going to feel about what he says. This is harder than it 
sounds. But so that's why on Commitments, sweating at the podium as only a large man 
can sweat, his thing is that he always says he's Lucky to be sober today, instead of that 
he's Grateful today, because he admits that the former is always true, every day, even 
though a lot of the time he still doesn't feel Grateful, more like shocked that this thing 
seems to work, plus a lot of the time also ashamed and depressed about how he's spent 
over half his life, and scared he might be permanently brain-damaged or retarded from 
Substances, plus also usually without any sort of clue about where he's headed in 
sobriety or what he's supposed to be doing or about really anything at all except that 
he's not at all keen to be back Out There behind any bars, again, in a hurry. Ferocious 
Francis G. likes to punch Gately's shoulder and tell him he's right where he's supposed 
to be. 

So but also know that causal attribution, like irony, is death, speaking-on- 
Commitments-wise. Crocodiles' temple-veins will actually stand out and pulse with 
irritation if you start trying to blame your Disease on some cause or other, and 
everybody with any kind of sober time will pale and writhe in their chair. See e.g. the 
White Flag audience's discomfort when the skinny hard-faced Advanced Basics girl who 
gets up to speak next to last posits that she was an eight-bag-a-day dope fiend because 
at sixteen she'd had to become a stripper and semi-whore at the infamous Naked I Club 
out on Route 1 (a number of male eyes in the audience flash with sudden recognition, 
and despite all willed restraint automatically do that crawly north-to-south thing down 
her body, and Gately can see every ashtray on the table shake from the force of Joelle 
V.'s shudder), and then but that she'd had to become a stripper at sixteen because she'd 
had to run away from her foster home in Saugus MA, and that she'd had to run away 
from home because ... — here at least some of the room's discomfort is from the fact 
that the audience can tell the etiology is going to get head-clutchingly prolix and 
involved; this girl has not yet learned to Keep It Simple —... because, well, to begin with, 
she'd been adopted, and the foster parents also had their own biological daughter, and 
the biological daughter had, from birth, been totally paralyzed and retarded and 
catatonic, and the foster mother in the household was — as Joelle V. put it later to 
Gately — crazy as a Fucking Mud-Bug, and was in total Denial about her biological 
daughter's being a vegetable, and not only insisted on treating the invertebrate 
biological daughter like a valid member of the chordate phylum but also insisted that 
the father and the adopted daughter also treat It as normal and undamaged, and made 
the adopted daughter share a bedroom with It, bring It along to slumber parties (the 
speaker uses the term It for the invertebrate sister, and also to tell the truth uses the 
phrase 'drag It along' rather than 'bring It along,' which Gately wisely doesn't dwell 
over), and even to school with her, and softball practice, and the hairdresser's, and 
Campfire Girls, etc., where at whatever place she'd dragged It along to It would lie in a 
heap, drooling and incontinent under exquisite mother-bought fashions specially altered 
for atrophy and top-shelf Lancome cosmetics that looked just lurid on It, and with only 
the whites of Its eyes showing, with fluid dribbling from Its mouth and elsewhere, and 
making unspeakable gurgly noises, completely pale and moist and stagnant; and then, 
when the adopted daughter now speaking turned fifteen, the rabidly Catholic wacko 



foster mother even announced that OK now that the adopted daughter was fifteen she 
could go out on dates, but only as long as It got to come along too, in other words that 
the only dates the fifteen-year-old adopted daughter could go out on were double dates 
with It and whatever submammalian escort the speaker could root up for It; and how 
this sort of stuff went on and on; and how the nightmarishness of Its continual pale 
soggy ubiquitousness in her young life would alone be more than sufficient to cause and 
explain the speaker's later drug addiction, she feels, but that also it so happened that 
the foster family's quiet smiling patriarch, who worked 0900 to 2100 as a claims 
processor for Aetna, it turned out that the cheerful smiling foster father actually made 
the wacko foster mother look like a Doric column of stability by comparison, because 
there turned out to be things about the biological daughter's utter paralytic pliability 
and catatonic inability to make anything except unspeakable gurgly noises that the 
smiling father found greatly to a certain very sick advantage the speaker says she has 
trouble openly discussing, still, even at thirty-one months sober in AA, being as yet still 
so retroactively Wounded and Hurting from it; but so in sum that she'd been ultimately 
forced to run away from the adoptive foster Saugus home and so become a Naked-I 
stripper and so become a raging dope fiend not, as in so many ununique cases, because 
she had been incestuously diddled, but because she'd been abusively forced to share a 
bedroom with a drooling invertebrate who by fourteen was Itself getting incestuously 
diddled on a nightly basis by a smiling biological claims processor of a father who — the 
speaker pauses to summon courage — who apparently liked to pretend It was Raquel 
Welch, the former celluloid sex goddess of the father's glandular heyday, and he even 
called It 'RAQUEL!' in moments of incestuous extremity; and how, the New England 
summer the speaker turned fifteen and had to start dragging It along on double dates 
and then having to make sure to drag It back home again by 2300h. so It had plenty of 
time to be incestuously diddled, that summer the smiling quiet foster father even 
bought, had found somewhere, a cheesy rubber Raquel Welch full-head pull-on mask , 
with hair, and would now nightly come in in the dark and lift Its limp soft head up and 
struggle and lug to get the mask on and the relevant holes aligned for air, and then 
would diddle his way to extremity and cry out 'RAQUEL!' and then but he would just 
clamber out and off and leave the dark bedroom smiling and sated and lots of times 
leave the mask still on It, he'd like forget, or not care, just as he seemed oblivious (But 
For the Grace of God, in a way) to the fetally curled skinny form of the adopted 
daughter lying perfectly still in the next bed, in the dark, pretending to sleep, silent, 
shell-breathing, with her hard skinny wounded pre-addiction face turned to the wall, in 
the room's next bed, her bed, the one without the collapsible crib-like hospital railings 
along the sides... The audience is clutching its collective head, by this time only partly in 
empathy, as the speaker specifies how she was de facto emotionally all but like forced 
to flee and strip and swan-dive into the dark spiritual anesthesia of active drug addiction 
in a dysfunctional attempt to psychologically deal with one particular seminally scarring 
night of abject horror, the indescribable horror of the way It, the biological daughter, 
had looked up at her, the speaker, one particular final time on this one particular one of 
the frequent occasions the speaker had to get out of bed after the father had come and 
gone and tiptoe over to Its bed and lean over the cold metal hospital railing and remove 



the rubber Raquel Welch mask and replace it in a bedside drawer under some back 
issues of Ramparts and Commonweal, after carefully closing Its splayed legs and pulling 
down Its variously-stained designer nightie, all of which she made sure to do when the 
father didn't bother to, at night, so that the wacko foster mother wouldn't come in in 
the A.M. and find It in a rubber Raquel Welch mask with Its nightie hiked up and Its legs 
agape and put two and two together and get all kinds of deep Denial shattered about 
why the foster father always went around the foster house with a silent creepy smile, 
and flip out and make the invertebrate catatonic's father stop diddling It — because, the 
speaker figured, if the foster father had to stop diddling It it didn't exactly take Sally 
Jessy Raphael M.S.W. to figure out who was then probably going to get promoted to the 
role of Raquel, over in the next bed. The silent smiling claims-processor father never 
once acknowledged the adopted daughter's little post-incestuous tidyings-up. It's the 
kind of sick unspoken complicity characteristic of wildly dysfunctional families, confides 
the speaker, who's also proud she says to be a member of a splinter 12-Step Fellowship, 
an Adult-Child-type thing called Wounded, Hurting, Inadequately Nurtured but Ever- 
Recovering Survivors. But so she says it was this one particular night soon after she'd 
turned sixteen, after the father had come and gone and uncaringly just left Its mask on 
again, and over to Its bedside the speaker had to creep in the dark, to tidy up, and but 
this time it turned out there was a problem with the Raquel Welch mask's long auburn 
horsehair tresses having gotten twisted and knotted into the semi-living strands of Its 
own elaborately overmoussed coiffure, and the adopted daughter had to activate the 
perimeter of lights on Its bedside table's many-bulbed vanity mirror to see to try to get 
the Raquel Welch wig untangled, and when she finally got the mask off, with the vanity 
mirror still blazing away, the speaker says how she was forced to gaze for the first time 
on Its lit-up paralytic post-diddle face, and how the expression thereon was most 
assuredly quite enough to force anybody with an operant limbic system 142 to leg it right 
out of her dysfunctional foster family's home, nay and the whole community of Saugus 
MA, now homeless and scarred and forced by dark psychic forces straight to Route 1 's 
infamous gauntlet of neon-lit depravity and addiction, to try and forget, rasa the tabula, 
wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates. Voice trembling, she accepts the 
chairperson's proffered bandanna-hankie and blows her nose one nostril at a time and 
says she can almost see It all over again: Its expression: in the vanity's lights only Its 
eyes' whites showed, and while Its utter catatonia and paralysis prevented the 
contraction of Its luridly rouged face's circumoral muscles into any conventional human 
facial-type expression, nevertheless some hideously mobile and expressive layer in the 
moist regions below real people's expressive facial layer, some slow-twitch layer unique 
to It, had blindly contracted, somehow, to gather the blank soft cheese of Its face into 
the sort of pinched gasping look of neurologic concentration that marks a carnal bliss 
beyond smiles or sighs. Its face looked post-coital sort of the way you'd imagine the 
vacuole and optica of a protozoan looking post-coital after it's shuddered and shot its 
mono-cellular load into the cold waters of some really old sea. Its facial expression was, 
in a word, the speaker says, unspeakably, unforgettably ghastly and horrid and scarring. 
It was also the exact same expression as the facial expression on the stone-robed lady's 
face in this one untitled photo of some Catholic statue that hung (the photo) in the 



dysfunctional household's parlor right above the little teak table where the 
dysfunctional foster mother kept her beads and Hours and lay breviary, this photo of a 
statue of a woman whose stone robes were half hiked up and wrinkled in the most 
godawfully sensually prurient way, the woman reclined against uncut rock, her robes 
hiked and one stone foot hanging off the rock as her legs hung parted, with a grinning 
little totally psychotic-looking cherub-type angel standing on the lady's open thighs and 
pointing a bare arrow at where the stone robe hid her cold tit, the woman's face 
upturned and cocked and pinched into that exact same shuddering-protozoan look 
beyond pleasure or pain. The wacko foster mom knelt daily to that photo, in a beaded 
and worshipful posture, and also required daily that It be hoisted by the adopted 
daughter from Its never-mentioned wheelchair and held under Its arms and lowered so 
as to approximate the same knelt devotion to the photo, and while It gurgled and Its 
head lolled the speaker had gazed at the photo with a nameless revulsion each morning 
as she held Its dead slumped weight and tried to keep Its chin off Its chest, and now was 
being forced into seeing by mirror-light the exact same expression on the face of a 
catatonic who'd just been incestuously diddled, an expression at once reverent and 
greedy on a face connected by dead hair to the slack and flapping rubber visage of an 
old sex goddess's empty face. And to make a long story short (the speaker says, not 
trying to be funny as far as the Flaggers can see), the traumatically scarred adopted girl 
had legged it from the bedroom and foster house into the brooding North Shore teen- 
runaway night, and had stripped and semi-whored and IV-injected her way all the way 
to that standard two-option addicted cliff-edge, hoping only to Forget. That's what 
caused it, she says; that's what she's trying to recover from, a Day at a Time, and she's 
sure grateful to be here with her Group today, sober and courageously remembering, 
and newcomers should definitely Keep Coming... As she's telling what she sees as 
etiological truth, even though the monologue seems sincere and unaffected and at least 
a B+ on the overall AA-story lucidity-scale, faces in the hall are averted and heads 
clutched and postures uneasily shifted in empathetic distress at the look-what- 
happened-to-poor-me invitation implicit in the tale, the talk's tone of self-pity itself less 
offensive (even though plenty of these White Flaggers, Gately knows, had personal 
childhoods that made this girl's look like a day at Six Flags Over the Poconos) than the 
subcurrent of explanation, an appeal to exterior Cause that can slide, in the addictive 
mind, so insidiously into Excuse that any causal attribution is in Boston AA feared, 
shunned, punished by empathic distress. The Why of the Disease is a labrynth it is 
strongly suggested all AAs boycott, inhabited as the maze is by the twin minotaurs of 
IM?y Me? and Why Not?, a.k.a. Self-Pity and Denial, two of the smily-faced Sergeant at 
Arms' more fearsome aides de camp. The Boston AA 'In Here' that protects against a 
return to 'Out There' is not about explaining what caused your Disease. It's about a 
goofily simple practical recipe for how to remember you've got the Disease day by day 
and how to treat the Disease day by day, how to keep the seductive ghost of a bliss long 
absconded from baiting you and hooking you and pulling you back Out and eating your 
heart raw and (if you're lucky) eliminating your map for good. So no whys or wherefores 
allowed. In other words check your head at the door. Though it can't be conventionally 
enforced, this, Boston AA's real root axiom, is almost classically authoritarian, maybe 



even proto-Fascist. Some ironist who decamped back Out There and left his meager 
effects to be bagged and tossed by Staff into the Ennet House attic had, all the way back 
in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, permanently engraved his tribute to AA's real 
Prime Directive with a rosewood-handled boot-knife in the plastic seat of the 5-Man 
men's room's commode: 

'Do not ask WHY If you dont want to DIE 
Do like your TOLD If you want to get OLD' 143 


30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


The choreography of interface had settled into the form of Steeply smoking, his bare 
arms crossed, going up and down slowly on the toes of his high heels, while Marathe 
hunched slightly in his metal chair, shoulders rounded and head slightly forward in a 
practiced position that allowed him almost to sleep while still attending to every detail 
of a conversation or wearisome surveillance. He (Marathe) had drawn his plaid blanket 
up to his chest. It was increasingly chilly at the altitude of the shelf. They could feel the 
remains of the U.S.A. Sonora Desert's heat rising past them into the clotted spangle of 
stars that were above them. The shirt Marathe wore beneath his windbreaker was not 
of Hawaiian type. 

Marathe remained unsure in this time of what exactly it was that Hugh Steeply of 
U.S.O.U.S. wished to learn from him, or verify, through Marathe's betrayal. Near 
midnight Steeply had given him the datum that he (Steeply) had been on the personal 
Marital Leave over his recent divorce, and was now back in the field of duty, wearing 
prosthetic breasts and woman-journalist credentials, assigned to cultivate some of the 
Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles. Marathe had made 
gentle fun of the inoriginality of a journalistic cover, then later less gentle fun of 
Steeply's cover's false name, expressing humored doubts that the meaty electrolysized 
face of Steeply would be responsible of launching even one ship or vessel. 


There'd been that first brutal winter night, early in the O.N.A.N.ite temporo-subsidized 
era, soon after the InterLace dissemination of The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was 
Made of Glass, that Himself emerged from the sauna and came to Lyle all sloppy-blotto 
and depressed over the fact that even the bastards in the avant-garde journals were 
complaining that even in his commercially entertaining stuff Incandenza's fatal Achilles' 



heel was plot, that Incandenza's efforts had no sort of engaging plot, no movement that 
sucked you in and drew you along . 144 Mario and Ms. Joelle van Dyne are probably the 
only people who know that Found Drama 145 and anticonfluentialism both came out of 
this night with Lyle. 


It's not like Boston AA recoils from the idea of responsibility, though. Cause: no; 
responsibility: yes. It seems like it all depends on which way the arrow of presumed 
responsibility points. The hard-faced adopted stripper had presented herself as the 
object of an outside Cause. Now the arrow comes back around as tonight's meeting's 
last and maybe best Advanced Basics speaker, another newcomer, a round pink girl with 
no eyelashes at all and a 'base-head's ruined teeth, gets up there and speaks in an r-less 
South Boston brogue about being pregnant at twenty and smoking Eightba I Is of 
freebase cocaine like a fiend all through her pregnancy even though she knew it was bad 
for the baby and wanted desperately to quit. She tells about having her water break and 
contractions start late one night in her welfare-hotel room when she was right in the 
middle of an Eightball she'd had to spend the evening turning unbelievably sordid and 
degrading tricks to pay for; she did what she had to do to get high, she says, even while 
pregnant, she says; and she says even when the pain of the contractions got to be too 
bad to bear she'd been unable to tear herself away from the 'base-pipe to go to the free 
clinic to deliver, and how she'd sat on the floor of the welfare-hotel room and freebased 
her way all through labor (that new Joelle girl's veil's billowing in and out with her 
breath, Gately sees, just like it also was during the last speaker's description of the 
statue's orgasm in the catatonic's dysfunctional Catholic mother's devotional photo); 
and how she'd finally delivered of a stillborn infant right there alone on her side like a 
cow on the rug of her room, all the time throughout still compulsively loading up the 
glass pipe and smoking; and how the infant emerged all dry and hard like a constipated 
turdlet, with no protective moisture and no afterbirth-material following it out, and how 
the emerged infant was tiny and dry and all withered and the color of strong tea, and 
dead, and also had no face, had in utero developed no eyes or nostrils and just a little 
lipless hyphen of a mouth, and its limbs were malformed and arachnodactylic, and there 
had been some sort of translucent reptilian like webbing between its mucronate digits; 
the speaker's mouth is a quivering arch of woe; her baby had been poisoned before it 
could grow a face or make any personal choices, it would have soon died of Substance- 
Withdrawal in the free clinic's Pyrex incubator if it had emerged alive anyway, she could 
tell, she'd been on such a bad 'base-binge all that pregnant year; and but so eventually 
the Eightball was consumed and then the screen and steel-wool ball in the pipe itself 
smoked and the cloth prep-filter smoked to ash and then of course likely-looking pieces 
of lint had been gleaned off the rug and also smoked, and the girl finally passed out, still 
umbilically linked to the dead infant; and how when she came to again in unsparing 
noonlight the next day and saw what still clung by a withered cord to her empty insides 
she got introduced to the real business-end of the arrow of responsibility, and as she 
gazed in daylight at the withered faceless stillborn baby she was so overcome with grief 
and self-loathing that she erected a fortification of complete and black Denial, like total 



Denial. She held and swaddled the dead thing just as if it were alive instead of dead, and 
she began to carry it around with her wherever she went, just as she imagined devoted 
mothers carry their babies with them everywhere they go, the faceless infant's corpse 
completely veiled and hidden in a little pink blanket the addicted expectant mother'd let 
herself buy at Woolworth's at seven months, and she also kept the cord's connection in¬ 
tact until her end of the cord finally fell out of her and dangled, and smelled, and she 
carried the dead infant everywhere, even when turning sordid tricks, because single 
motherhood or not she still needed to get high and still had to do what she had to do to 
get high, so she carried the blanket-wrapped infant in her arms as she walked the 
streets in her velvet fuchsia minipants and haltertop and green spike heels, turning 
tricks, until there began to be strong evidence, as she circled her block — it was August 
— let's just say compelling evidence that the infant in the stained cocoon of blanket in 
her arms was not a biologically viable infant, and passersby on the South Boston streets 
began to reel away white-faced as the girl passed by, stretch-marked and brown¬ 
toothed and lashless (lashes lost in a Substance-accident; fire hazard and dental 
dysplasia go with the freebase terrain) and also just hauntedly calm-looking, oblivious to 
the olfactory havoc she was wreaking in the sweltering streets, and but her August's 
trick-business soon fell off sharply, understandably, and eventually word that there was 
a serious infant-and-Denial problem here got around the streets, and her fellow Southie 
'base-heads and street-friends came to her with not ungentle r-less remonstrances and 
scented hankies and gently prying hands and tried to reason her out of her Denial, but 
she ignored them all, she guarded her infant from all harm and kept it clutched to her — 
it was by now sort of stuck to her and would have been hard to separate from her by 
hand anyway — and she'd walk the streets shunned and trickless and broke and in 
early-stage Substance-Withdrawal, with the remains of the dead infant's tummy's cord 
dangling out from an unclosable fold in the now ominously ballooned and crusty 
Woolworth's blanket: talk about Denial, this girl was in some major-league Denial; and 
but finally a pale and reeling beat-cop phoned a hysterical olfactory alert in to the 
Commonwealth's infamous Department of Social Services — Gately sees alcoholic moms 
all over the hall cross themselves and shudder at the mere mention of D.S.S., every 
addicted parent's worst nightmare, D.S.S., they of the several different abstruse legal 
definitions of Neglect and the tungsten-tipped battering ram for triple-locked apartment 
doors; in a dark window Gately sees one reflected mom sitting over with the Brighton 
AAs that has her two little girls with her in the meeting and now at the D.S.S. reference 
clutches them reflexively to her bosom, one head per bosom, as one of the girls 
struggles and dips her knees in the little curtsies of impending potty — but so now D.S.S. 
was on the case, and a platoon of blandly efficient Wellesley-alum D.S.S. field personnel 
with clipboards and scary black Chanel women's businesswear were now on the prowl 
in the South Boston streets for the addicted speaker and her late faceless infant; and 
but finally around this time, during last year's awful late-August heat wave, evidence 
that the infant had a serious bio-viability problem started presenting itself so forcefully 
that even the Denial-ridden addict in the mother could not ignore or dismiss it — 
evidence which the speaker's reticence about describing (save to say that it involved an 
insect-attraction problem) makes things all the worse for the empathetic White 



Flaggers, since it engages the dark imaginations all Substance-abusers share in surplus 
— and so but the mother says how she finally broke down, emotionally and olfactorily, 
from the overwhelming evidence, on the cement playground outside her own late 
mother's abandoned Project building off the L Street Beach in Southie, and a D.S.S. field 
team closed in for the pinch, and she and her infant got pinched, and special D.S.S. 
spray-solvents had to be sent for and utilized in order to detach the Wool worth baby- 
blanket from her maternal bosom, and the blanket's contents were more or less 
reassembled and were interred in a D.S.S. coffin the speaker recalls as being the size of a 
Mary Kay makeup case, and the speaker was medically informed by somebody with a 
clipboard from D.S.S. that the infant had been involuntarily toxified to death somewhere 
along in its development toward becoming a boy; and the mother, after a painful D&C 
for the impacted placenta she'd carried inside, then spent the next four months on the 
locked ward of Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham MA, psychotic with Denial- 
deferred guilt and cocaine-withdrawal and searing self-hatred; and how when she finally 
got discharged from Met State with her first S.S.I, mental-disability check she found she 
had no taste for chunks or powders, she wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels 
spoke of Proof, and she drank and drank and believed in her heart she would never stop 
or swallow the truth, but finally she got to where she had to, she says, swallow it, the 
responsible truth; how she quickly drank her way to the old two-option welfare-hotel 
window-ledge and made a blubbering 0200h. phone call, and then so here she is, 
apologizing for going on so long, trying to tell a truth she hopes someday to swallow, 
inside. So she can just try and live. When she concludes by asking them to pray for her it 
almost doesn't sound corny. Gately tries not to think. Here is no Cause or Excuse. It is 
simply what happened. This final speaker is truly new, ready: all defenses have been 
burned away. Smooth-skinned and steadily pinker, at the podium, her eyes squeezed 
tight, she looks like she's the one that's the infant. The host White Flaggers pay this 
burnt public husk of a newcomer the ultimate Boston AA compliment: they have to 
consciously try to remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without 
effort. There's no judgment. It's clear she's been punished enough. And it was basically 
the same all over, after all. Out There. And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so 
good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat 
still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker's face but into it, helps 
force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of 
them signed up for. 

They'd been the odd couple of libations, the muscled fitness-guru and the tall slope¬ 
shouldered optician/director, often down there in the weight room til all hours, sitting 
on the towel dispenser, drinking, Lyle with his Caffeine Free Diet Coke, Incandenza with 
his Wild Turkey. Mario literally standing by in case the ice bucket ran out or Himself 
needed moral support getting to the urinal. Mario often fell asleep as the hour got 
severe, drifted in and out, slept upright and leaning forward, weight borne by his police 
lock and lead receptacle. 

James Incandenza was one of those profound-personality-change drinkers who 
seemed quiet and centered and almost affectless when he was sober but would move 
way out to one side or the other of the human emotional spectrum, when drunk, and 



seem to open up in a way that was almost injudicious. 

Sometimes, libated late at night with Lyle in the newly outfitted E.T.A. weight room, 
Incandenza'd open up and pour his heart's thickest chyme right out there for all to be 
affected and potentially scarred by. E.g. one night Mario, leaning way forward into the 
police lock's support, drifted awake to the sound of his father saying that if he had to 
grade his marriage he'd give it a C-. This seems injudicious in the extreme, potentially, 
though Mario, like Lyle, tends to take data pretty much as it comes. 

Lyle, who sometimes would start to get tipsy himself as Himself's pores began to 
excrete the bourbon, often brought some Blake out, as in William Blake, during these 
all-night sessions, and read Incandenza Blake, but in the voices of various cartoon 
characters, which Himself eventually started regarding as deep. 146 


8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR 


If it's odd that Mario Incandenza's first halfway-coherent film cartridge — a 48-minute 
job shot three summers back in the carefully decorated janitor-closet of Subdorm B with 
his head-mount Bolex H64 and foot-treadle — if it's odd that Mario's first finished 
entertainment consists of a film of a puppet show — like a kids' puppet show — then it 
probably seems even odder that the film's proven to be way more popular with E.T.A.'s 
adults and adolescents than it is with the woefully historically underinformed children it 
had first been made for. It's proved so popular that it gets shown annually now every 
11/8, Continental Interdependence Day, on a wide-beam cartridge projector and stand- 
up screen in the E.T.A. dining hall, after supper. It's part of the gala but rather ironic 
annual celebration of l.-Day at an Academy whose founder had married a Canadian, and 
it usually gets under way about 1930h., the film, and everybody gathers in the dining 
hall, and watches it, and by Charles Tavis's festive fiat 147 everybody gets to two-handed 
snack instead of squeezing tennis balls while they watch, and not only that but normal 
E.T.A. dietary regulations are for an hour completely suspended, and Mrs. Clarke, the 
dietician out in the kitchen — a former Four-Star dessert chef normally relegated here 
to protein-conveyors and ways to vary complex carbs — Mrs. Clarke gets to put on her 
floppy white chef's hat and just go sucrotically mad, out in West House's gleaming 
kitchen. Everybody's supposed to wear some sort of hat — Avril Incandenza positively 
towers in the same steeple-crowned witch's hat she teaches all her classes in every 
10/31, and Pemulis wears the complex yachting cap and naval braid, and pale and 



blotchy Struck a toque with a kind of flitty aigrette, and Hal a black preacher's hat with a 
stern round downturned brim, etc. etc. 148 — and Mario, as director and putative author 
of the popular film, is encouraged to say a few words, like eight: 

'Thanks everybody and I hope you like it,' is what he said this year, with Pemulis 
behind him making a show of putting a maraschino on top of the small twizzle of Redi- 
Whip that 0. Stice had sprayed on the top of Mario's head-mount Bolex H64, which 
counts as a hat, when the dessert-course's zenith had gotten slightly out of control near 
the l.-Day gala supper's end. These few brief words and round of applause are Mario's 
big public yearly moment at E.T.A., and he neither likes the moment nor dislikes it — 
same with the untitled film itself, which really started out as just a kids' adaptation of 
The ONANtiad, a four-hour piece of tendentiously anticonfluential political parody long 
since dismissed as minor Incandenza by his late father's archivists. Mario's piece isn't 
really better than his father's; it's just different (plus of course way shorter). It's pretty 
obvious that somebody else in the Incandenza family had at least an amanuentic hand 
in the screenplay, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet-work 
personally — his little S-shaped arms and falcate digits are perfect for the forward curve 
from body to snout of a standard big-headed political puppet — and it was, without 
question, Mario's little square Hush Puppy on the H64's operant foot-treadle, the Bolex 
itself mounted on one of the tunnel's locked lab's Husky-VI TL tripods across the over lit 
closet, mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets carefully moved out past the frame's 
borders on either side of the little velvet stage. 

Ann Kittenplan and two older crew-cut girls sit in identical snap-brim fedoras with 
their arms crossed, Kittenplan's right hand bandaged. Mary Esther Thode is grading 
midterms on the sly. Rik Dunkel has his eyes closed but is not asleep. Somebody's 
slapped an ad hoc Red Sox cap on the visiting Syrian Satellite pro, and the Syrian 
Satellite pro sits with most of the prorectors, looking confused, his shoulder taped up 
with a heatable compress, being polite about the comparative authenticity of Mrs. C.'s 
baklava. 

Everyone gathers and all's quiet except for the sounds of saliva and chewing, and 
there's the yeasty-sweet smell of Coach Schtitt's pipe, and E.T.A.'s youngest kid Tina 
Echt in her giant beret gets to be in charge of the lights. 

Mario's thing opens without credits, just a crudely matted imposition of fake-linotype 
print, a quotation from President Gentle's second Inaugural: 'Let the call go forth, to 
pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched by a 
new and millennial generation of Americans,' against a full-facial still photo of a truly 
unmistakable personage. This is the projected face of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner. 
This is Johnny Gentle, ne Joyner, lounge singer turned teenybopper throb turned B- 
movie mainstay, for two long-past decades known unkindly as the 'Cleanest Man in 
Entertainment' (the man's a world-class retentive, the late-Howard-Hughes kind, the 
really severe kind, the kind with the paralyzing fear of free-floating contamination, the 
either-wear-a-surgical-microfiltration-mask-or-make-the-people-around-you-wear- 
surgical-caps-and-masks-and-touch-doorknobs-only-with-a-boiled-hankie-and-take- 
fourteen-showers-a-day-only-they're-not-exactly-showers-they're-with-this-Dermalatix- 
brand-shower-sized-Hypospectral-Flash-Booth-that-actually-like-burns-your-outermost- 



layer-of-skin-off-in-a-dazzling-flash-and-leaves-you-baby's-butt-new-and-sterile-once- 
you-wipe-off-the-coating-of-fine-epidermal-ash-with-a-boiled-hankie kind) then in later 
public life a sterile-toupee-wearing promoter and entertainment-union bigwig, Vegas 
schmaltz-broker and head of the infamous Velvety Vocalists Guild, the tanned, gold- 
chained labor union that enforced those seven months of infamously dreadful 'Live 
Silence,' 149 the total scab-free solidarity and performative silence that struck floor- 
shows and soundstages from Desert to NJ coast for over half a year until equitable 
compensation-formulae on certain late-millennial phone-order retrospective TV- 
advertised So-You-Don't-Forget-Order-Before-Midnight-Tonight-type records and CDs 
were agreed on by Management. Hence then Johnny Gentle, the man who brought 
GE/RCA to heel. And then thus, at the millennial fulcrum of very dark U.S. times, to 
national politics. The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are of Johnny Gentle, 
Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new 'Clean U.S. Party,' the 
strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt- 
deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain- 
Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers, 
a surreal union of both Rush L.- and Hillary R.C.-disillusioned fringes that drew 
mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile venue), the 
seemingly LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform's plank had been Let's 
Shoot Our Wastes Into Space, 150 C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three 
years, until — white-gloved finger on the pulse of an increasingly asthmatic and 
sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American electorate — the C.U.S.P. suddenly swept 
to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and 
LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on 
either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other's surely got 
it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a 
dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some 
places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and - 
Jihad era when — somehow even worse — there was no real Foreign Menace of any 
real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own 
philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in 
retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent 
silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear. This motionless face on the 
E.T.A. screen is Johnny Gentle, Third-Party stunner. Johnny Gentle, the first U.S. 
President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration 
speech. Whose new white-suited Office of Unspecified Services' retinue required 
Inauguration-attendees to scrub and mask and then walk through chlorinated footbaths 
as at public pools. Johnny Gentle, managing somehow to look presidential in a Fukoama 
microfiltration mask, whose Inaugural Address heralded the advent of a Tighter, Tidier 
Nation. Who promised to clean up government and trim fat and sweep out waste and 
hose down our chemically troubled streets and to sleep darn little until he'd fashioned a 
way to rid the American psychosphere of the unpleasant debris of a throw-away past, to 
restore the majestic ambers and purple fruits of a culture he now promises to rid of the 
toxic effluvia choking our highways and littering our byways and grungeing up our 



sunsets and cruddying those harbors in which televised garbage-barges lay stacked up at 
anchor, clotted and impotent amid undulating clouds of potbellied gulls and those 
disgusting blue-bodied flies that live on shit (first U.S. President ever to say shit publicly, 
shuddering), rusty-hulled barges cruising up and down petroleated coastlines or laying 
up reeky and stacked and emitting CO as they await the opening of new landfills and 
toxic repositories the People demanded in every area but their own. The Johnny Gentle 
whose C.U.S.P. had been totally up-front about seeing American renewal as an 
essentially aesthetic affair. The Johnny Gentle who promised to be the possibly 
sometimes unpopular architect of a more or less Spotless America that Cleaned Up Its 
Own Side of the Street. Of a new-era'd nation that looked out for Uno, of a one-time 
World Policeman that was now going to retire and have its blue uniform deep-dry- 
cleaned and placed in storage in triple-thick plastic dry-cleaning bags and hang up its 
cuffs to spend some quality domestic time raking its lawn and cleaning behind its 
refrigerator and dandling its freshly bathed kids on its neatly pressed mufti-pants' knee. 
A Gentle behind whom a diorama of the Lincoln Memorial's Lincoln smiled down 
benignly. A Johnny Gentle who was as of this new minute sending forth the call that 'he 
wasn't in this for a popularity contest' (Popsicle-stick-and-felt puppets in the Address's 
audience assuming puzzled-looking expressions above their tiny green surgical masks). A 
President J.G., F.C. who said he wasn't going to stand here and ask us to make some 
tough choices because he was standing here promising he was going to make them for 
us. Who asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show. Who handled wild applause 
from camouflage-fatigue- and sandal-and-poncho-clad C.U.S.P.s with the unabashed 
grace of a real pro. Who had black hair and silver sideburns, just like his big-headed 
puppet, and the dusty brick-colored tan seen only among those without homes and 
those whose homes had a Dermalatix Hypospectral personal sterilization booth. Who 
declared that neither Tax & Spend nor Cut & Borrow comprised the ticket into a whole 
new millennial era (here more puzzlement among the Inaugural audience, which Mario 
represents by having the tiny finger-puppets turn rigidly toward each other and then 
away and then toward). Who alluded to ripe and available Novel Sources of Revenue 
just waiting out there, unexploited, not seen by his predecessors because of the trees 
(?). Who foresaw budgetary adipose trimmed with a really big knife. The Johnny Gentle 
who stressed above all — simultaneously pleaded for and promised — an end to 
atomized Americans' fractious blaming of one another for our terrible 151 internal 
troubles. Here bobs and smiles from both wealthily green-masked puppets and 
homeless puppets in rags and mismatched shoes and with used surgical masks, all made 
by E.T.A.'s fourth -and fifth-grade crafts class, under the supervision of Ms. Heath, of 
match-sticks and Popsicle-stick shards and pool-table felt with sequins for eyes and 
painted fingernail-parings for smiles/frowns, under their masks. 

The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so 
hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just must be some people 
besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to. And he promises to eat 
light and sleep very little until he finds them — in the Ukraine, or the Teutons, or the 
wacko Latins. Or — pausing with that one arm up and head down in the climactic Vegas 
way — closer to right below our nose. He swears he'll find us some cohesion-renewing 



Other. And then make some tough choices. Alludes to a whole new North America for a 
crazy post-millennial world. First U.S. President ever to use boss as an adjective. His 
throwing his surgical gloves into the miniature Inaugural crowd as souvenirs is Mario's 
own touch. 

And Mario Incandenza's idea of representing President Gentle's cabinet as made up 
mostly of tall-coiffured black-girl puppets in shiny imbricate-sequin dresses is also of 
course historically inaccurate, though the honorary inclusion, in that cabinet's second 
year, of the Presidente of Mexico and the P.M. of Canada is both factual and of course 
seminal: 

PRES. MEX. AND P.M. CAN. [in unison and green-mask-muffled]: It is tremendously 
flattering to be invited to sit on the cabinet of the leadership of our beloved neighbor to 
the [choose one], 

GENTLE: Thanks, boys. You have gorgeous souls. 

It's not the cartridge's strongest scene, heavy on stock phrases and two-handed 
handshakes. But the historical fact that the Presidente of Mexico and P.M. of Canada 
are honorarily appointed by President Gentle to be 'Secretaries' of Mexico and Canada 
(respectively) — as if the neighbors had already become sort of post-millennial 
American protectorates — is foreshadowed as ominous by a wavered D-minor on the 
soundtrack's organ — Mrs. Clarke's Wurlitzer, at home — but the two leaders' 
respectively dusky and Gallic expressions seem unperturbed, under their green masks, 
as more stock phrases are invoked. 

Because budget and broom-closet constraints make artful transitions between scenes 
impractical, Mario has opted for the inter-scenic 'entr'acte' device of having Johnny 
Gentle, Famous Crooner doing some of his repertoire's bouncier numbers, with the 
cabinet-members undulating and harmonizing Motownishly behind him, and other 
puppets bouncing in tempo on- and offstage as the script requires. Audience-wise, most 
of the E.T.A.s under twelve, cortexes spangling with once-a-year sweets, have by now 
emigrated hyperactively under the long tables' tablecloths and met up on the dining-hall 
floor below and begun navigating on hands and knees the special children's second 
world of shins and chairlegs and tile that exists under long tablecloths, making various 
sorts of puerile trouble — investigations from last year's I. Day are still in progress w/r/t 
which kid or kids tied Aubrey deLint's shoelaces together and Krazy-Glued Mary Esther 
Thode's left buttock to the seat of her chair — but everyone glycemically mature 
enough to sit still and watch the cartridge is having a rousing good time, eating choco¬ 
late cannolis and twenty-six-layer baklava and Redi-Whip by itself if they want and 
homemade Raisinettes and little cream-filled caramel things and occasionally heckling 
or cheering ironically, every so often throwing sweets that stick to the screen, giving the 
smooth sterile Gentle a sort of carbuncular look that everyone approves. There is much 
cracking wise and baritone mimicry of a President roundly disliked for over two terms 
now. Only John Wayne and a handful of other Canadian students sit unhatted, chewing 
stolidly, faces blurred and distant. This American penchant for absolution via irony is 
foreign to them. The Canadian boys remember only hard facts, and the glass-walled 
Great Convexity whose southern array of ATHSCME Effectuators blow the tidy U.S.'s 
northern oxides north, toward home; and they feel with special poignancy on 11/8 the 



implications of their being down here, south of the border, training, in the land of their 
enemy-ally; and the less gifted among them wonder whether they'll ever get to go 
home again after graduation if a pro career or scholarship doesn't pan out. Wayne has a 
cloth hankie and keeps wiping his nose. 

Mario's openly jejune version of his late father's take on the rise of O.N.A.N. and U.S. 
Experialism unfolds in little diffracted bits of real news and fake news and privately- 
conceived dialogue between the architects and hard-choice-makers of a new millennial 
era: 

GENTLE: Another piece of pre-tasted cobbler, J.J.J.C.? 

P.M. CAN.: Couldn't. Stuffed. Having trouble breathing. I would not say no to another 
beer, however. 

GENTLE: ... 

P.M. CAN.: ... 

GENTLE: So we're sympatico on the gradual and subtle but inexorable disarmament 
and dissolution of NATO as a system of mutual-defense agreements. 

P.M. CAN. [Less muffled than last scene because his surgical mask gets to have a 
prandial hole]: We are side by side and behind you on this thing. Let the EEC pay for 
their oown defendings henceforth I say. Let them foot some defensive budgets and then 
try to subsidize their farmers into undercutting NAFTA. Let them eat butter and guns for 
their oown for once in a change. Hey? 

GENTLE: You said more than a mouthful right there, J.J. Now maybe we can all direct 
some cool-headed attention to our own infraternal affairs. Our own internal quality of 
life. Refocusing priorities back to this crazy continent we call home. Am I being dug? 

P.M. CAN: John, I am kilometers ahead of you. I happen to have my Term-ln-Office-At- 
A-Glance book right with me here. Now that the big frappeurs are being put doown, we 
are wondering what is the date I can be pencilling in for the removals of NATO ICBM 
frappeurs from Manitoba. 

GENTLE: Put that pencil away, you good-looking Canadian. I've got more long shiny 
trailer-rigs full of large men with very short haircuts and white suits than you can shake 
a maple leaf at heading for your silos right this very. Those complete totalities of 
Canada's strategic capacity'll be out of your hair toot sweet. 

P.M. CAN: John, let me be the first world leader to call you a statesman. 

GENTLE: We North Americans have to stick together, J.J.J.C., especially now, no? Am I 
off-base? We're interdependent. We're cheek to jowl. 

P.M. CAN: It is a smaller world, today. 

GENTLE: And an even smaller continent. 

This segues into an entr'acte, with continent squeezed in for world in 'It's a Small 
World After All,' which enjambment doesn't do the rhythm section of doo-wopping 
cabinet girls a bit of good, but does usher in the start of a whole new era. 


Though can any guru be held to a standard of like 100% exemption from the human 
pains of stunted desire? No. Not 100%. Regardless of level of transcendence, or diet. 
Lyle, down in the dark Interdependence Day weight room, sometimes recalls an E.T.A. 



player from several years back whose first name was Marlon and whose last name Lyle 
never to his knowledge learned. 152 

The thing about this Marlon was that he was always wet. Arms purling, T-shirt darkly 
V'd, face and forehead ever gleaming. Orin's Academy doubles partner. It had had a 
lemony, low-cal taste, the boy's omniwetness. It wasn't exactly sweat, because you 
could lick off the forehead and more beads instantly replaced what you'd taken. None of 
real sweat's frus-tratingly gradual accretion. The kid was always in the shower, always 
doing his best to stay clean. There were powders and pills and electrical appliques. And 
still this Marlon dripped and shone. The kid wrote accomplished juvenile verses about 
the dry clean boy inside, struggling to break the soggy surface. He shared extensively 
with Lyle. He confessed to Lyle one night in the quiet weight room that he'd gone in for 
high-level athletics mostly to have an excuse of some sort for being as wet as he was. It 
always looked like Marlon had been rained on. But it wasn't rain. It's like Marlon hadn't 
been dry since the womb. It's like he leaked. It had been a tormenting but also in certain 
ways halcyon few years, in the past. A tormentingly unspecific hope in the air. Lyle had 
told this boy everything he had to tell. 

It's raining tonight, though. As so often happens in autumn below the Great Concavity, 
P.M. snow has given way to rain. Outside the weight room's high windows a mean wind 
sweeps curtains of rain this way and that, and the windows shudder and drool. The sky 
is a mess. Thunder and lightning happen at the same time. The copper beech outside 
creaks and groans. Lightning claws the sky, briefly illuminating Lyle, seated lotus in 
Spandex on the towel dispenser, leaning forward to accept what is offered in the dark 
weight room. The idle resistance-machines look insectile in the lightning's brief light. 
The answer to some of the newer kids' complaints about what on earth Lyle can be 
doing down there at night in a locked empty weight room is that the nighttime weight 
room is rarely empty. The P.M. custodians Kenkle and Brandt do lock it up, but the door 
can be dickied by even the clumsiest insertion of an E.T.A. meal-card between latch and 
jamb. The kitchen crew always wonders why so many meal-cards' edges always look 
ravaged. Though the idle machines are scary and the room smells somehow worse in 
the dark, they come most at night, the E.T.A.s who are on to Lyle. They hit the saunas 
out by the cement stairs until they've got enough incentive on their skin, then they lurk, 
purled and shiny, in towels, by the weight room door, waiting to enter one by one, 
sometimes several E.T.A.s, dripping in towels, not speaking, some pretending to have 
other business down there, lurking in the eye-averted attitudes of like patients in the 
waiting room of an impotence clinic or shrink. They have to be real quiet and the lights 
stay off. It's like the administration'll turn a blind eye as long as you make it plausible to 
do so. From the dining hall, whose east wall of windows faces Comm.-Ad., you can hear 
very muffled laughter and kibitzing and the occasional scream from Mario's 
Interdependent puppet thing. A quiet slow small stream of yellow-slickered wet-shoed 
migrations back and forth between West House and the weight room — people know 
the slow parts, the times to duck out and go very briefly down to Lyle, to confer. They 
dicky the lock and go in one by one, in towels. Proffer beaded flesh. Confront the sorts 
of issues reserved for nighttime's gurutical tete-a-tete, whispers made echoless by 
rubberized floors and much damp laundry. 



Sometimes Lyle will listen and shrug and smile and say 'The world is very old 1 or some 
such general Remark and decline to say much else. But it's the way he listens, somehow, 
that keeps the saunas full. 

Lightning claws the eastern sky, and it's neat in the weight room's dark because Lyle is 
in a slightly different position and forward angle each time he's illuminated through the 
window up over the grip/wrist/forearm machines to his left, so it looks like there are 
different Lyles at different ful-gurant moments. 

LaMont Chu, glabrous and high-gloss in a white towel and wristwatch, haltingly 
confesses to an increasingly crippling obsession with tennis fame. He wants to get to the 
Show so bad it feels like it's eating him alive. To have his picture in shiny magazines, to 
be a wunderkind, to have guys in blue l/SPN blazers describe his every on-court move 
and mood in hushed broadcast cliches. To have little patches with products' names 
sewn onto his clothes. To be soft-profiled. To get compared to M. Chang, lately expired; 
to get called the next Great Yellow U.S. Hope. Let's not even talk about video magazines 
or the Grid. He confesses it to Lyle: he wants the hype; he wants it. Sometimes he'll 
pretend a glowing up-at-net action shot he's clipping out of a shiny magazine is of him, 
LaMont Chu. But then he finds he can't eat or sleep or sometimes even pee, so horribly 
does he envy the adults in the Show who get to have up-at-net action shots of 
themselves in magazines. Sometimes, he says, lately, he won't take risks in tournament 
matches even when risks are OK or even called for, because he finds he's too scared of 
losing and hurting his chances for the Show and hype and fame, down the road. A 
couple times this year the cold clenched fear of losing has itself made him lose, he 
believes. He's starting to fear that rabid ambition has more than one blade, maybe. He's 
ashamed of his secret hunger for hype in an academy that regards hype and the 
seduction of hype as the great Mephistophelan pitfall and hazard of talent. A lot of 
these are his own terms. He feels himself in a dark world, inside, ashamed, lost, locked 
in. LaMont Chu is eleven and hits with two hands off both sides. He doesn't mention the 
Eschaton or having been punched in the stomach. The obsession with future-tense fame 
makes all else pale. His wrists are so thin he wears his watch halfway up his forearm, 
which looks sort of gladiatorial. 

Lyle has a way of sucking on the insides of his cheeks as he listens. Plates of old ridged 
muscle emerge and subside as he shifts his weight slightly on the raised towel dispenser. 
The dispenser's at about shoulder-height for someone like Chu. Like all good listeners, 
he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels 
both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment. It's like he's 
working as hard as you. You both of you, briefly, feel unalone. Lyle will suck in first one 
side's cheek and then the other. 'You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.' 'I'm 
afraid so.' 'Why again exactly, now?' 'I guess to be felt about as I feel about those 
players with their pictures in magazines.' 'Why?' 'Why? I guess to give my life some sort 
of kind of meaning, Lyle.' 'And how would this do this again?' 'Lyle, I don't know. I do not 
know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take 
risks, not sleep or pee?' 'You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care 
deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.' 'I do. 
They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?' 'The meaning 



they feel, you mean. From the fame.' 'Lyle, don't they ?' Lyle sucks his cheeks. It's not 
like he's condescending or stringing you along. He's thinking as hard as you. It's like he's 
you in the top of a clean pond. It's part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost 
caves in, thinking. 'LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first 
magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the 
hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you 
trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care 
only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their 
privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. 
Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men 
do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their 
photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.' 'Is 
this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.' 'LaMont, are you willing to listen to 
a Remark about what is true?' 'Okey-dokey.' 'The truth will set you free. But not until it 
is finished with you.' 'Maybe I ought to be getting back.' 'LaMont, the world is very old. 
You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You 
have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a 
flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang's enjoyable 
feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.' 'Animal?' 'You burn with 
hunger for food that does not exist.' 'This is good news?' 'It is the truth. To be envied, 
admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, 
but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.' 
'The burning doesn't go away?' 'What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself 
they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy 
fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you 
weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.' 'Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn't 
make me feel very much better at all?' 'LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, 
incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its 
oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.' 'So I'm 
stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out.' 
'You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness 
of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right... there...' Etc. 

The thunder's died down to a mutter, and the window's spatter's gone random and 
post-storm sad. 

An E.T.A. female (female students wear two different towels, coming in), a breastless 
senior who can barely perspire at all, is troubled, whenever she has lunch with her 
fiance, by the persistent whine of a mosquito that she can't see and no one else can 
hear. Summer and winter, indoors or alfresco. But only at lunch, and only with her 
fiance. Remarks or advice are not always the point. Sometimes suffering's point is 
almost crying out in a high-pitched whine to be heard. As fitness gurus go, Lyle is results- 
oriented and can-do. 153 Ten-year-old Kent Blott, whose parents are Seventh-Day 
Adventists, isn't yet old enough to masturbate, but he hears quite a lot about it, not 
surprisingly, from his adolescent peers, in rather lush detail, masturbation, and is 
worried about what sorts of homemade-type potentially wicked and soul-sapping 



pornographic cartridges will run through his psychic projector as he masturbates, when 
he eventually can masturbate, and worries about whether different sorts of fantasy 
scenes and combinations herald different sorts of psychic dysfunction or turpitude, and 
wants to get a good jump on worrying about it. The sounds of the dining hall's gala are 
more frequent and convulsive without the sound of rain. Lyle tells Blott not to let the 
weight he would pull to himself exceed his own personal weight. Up to the left the 
storm's clouds' stragglers run like ink in water between the window and the risen moon. 
Mario Incandenza's presidential puppet is just about to inaugurate Subsidized Time. 16- 
B's Anton Doucette's been driven to Lyle he says by an increasing self-consciousness 
about the big round dark raised mole on his upper-upper lip, just under his left nostril. 
It's only a mole but looks pretty dire, nasally. People who first meet him are always 
pulling him off to the side and handing him a Kleenex. Doucette lately wishes either the 
mole were gone or he were gone. Even if people don't stare at the mole it's like they're 
intentionally not staring at it. Doucette pounds himself in the chest and thigh, 
supposedly in frustration. He just cannot come to terms with how it must look. It's 
getting worse as puberty intensifies, the anxiety. Then in a vicious cycle the anxiety 
prompts the nervous tic on his face's right side. He's starting to suspect that some 
upperclassmen are referring to him behind his back as Anton ('Booger') Doucette. It's 
like he's frozen on this anxiety, unable to move on to more advanced anxieties. He can't 
see any way past this. The pounding is more a sign of intense unconscious self-hatred, 
though, Lyle knows. Doucette grimaces and says he's starting to want to play tennis with 
his hand over his nose and upper lip. But he has a two-handed backhand and it's too late 
to switch and there's no way they're going to let him switch to one hand just for 
aesthetic reasons. Lyle sends Anton Doucette packing off with directions to come on 
back with Mario Incandenza the minute the l.-Day gala lets out. Mario gets a fair 
number of aesthetic-self-consciousness referrals from Lyle. No type or rank of guru is 
above delegating. It's like a law. Doucette says it's like he's stuck. It's becoming all he 
thinks about. This is on his way out. His back's additional moles form no outline or 
shape. Lyle pops the tab to a C.F.D.C. Mario tends to bring down most evenings around 
suppertime. In between door-dickyings and visits Lyle does little isometric neck- 
stretches, for the tension. 


Between Gerhardt Schtitt's pipe and Avril Incandenza's Benson & Hedges and certain 
cheeks full of chewing tobacco — plus the maddening cooking-smells of honey and 
chocolate and real high-lipid walnuts from the kitchen vents, plus over 150 very fit 
bodies only some of which have been showered on this day off — the dining hall is 
warm and close and multi-odored. Mario as auteur opts for his late father's parodic 
device of mixing real and fake news-summary cartridges, magazine articles, and 
historical headers from the last few great daily papers, all for a sort of time-lapse 
exposition of certain developments leading up to Interdependence and Subsidized Time 
and cartographic Reconfiguration and the renewal of a tight and considerably tidier 
Experialist U.S. of A., under Gentle: 

UKRAINE, TWO MORE BALTIC STATES APPLY FOR NATO INCLUSION- 16-point bold 



Header; 

SO THEN WHY A NATO? - Editorial Header; 

E.E.C. SIDES WITH PACIFIC RIM, UPS TARIFFS IN RESPONSE TO U.S. QUOTAS - Header; 

GENTLE ON WASTE STORAGE FROM DISMANTLED NATO THERMS: 'NOT IN MY 
NATION, BABE 1 - 12-point Subheader; 

'Amid smiles and two-handed handshakes that belied the high tensions here, the 
leaders of twelve out of fifteen NATO nations today signed an accord effectively 
dismantling the Western Bloc's fifty-five-year-old defensive alliance.' — News-Summary 
Cartridge Voiceover; 

U.S., CANADIAN SUPPORT CUTS DOOMED NATO SUMMIT FROM START, ICELANDIC 
POL DECLARES - Header; 

SO THEN WHY NOT A CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE, NOW, MAYBE? - Editorial Header; 

MEXICO SIGNS ON FOR 'ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS 1 
CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE; BUT QUEBEC SEPARATISTS RALLY AGAINST 'FINLANDIZATION' 
OF 'O.N.A.N.' ALLIANCE; BUT GENTLE TO CANADA: UNLESS 'O.N.A.N.' TREATY SIGNED, 
NAFTA NULL, MANITOBAN THERMS STAY PUT, INTRACONTINENTAL POLLUTION AND 
WASTE DISPOSAL EACH NATION'S 'INTERESTS TO PURSUE TO THE BEST THEY SEE FIT 1 - 
Header from Veteran but Methamphetamine-Dependent Headliner Finally Demoted 
after Repeated Warnings about Taking up Too Much Space; 

FED WORKERS PROTEST RANDOM FINGERNAIL-HYGIENE SCREENS - 12-point Header; 

GENTLE PROPOSES NATIONALIZATION OF INTERLACE TELENT -Header; SAYS GOVT IN 
LINE FOR 'PIECE OF THE ACTION' ON VIDEO, CARTRIDGE, DISK RENTALS - 8-point 
subheader; 

BURGER KING'S PILLSBURY AWARDED RIGHTS TO NEW YEAR - Header; 

PIZZA HUT'S PEPSICO FILES BID-RIGGING COMPLAINT WITH IRS - 12-point 
Subheader; 

CALENDAR AND PREPRINTED CHECK INDUSTRIES STOCKS SOAR - 8-point subheader; 

Three blue-jawed convicts in antiquated stripes dicky their cell's lock and run, backed 
by sirens and searchlights' crisscrossed play, not for the wall but straight to the 
Warden's empty nighttime office, where they sit rapt before his old dual-modem 
Macintosh, slapping their knees and pointing to the monitor and elbowing each other in 
the ribs, nibbling at inexplicably-appeared boxes of popcorn, with a Voiceover: 
'Cartridges by Modem! Just Insert a Blank Diskette! Break Free of the Confinement of 
Your Channel Selector!' — Some more of Ms. Heath's classes' puppets in a B-film parody 
of the InterLace TelEntertainment ads that the cable networks seemed so mysteriously 
suicidally to run all the time that last year of Unsubsidized Time; 

O.N.A.N. PACT PENNED — 24-point Superheader; 

CANADA 'NUCK'LES UNDER - Tabloidish NY Daily's 24-point Superheader; 

ACID RAIN, LANDFILLS, BARGES, FUSION-TECH, MANITOBAN THERMS WERE ’BIG 
STICKS,' CHRETIEN ADMITS-16-point Header; 

SHORT-HAIRED MEN IN SHINY TRUCKS ARE NOT DISMANTLING MANITOBAN THERMS 
BUT INSTEAD MOVING THEM JUST OVER BORDER INTO TURTLE MTN. INDIAN 
RESERVATION, HORRIFIED N.D. GOV CHARGES - 12-point Subheader from Demoted 
Headliner Already in Dutch Down in the Subheader Dept., Now, Too; 



EXCLUSIVE COLOR PHOTOS SHOW BRAVE DOCS FUTILELY FIGHTING TIME TO REMOVE 
RAILROAD SPIKE FROM CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER'S RIGHT EYE - Tabloidish NY Daily's 
16-point Header; 

PRESIDENT'S OFFICE IS 'A ANALLY RETENTIVE HORROR SHOW SAYS THIS JUST RETIRED 
WHITE HOUSE CUSTODIAN —Tabloid Header with Photo of Old Guy with Basically One 
Eyebrow Running All the Way across His Forehead Holding up a Mammoth Plastic Barrel 
He Claims Held Just One Day's Haul of Dental Stimulators, Alcohol-Soaked Cotton Puffs, 
Gl-X-Ray-Grade Colonic Purgative Bottles, Epidermal Ash, Surgical Masks and Gloves, Q- 
Tips, Kleenex, and Homeopathic Pruritis-Cream Containers; 

U.S.O.U.S. CHIEF TINE: CHARGES OF AN OVAL OFFICE LITTERED WITH KLEENEX AND 
FLOSS A 'CLEAR CASE OF DIRTY TRICKS' - Respectable Daily Header; 

OVERLOADED WASTE BARGES COLLIDE, CAPSIZE OFF GLOUCESTER - Boston Daily 
Header; 

HUGE PUTRID SLICK EMPTIES BEACHES OFF BOTH SHORES, CAPE - Equally Large 
Subheader; 

GENTLE SPEAKS OUT ON A U.S. 'CONSTIPATEDLY IMPACTED ON CONTINENTAL WASTE' 
AT U.N.L.V. COMMENCEMENT-Header; 

AD COUNCIL REPORT: BOSTON'S VINEY & VEALS AGENCY'S LIPOSUCTION AND 
TONGUE-STICK CAMPAIGNS NOT TO BLAME FOR ABC HQ BOMB THREATS - Advertising 
Age Header; 

'The Governors of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire today reacted strongly to 
President Gentle's establishment of a blue-ribbon panel of waste experts to investigate 
the feasibility of mass landfill and conversion sites in northern New England' — 
Respectable NY Daily's Lead 'Graph; 

'WE ARE NOT THIS CONTINENT'S SIGMOID COLON,' GENTLE WARNS O.N.A.N. JOINT 
SESSION - Header; 

BETHESDA MD'S: STRICKEN PRESIDENT CONFINED FOR 'HYGIENIC STRESS' FOLLOWING 
INCOHERENT O.N.A.N. ADDRESS -Header; 

HOLOGRAPHY MAKES ULTRA-TOXIC FUSION GAMBIT SAFE FOR WORKERS, 
COMMUNITY, D.O.E. REP ASSURES METHUEN P.T.A. - Boston Daily Header; 

GENTLE OUT OF BETHESDA NAVAL HOSP CONFINEMENT, TO ADDRESS U.S. CONGRESS 
ON 'RECONFIGURATIVE OPTIONS' FOR 'TIGHT, TIDIER NATIONAL ERA' - Header, all 
these twirling journalistically out from a black-acetate (one of 0. Stice’s old Fila warm-up 
tops) background in vintagely allusive old-b&w-film style, with a sonic background of 
that sad sappy Italianate stuff Scorcese had loved for his own montages, with the 
headlines lap-dissolving into transverse-angled shots of a modest, green-masked Gentle 
accepting tight-lipped handshakes from Mexican and Canadian officials in an agreement 
to make the U.S. President the first Chair of the Organization of North American 
Nations, with Mexican Presidente and new heavily guarded Canadian P.M. to be co-Vice 
Chairs. Gentle's first State of the O.N.A.N. Address, delivered before a triple-size 
Congress on the very last day of 'B.S.' solar time, holds out the promise of a whole bright 
spanking new millennium of sacrifices and rewards and Interdependence's 'not 
impossibly radically altered new look,' continent-wide. 



Do not underestimate objects! Lyle says he finds it impossible to over-stress this: do 
not underestimate objects. Partridge KS's serve-and-volley prodigy Ortho ('The 
Darkness 1 ) Stice, 16-A's very top man, whose sauna-fresh torso gleams the same color as 
the moonlight off the idle weights' metal, is being driven right to the edge by the fact 
that he goes to sleep with his bed against one wall and then but wakes up with his bed 
against a whole nother wall. Stice'd already had a whole series of beefs with roommate 
Kyle D. Coyle because he'd figured clearly Coyle was moving Stice's bed around in Stice's 
sleep. But then Coyle got put in the infirmary with a suspicious discharge, and he's been 
out of the room for the last two nights, Coyle, and here Stice is still waking up with his 
bed against a different wall. So then he thought like Axford or Struck was dickying his 
door with a meal-card and sneaking in really late and messing with Stice's bed out of 
obscure motives. So but last night Stice jammed a chair up against his door and piled 
empty tennis-ball cans on the chair to make a racket if there was any dickying, and lined 
up still more cans on the sills of all three windows, just to cover all bases; and but so the 
reason he's here is this A.M. he wakes up with his bed moved over against the chair by 
the door at an angle he didn't care for one bit and with all the ball-cans arranged in a 
neat pyramid in the dusty rectangle where his bed was supposed to normally be. Ortho 
Stice can think of only three possible explanations for what's going on, and he presents 
them to an attentive cheek-sucking Lyle in ascending order of grimness. One is that Stice 
is telekinetic, but only in his sleep. Two is that somebody else at E.T.A. is telekinetic and 
has it in for Stice and wants to drive him batsoid for some reason. Three is that Stice is 
like getting up in his sleep and rearranging the room without knowing it or remembering 
it, which means he's a severe fucking somnambulist, which means Lord only knows what 
all else he could get up and wander around and do in his sleep. He's got promise, the 
Staff say; he's got a quite legit shot at the Show when he graduates. Which he does not 
want to mess up with any sort of telekinetic or somnambulistical shenanigans. Stice 
offers up the planes of his torso and forehead. He wears one of his own personal towels, 
a black one. He is slim but wiry and beautifully muscled, and sweats freely and well. He 
says he knows too well he'd neglected Lyle's advice about the pull-down station two 
years back, and regrets it. He wholeheartedly apologizes for the time last spring he got 
Struck and Axford to distract Lyle and then Krazy-Glued Lyle's left buttock's Spandex to 
the wooden top of the towel dispenser. Stice says he realizes he's the last guy with any 
right to come to Lyle cap in hand after all the cracks about the diet and hairstyle and all. 
But here he is, cap in hand, or rather calotte in hand, offering up his sauna'd planes, 
asking for Lyle's input. 

Lyle waves bygones away like a gnat you barely look at. He is completely engaged. The 
lightning now far off out over the Atlantic treats him like a weak strobe. Do not 
underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, 
after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects. Lyle leans in, waves Stice up 
even closer, and consents to tell Stice the story of this one man he once knew of. This 
man earned his living by going to various public sites where people congregated and 
were bored and impatient and cynical, he'd go in and bet people that he could stand on 
any chair in the place and then lift that chair up off the ground while standing on it. A 



bootstrap-type scenario. His M.O. is he climbs up on a chair and stands there and says 
publicly Hey, I can lift this chair I stand on. A bystander holds the bets. The idle bus- 
depot or DMV-waiting-area or hospital-lobby crowd is dumbstruck. They gaze up at a 
man who is standing 100% on top of a chair he has grabbed the back of and raised 
several m. off the ground. There is vigorous speculation about how the trick's done, 
which gives rise to side-bet action. A devoutly religious experimental oncologist dying of 
his own inoperable colorectal neoplastis moans Why oh why Lord do You give this man 
this idiotic picayune power and I no power over my own ravening colorectal cells. There 
are numerous silent variations on this sort of meditation in the crowd. The bet won, the 
$ finally forked over and handed up to him, the man Lyle says he once knew of now 
jumps back down to the floor, incidental change spraying from his pockets on impact, 
straightens his tie, and walks off, leaving behind a dumbfounded crowd still staring up at 
an object he had not underestimated. 


Like most young people genetically hard-wired for a secret drug problem, Hal 
Incandenza also has severe compulsion-issues around nicotine and sugar. Because 
smoking will simply kill you during drills, only Bridget Boone, a steroidic Girls' 16 named 
Carol Spodek, and one or the other of the Vaught twins are masochistic enough to do it, 
though Teddy Schacht has been known to enjoy the occasional panatela. The nicotine 
craving Hal tries to mollify as best he can by dipping Kodiak Wintergreen Smokeless 
Tobacco several times daily, spitting into either a cherished old childhood NASA glass or 
the empty can of Spiru-Tein High Protein Breakfast Beverage that even now sits — given 
a wide berth by all others — next to a small pile of the tennis balls the table's kids don't 
have to squeeze as long as they're eating. Hal's more serious problem is with sucrose — 
the Hope-smoker's ever-beckoning siren — because he craves it always and awfully, Hal 
does — sugar — but finds now lately that any sugar-infusion above the level of a 56- 
gram AminoPal High Energy Bar now induces odd and unpleasant emotional states that 
don't do him one bit of good on court. 

Sitting here preacher-hatted, with a mouth full of multilayered baklava, Hal knows 
perfectly well that Mario gets his fetish for cartridges about puppets and entr'actes and 
audiences from their late father. Himself, during his anticonfluential middle period, 
went through this subphase of being obsessed with the idea of audiences' relationships 
with various sorts of shows. Hal doesn't even want to think about the grim one about 
the carnival of eyeballs. 154 But this one other short high-tech one was called 'The 
Medusa v. The Odalisque' and was a film of a fake stage-production at Ford's Theater in 
the nation's capital of Wash. DC that, like all his audience-obsessed pieces, had cost 
Incandenza a real bundle in terms of human extras. The extras in this one are a well- 
dressed audience of guys in muttonchops and ladies with paper fans who fill the place 
from first row to the rear of the balcony's boxes, and they're watching an incredibly 
violent little involuted playlet called 'The Medusa v. The Odalisque,' the relatively 
plotless plot of which is just that the mythic Medusa, snake-haired and armed with a 
sword and well-polished shield, is fighting to the death or petrification against 
L'Odalisque de Ste. Therese, a character out of old Quebecois mythology who was 



supposedly so inhumanly gorgeous that anyone who looked at her turned instantly into 
a human-sized precious gem, from admiration. A pretty natural foil for the Medusa, 
obviously, the Odalisque has only a nail-file instead of a sword, but also has a well- 
wielded hand-held makeup mirror, and she and the Medusa are basically rumbling for 
like twenty minutes, leaping around the ornate stage trying to de-map each other with 
blades and/or de-animate each other with their respective reflectors, which each leaps 
around trying to position just right so that the other gets a glimpse of its own full-frontal 
reflection and gets instantly petrified or gemified or whatever. In the cartridge it's pretty 
clear from their milky-pixeled translucence and insubstantiality that they're holograms, 
but it's not clear what they're supposed to be on the level of the playlet, whether the 
audience is supposed to see/(not)see them as ghosts or wraiths or 'real' mythic entities 
or what. But it's a ballsy fight-scene up there on the stage — having been intricately 
choreographed by an Oriental guy Himself rented from some commercial studio and put 
up in the HmH, who ate like a bird and smiled very politely all the time and didn't have 
even a word to say to anybody, it seemed, except Avril, to whom the Oriental 
choreographer had cottoned right off — balletic and full of compelling little cornerings 
and near-misses and reversals, and the theater's audience is rapt and clearly 
entertained to the gills, because they keep spontaneously applauding, as much maybe 
for the film's play's choreography as anything else — which would make it more like 
spontaneously meta-applauding, Hal supposes — because the whole fight-scene has to 
be ingeniously choreographed so that both combatants have their respectively scaly and 
cream-complected backs 155 to the audience, for obvious reasons ... except as the shield 
and little mirror get whipped martially around and brandished at various strategic 
angles, certain members of the playlet's well-dressed audience eventually start catching 
disastrous glimpses of the combatants' fatal full-frontal reflections, and instantly get 
transformed into like ruby statues in their front-row seats, or get petrified and fall like 
embolized bats from the balcony's boxes, etc. The cartridge goes on like this until 
there's nobody left in the Ford's Theater seats animate enough to applaud the nested 
narrative of the fight-scene play, and it ends with the two aesthetic foils still rumbling 
like mad before an audience of varicolored stone. 'The Medusa v. The Odalisque' 's own 
audiences didn't think too much of the thing, because the film audience never does get 
much of a decent full-frontal look at what it is about the combatants that supposedly 
has such a melodramatic effect on the rumble's live audience, and so the film's audience 
ends up feeling teased and vaguely cheated, and the thing had only a regional release, 
and the cartridge rented like yesterday's newspapers, and it's now next to impossible to 
find. But that wasn't by any stretch of the imagination the James 0. Incandenza film that 
audiences hated the most. The most hated Incandenza film, a variable-length one called 
The Joke , had only a very brief theatrical release, and then only at the widely scattered 
last remains of the pre-InterLace public art-film theaters in arty places like Cambridge 
MA and Berkeley CA. And InterLace never considered it for Pulse-Order rerelease, for 
obvious reasons. The art-film theaters' marquees and posters and ads for the thing were 
all required to say something like 'THE JOKE': You Are Strongly Advised NOT To Shell Out 
Money to See This Film, which art-film habitues of course thought was a cleverly ironic 
anti-ad joke, and so they'd shell out for little paper theater tickets and file in in their 



sweater vests and tweeds and dirndls and tank up on espresso at the concession stand 
and find seats and sit down and make those little pre-movie leg and posture 
adjustments, and look around with that sort of vacant intensity, and they'd figure the 
tri-lensed Bolex H32 cameras — one held by a tall stooped old guy and one complexly 
mounted on the huge head of the oddly forward-listing boy with what looked like a steel 
spike coming out of his thorax — the big cameras down by the red-lit EXITS on either 
side of the screen, the patrons figured, were there for like an ad or an anti-ad or a 
behind-the-scenes metafilmic documentary or something. That is, until the lights went 
down and the film started up and what was on the wide public screen was just a wide¬ 
angled binoculated shot of this very art-film theater's audience filing in with espressos 
and finding seats and sitting down and looking around and getting adjusted and saying 
knowledgeable little pre-movie things to their thick-lensed dates about what the Don't- 
Pay-To-See-This ad and Bolex cameras probably signified, artistically, and settling in as 
the lights dimmed and facing the screen (i.e. now themselves, it turns out) with the 
coolly excited smiles of highbrow-entertainment expectation, smiles which the cameras 
and screen's projection now revealed as just starting to drop from the faces of the 
audience as the audience saw row after row of itself staring back at it with less and less 
expectant and more and more blank and then puzzled and then eventually pissed-off 
facial expressions. The Joke's total running time was just exactly as long as there was 
even one cross-legged patron left in the theater to watch his own huge projected image 
gazing back down at him with the special distaste of a disgusted and ripped-off-fee ling 
art-film patron, which ended up being more than maybe twenty minutes only when 
there were critics or film-academics in the seats, who studied themselves studying 
themselves taking notes with endless fascination and finally left only when the espresso 
finally impelled them to the loo, at which point Himself and Mario would have to 
frantically pack up cameras and lens-cases and coaxials and run and totter like hell to 
catch the next cross-country flight from Cambridge to Berkeley or Berkeley to 
Cambridge, since they obviously had to be there all set up and Bolex'd for each showing 
at each venue. Mario said Lyle had said Incandenza had confessed that he'd loved the 
fact that The Joke was so publicly static and simple-minded and dumb, and that those 
rare critics who defended the film by arguing at convolved length that the simple- 
minded stasis was precisely the film's aesthetic thesis were dead wrong, as usual. It's 
still unclear whether it was the Eyeball-and-Sideshow thing or 'The Medusa v....' or The 
Joke that had metamorphosized into their late father's later involvement with the 
hostilely anti-Real genre of 'Found Drama,' which was probably the historical zenith of 
self-consciously dumb stasis, but which audiences never actually even got to hate, for a- 
priori reasons. 


FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER - Header; 

BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER- 12-point 
Subheader; 

GENTLE PROMISES SKEPTICAL CUB SCOUT CONVENTION 'YOU'LL BE ABLE TO EAT 
RIGHT OFF' TERRITORIAL U.S. BY END OF TERM'S FIRST YEAR - Header; 



ANOTHER LOVE CANAL? - 24-point Superheader; 

TOXIC HORROR ACCIDENTALLY UNCOVERED IN UPSTATE NEW HAMPSHIRE- 16-point 
Header-sized Subheader; 

'New Hampshire environmental officials yesterday flatly denied that vast collections of 
drums leaking industrial solvents, chlorides, benzenes and oxins had been quote 
"stumbled on" by 18 federal EPA staffers playing a casual game of softball east of Berlin, 
NH, claiming instead that the corroded receptacles had been placed there against 
statute by large men with white body suits and short haircuts in long shiny trailer trucks 
with O.N.A.N.'s official crest, a sombreroed eagle with a maple leaf in its mouth, 
stencilled on the sides. In the nation's capital, a quote "full and energetic investigation" 
has been promised by the Gentle administration into claims by residents of Berlin, NH 
and Rumford, ME that the incidence of soft-skulled and extra-eyed newborns in the 
toxicly affected area far exceeds the national average.' — $3.75 U.S. Nightly-Rental 
News Cartridge Anchor Lead; 

SUB ROSA FUSION-IN-POISONOUS-ENVIRONMENT TEST SITE ALLEGED AT 
MONTPELIER, VT — Scientific North American Header; 

MY BABY HAS SIX EYES AND BASICALLY NO SKULL - Lurid Color 32-point Tabloid 
Header, Dateline Lancaster NH; 

FED EPA SOFTBALLERS ALLEGE TWO MORE 'POISONOUS WASTE HORRORFEST' 
ILLEGAL DUMP SITES 'STUMBLED OVER' NEAR NORTH SYRACUSE, HISTORIC 
TICONDEROGA - NYC Daily Header; 

THE FINE ART OF FEDERAL STUMBLING: A WHOLE LOT OF SOFTBALL GOING ON - 
Editorial Header in Syracuse NY's Post-Standard; 

CANADIAN P.M. DENIES SECRET MINIATURE GOLF OUTING WITH OUTRAGED NEW 
ENGLAND GOVS — Surprisingly Small 3rd-Page 10-point Header; 

GENTLE SHOCKER — Pearl-Harbor-Sized 32-point Super-superheader Almost Too Big 
to Read Clearly; 

MAYFLOWER, RED BALL, ALLIED, U-HAUL STOCKS SOAR- 16-point Financial Daily 
Subheader; 

TWO NORTHEAST GOVS HOSPITALIZED FOR INFARCTION, ANEURISM- 10-point 
Subheader; 

GENTLE DECLARES ALL U.S. TERRITORY NORTH OF LINE FROM SYRACUSE TO 
TICONDEROGA, NY, TICONDEROGA, NY TO SALEM, MA FEDERAL DISASTERS, OFFERS 
FEDERAL AID FOR UPSTATE AND NEW ENGLAND RESIDENTS WISHING TO RELOCATE, 
CLAIMS FUNDS FOR EPA CLEAN-UP 'ARE NOT WITHIN THE MAP OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE' 
[SIC]— Header from Chemically Over-Garrulous Headliner Eventually Fired Even from 
Subheader Dept, for Exceeding Verbal Parameters and Now Starting to Get in the Same 
Hot Water All Over Again at a Much Less Prestigious Daily Paper; 

and so on and so forth. Himself's old optical editing lab has imposing Compugraphic 
typesetting and matteing facilities: it's hard to tell which of the headlines and other stuff 
are for real and which have been dickied with, usually, if you're too young to recall the 
actual chronology. At least some of the headlines are phony, the kids know; miniature 
golf indeed. But the accuracy of Mario's puppeteered account of the seminal meeting of 
what's come to be known as 'The Concavity Cabinet' gets to stand uncontested by fact. 



Nobody who wasn't actually there at the 16 January meeting knows just what was said 
when or by whom, the Gentle administration being of the position that extant Oval 
Office recording equipment was a veritable petri dish of organisms. Gentle's claque of 
doo-wopping Motown cabinet-puppets have purple dresses and matching lipstick and 
nail polish, and bouffants so blindingly Afrosheened that there had been special lighting 
and film-speed problems in the custodial closet: 

SEC. TREAS.: You're looking vigorous and hale today, sir. 

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh. 

PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: May I ask, Senor, why my distinguished co-Vice 
Chair of O.N.A.N. is not with us in attendance today. 

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh. 

MR. RODNEY TINE, CHIEF, U.S. OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES: The president's 
taking a little pure oxygen today, boys, and has authorized me as his oral proxy on this 
may I say historically opportune day. The Canadian P.M.'s in a bit of a snit. He prefers to 
whinge in the media surrounded by Mounted Reserves and is off somewhere far from 
Quebec in a Kevlar vest doing whatever the Canadian word is for pouting, doubtless 
poring over opinion polls prepared by chinless guys in Canadian hornrims. 

MEX. AND SOME OTHER SECS.: [Various puzzled apprehensive noises.] 

TINE: I'm sure you've all been briefed on the unprecedented but not unop-portune 
crisis that obtains north of the almost perfectly horizontal line between Buffalo and 
Northeast Mass. 

TINE arranges photos on seal-crested easels: a New Hampshire runoff-ditch running 
off stuff a color nobody's quite ever seen before; a wide-angle horizon-stretching vista 
of skull-embossed drums, with short-haired guys in white body-suits walking around 
adjusting knobs and reading dials on shiny hand-held devices; a very weird chemical 
sunrise, close in hue to the Cabinet members' lipstick, over some forests in southern 
Maine that look way taller and generally lusher than January forests ought properly to 
be; a couple indoor-lit snapshots of a multi-eyed infant crawling backwards, its ear to 
the carpet, dragging its shapeless head like a sack of spuds. The last display's a real 
heartstring-plucker. 

ALL SECS.: [Various concerned and sympathetic noises.] 

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh. 

TINE: Gentlemen, let the president just say that no one's prepared to say they're quite 
sure what's happened, or just which quote unquote loyal part of the Union or 
Organization might reasonably be said to be culpable, but it's not the administration's 
immediate concern to point the levelling finger of blame or aspersion just yet or right 
now. Our concern is to act, to respond, and act and respond decisively. Swiftly. And de¬ 
cisively. 

SEC. INT.: We've come up with some extremely preliminary projections on the costs of 
detoxifying and/or deradiating the better part of four U.S. states, sir, and I have to tell 
you gentlemen that even with the atmosphere of uncertainty at this point in time of not 
yet having a definitive handle on just what kinds and combinations of compounds were 
— umm — found there and how wide your — not 'your' personally, sir, J.G., 'your' just 
being a shorthand way for — to say something like I suppose simply 'the' — how wide 



the dispersal- and toxicity-parameters are shaping up to look — umm — I have to relate 
that the figures we're looking at are almost staggeringly multi-zeroed, sir, gentlemen. 

TINE: Tighten in and expand on staggering if you will, Blaine. 

SEC. INT.: We're talking at bare minimum a staggering amount of Private-Sector- 
caliber guys in white suits and helmets, not unlike your own helmet, sir, with a 
commensurately massive tab for the suits and helmets, plus gloves and throwaway 
booties, and a lot of really shiny equipment with a great many knobs and dials. Sir. 

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh. 

TINE: Gentlemen, let's pay the president the due tribute of proceeding right to the 
bone of the matter. I think the president's position is rendered patently clear by the 
pure oxygen he's been forced to take here with us today. No way we can possibly permit 
territory publicly exposed as this befouled and waste-impacted to continue to besmirch 
the already tight and tidier territory of a new era's U.S. of A. The president shudders at 
the mere thought. Just the mere thought of it forces him to resort to oxygen. 

PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: I do not anticipate what options your federal and 
our continental government might consider options to this permitting, senors. 

OTHER SECS.: [Tentative puzzled nods and slightly off-key agreement-noises.] 

TINE: Having been elected and conferred with a mandate on the clear and public anti¬ 
waste platform of the C.U.S.P., the president is inexorably driven to see the only viable 
option being to give it away. 

SEC. STATE: Give it away? 

TINE: Expressly. 

SEC. STATE: You mean simply tell the truth? That Johnny's C.U.S.P. platform 
necessitates — given the unfeasibility of shooting national wastes into space, since 
NASA hasn't put a successful launch on in over a decade and the rockets simply fall over 
and blow up and become more waste — that — given the amount of additional waste 
annular fusion's start-up is going to start putting in circulation the minute start-up 
commences — that his platform all but necessitates the second-tier option of 
transforming certain vast stretches of U.S. territory into uninhabitable and probably 
barbed-wired landfills and fly-shrouded dumps and saprogenic magenta-fogged toxic- 
disposal sites? Concede publicly that those EPA Softball games weren't casual or pick-up 
in the least? That you allowed Rod the God here to convince you 156 to authorize 
Unspecified Services to undertake massive toxic dumping and skull-softening against 
local statute for basically the same hard-choice, Greater-Good-of-the-Union reasons 
that prompted Lincoln to suspend the Constitution and jail Confederate activists without 
charge for the duration of the last great U.S. territorial crisis? And/or not least that 
these particular territories were chosen essentially because New Hampshire and Maine 
didn't let C.U.S.P. on their Independent ballots and the Mayor of Syracuse had the 
misfortune to sneeze on the president during a campaign swing? Give away the entire 
strategy the two of you have apparently huddled in some sterilized corner and mapped 
out? Can this be what you mean by Give it away , Rod? 

TINE: Bof. Don't be a maroon, Billingsley. The it in the president's Give it away signifies 
the territory. 

GENTLE: Hhhaaaahhh. 



TINE: We're going to give away the whole benighted smirch of ground. 

SEC. INT.: Export it, one might venture to sally. 

TINE: It's a novel and pro-active resource no prior statesman's had the vision or 
environmental cojones to envision. If there's one natural resource we've still got in 
spades, it's territory. 

PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N. AND SEVERAL OTHER SECS.: [Attempt to bring 
eyebrows back down below hairlines,] 

TINE: President Gentle's decided we're going to reinvent not just government but 
history. Torch the past. Manifest a new destiny. Boys, we're going to institute some 
serious intra-O.N.A.N. interdependence. 

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhh. 

TiNE: Gentlemen, we're going to make an unprecedented intercontinental gift of 
certain newly expendable northeast American territories, in return for the faute-de- 
mieux continuation of U.S. waste-displacement access to those territories. Allow me to 
illustrate what Lur— just what the president means. 

TINE places two large maps (also courtesy of Ms. Heath's crafts class) on Govt.-issue 
easels. They look both to be of the good old U.S.A.. The first map is your more or less 
traditional standard issue, with the U.S. looking really big in white and Mexico's 
northern fringes a tasteful ladies'-room pink and Canada's brooding bottom hem a 
garish, almost menacing red. The second North American map looks neither old nor all 
that good, traditionally speaking. It has a concavity. It looks sort of like some person or 
persons have taken a deep wicked canine-intensive bite out of its upper right bit, in 
which an ascending and then descending line has its near-right-angle at what looks to be 
the historic and now hideously befouled Ticonderoga NY; and the areas north of that 
jagged line look to be that pushy shade of Canadian red, now. Some little rubber 
practical-joke-type flies, the blue-bellied kind that live on filth, are stapled in a 
raisinesque dispersal over the red Concavity. TINE has a trademark telescoping 
weatherman's pointer that he plays with instead of using to point at much of anything. 

SEC. STATE: A kind of ecological gerrymandering? 

TINE: The president invites you gentlemen to conceive these two visuals as a sort of 
before-and-after representation of 'projected intra-O.N.A.N. territorial reallocations,' or 
some public term like that. Redemisement's probably too technical. 

SEC. STATE: Still respectfully not quite sure we at State see how inhabited territories 
can be sold to the public as quote expendable when a decent slice of that public by all 
reports inhabits that territory. Rod. 

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh. 

TINE: The president's proactively chosen not to hedge that high-cost tough-choice 
possibly unpopular lonely-at-the-top fact one bit, guys. We've been moving forward full- 
bore on anticipating various highly involved relocation scenarios. Scenaria? Is it 
scenarios or scenaria? 157 Marty's on-task on the scenario front. Care to bring us to 
speed, Marty? 

SEC. TRANSP.: We foresee a whole lot of people moving south really really fast. We 
foresee cars, light trucks, heavier trucks, buses, Winnebagos — Winnebaga? — 
commandeered vans and buses, and possibly commandeered Winnebagos or 



Winnebaga. We foresee 4-wheel-drive vehicles, motorcycles. Jeeps, boats, mopeds, 
bicycles, canoes and the odd makeshift raft. Snowmobiles and cross-country skiers and 
roller-skaters on those strange-looking roller-skates with only one line of wheels down 
each skate. We foresee backpack-type folks speed-walking in walking-shorts and boots 
and Tyrolean hats and a stick. We foresee some folks just outright running like hell, 
possibly. Rod. We foresee homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods. We 
foresee BMW war-surplus motorcycles with sidecars and guys in goggles and leather 
helmets. We foresee the occasional skateboard. We foresee a strictly temporary 
breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization over the souls of essentially frightened 
stampeding animals. We foresee looting, shooting, price-gouging, ethnic tensions, 
promiscuous sex, births in transit. 

SEC. H.E.W.: Rollerblades I think you mean, Marty. 

SEC. TRANSP.: All feedback and input welcome, Trent. Someone junior in the office 
foresaw hang-gliders. I don't foresee demographically significant hang-gliding, 
personally, at this juncture. Nor I need to stress do we foresee anything you could call 
true refugees. 

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhhhhhhh. 

TINE: Absolutely not. Mart. No way a downer-association-rife term like refugee is 
going to be applicable here. I cannot overstress this too assertively. Eminent 
nondomain: yes. Renewal-grade brand of sacrifice: you bet. Heroes, new era's breed of 
new pioneers, striking in bravely for already-settled good old settled but unfoul 
American territory: bien sur. 

SEC. STATE: Bien sur? 

PRESS SEC. [w/ queer combination of bangs and bouffant and pair of bifocals on slim 
bead chain around neck and resting in cleavage]: Neil over in Spin has been poring 
through resource materials. Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both 
— I'm quoting direct from Neil's memo here — if both, a, no homemade wagons piled 
high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if 
the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top 
of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the total number of children under six in 
transit. It's true that Neil's key resource here is Pol and Diang's Totalitarian's Guide to 
Iron-Fisted Spin, but they're thinking this fact can be spun away from without much to- 
do, over in Spin. 

GENTLE: Hhhuuuhh. 

TINE: Marty and Jay's staffs have been day-and-nighting on strategies to forestall 
anything like ostensible refugeeism. 

PRESS SEC. [Holding brillantined head at that angle people in bifocals have to, to read]: 
Anything bovine with curvy horns gets shot on sight. Rod's top U.S.O. operatives in shiny 
trucks at strategic intervals handing out free toddler-wear courtesy of Sears' Winnie- 
the-Pooh line, to nip nakedness in the bud. 

SEC. TREAS.: Still hammering out the boilerplate on the Sears agreement. Rod. 

TINE: The president has every confidence, Chet. I believe Marty and Jay were just 
getting to the transportational coup de grace. 

SEC. TRANSP.: We're soliciting bids for signs for up there making it legal to drive really 



really fast in the breakdown lanes. 

PRESS SEC.: South-bound breakdown lanes. 

ALL SECS.: [Harmonic murmurs.] 

SEC. STATE: Still don't see why not just retain cartographic title to the toxified areas, 
relocate citizenry and portable capital, use them as our own designated disposal area. 
Sort of the back of the hall closet or special wastebasket underneath the national 
kitchen sink as it were. Hammer out systems for delivering all national refuse and waste 
into the area, cordon it off, keep the rest of the nation edible-off as per Johnny's 
platform. 

SEC. H.E.W.: Why cede vitally needed waste-disposal resources to a recalcitrant ally? 

TINE: Billingsley, Trent, and yet who as I stated says we can't utilize these territories 
for just this purpose no matter whose nation's name they're in? Interdependence is as 
Interdependence does, after all. 

PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: iQue? 

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh? 

TINE: Yet Billingsley's right that this kind of sprawling, depopulated, newly Canadian 
territory can accommodate the tidiness-needs of this whole great continental alliance 
for decades to come. After that, look out Yukon! 

PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N. [Face green and mask wetly dark over upper lip]: 
May I respectfully ask President Gentle how you are proposing to ask my newly 
succeeded Co-Vice Chair of our continental Organization to possibly be able to accept 
vast arenas of egregiously poisoned terrain on behalf of his peoples? 

TINE: Valid question. Simple answer. Three answers. Statesmanship. Gamesmanship 
[counting, now, on fine strong white clean fingers], Brinksmanship. 

W/ now more — and rather more jejune — journalistic f/x spinning out of the black at 
high-camp speeds to a 45-rpm playing of custodian Dave ('F.D.V.') Harde's 33 1/3-rpm 
disc of 'Flight of the Bumblebee': 

GENTLE TO CANADIAN PM: HAVE SOME TERRITORY - Header; 

CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: NO, REALLY, THANKS ANYWAY - Header; 

GENTLE TO CANADIAN P.M.: BUT I INSIST - Header; 

BLOC QUEBECOIS TO CANADIAN P.M.: ACCEPT TOXICLY CONVEX ADDITION TO OUR 
PROVINCE AND WE ARE OUT OF HERE SO FAST YOUR HEAD WILL SPIN ALL THE WAY 
AROUND -Header from That Guy Again; 

CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: LOOK, WE'RE SWIMMING IN TERRITORY ALREADY, HAVE 
A LOOK AT AN ATLAS WHY DON'T YOU, WE HAVE WAY MORE TERRITORY THAN WE 
KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ALREADY, PLUS I DON'T MEAN TO BE RUDE EITHER BUT 
WE'RE ESPECIALLY UNKEEN ON ACCEPTING HOPELESSLY BEFOULED TERRITORY FROM 
YOU GUYS, INTERDEPENDENCE RHETORIC OR NO, THERE'S REALLY JUST NO WAY - And 
Again; 

26-MEMBER EEC ACCUSES U.S. OF 'EXPERIALIST DOMINATION'- Header; 

THIRD-WORLD VEGETABLES HURLED IN U.N. IMBROGLIO - 10-point Subheader; 

GENTLE TO P.M.: LOOK, BABE, TAKE THE TERRITORY OR YOU'RE GOING TO BE REALLY 
REALLY SORRY - Header; 

SIN CITY SHRINK: NATION'S VELVETIEST VOCALIST WAS HOSPITALIZED TWICE FOR 



MENTAL ILLNESS - Tabloid Header; 

PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY OF 'EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY' ALLEGED BY LAS VEGAS M.D. - 
Respectable Header; 

MY GARDEN NOW'S GOT TOMATOES I COULDN'T LIFT EVEN IF I COULD HACK 
THROUGH THEIR VINES WITH A MACHETE TO EVEN REACH THEM - Tabloid Header, 
Dateline Montpelier VT, with Photo That Simply Has Got to Have Been Doctored; 

F.E.C. CALLED TO INVESTIGATE C.U.S.P.s - Header; 

'STRATEGIC MISREPRESENTATION' OF CANDIDATE'S PSYCH HISTORY HAS PUT NATION, 
CONTINENT AT RISK, DEMS CHARGE - 12-point Supersubheader; 

TOP AIDES HUDDLE AS WORRIES OVER GENTLE'S 'PATHOLOGICAL INABILITY TO DEAL 
PROACTIVELY WITH ANY SORT OF REAL OR IMAGINED REJECTION' MOUNT IN FACE OF 
CANADIAN SHOWDOWN — Meth-Dependent Headliner, Now at Third Daily in 17 
Months; 

'Both financial and diplomatic communities have reacted with increasing concern to 
reports that President Gentle has isolated himself in a small private suite at Bethesda 
Naval Hospital with several thousand dollars' worth of sound and sterilization 
equipment and is spending all day every day singing morose show-tunes in 
inappropriate keys to the U.S.M.C. Colonel who stands near the Dermalatix 
Hypospectral sterilization appliance handcuffed to the Black Box of United States 
nuclear codes. Unspecified Services Office spokespersons have declined to comment on 
reports of such erratic Executive directives as: ordering the Defense Department to 
commandeer department store giant Searsco's entire inventory of Winnie-the-Pooh 
toddler wear under National Security Emergency Proviso 414; requiring Armed Forces 
personnel to take target practice at cardboard silhouettes of what appear to be oxen, 
water buffalo, or Texas longhorn cattle; preparing the release of a Presidential Address 
to the Nation cartridge that purportedly consists entirely of the president seated at his 
desk with his head in his gloves intoning "What's the point of going on?" over and over; 
instructing silo personnel at all S.A.C. installations north of 44° to remove their missiles 
from the silos and then reinsert them upside-down; and ordering the installation of 
massive "air displacement effectuators" 28 km. south of each such silo, facing north.' — 
Anchor's Lead for Kind of Semi-Cheesy Weekly Lurid-News-Intensive Summary 
Cartridge; 

'UNPRECEDENTED' WHOPPER REVENUES IN THIRD QUARTER CREDITED BY 
PILLSBURY/BK TO GENTLE'S ’CREATIVELY PROACTIVE' RESUSCITATION OF POST¬ 
NETWORK ADVERTISING -Ad Week 14-point Full-Color Header; 

GENTLE HAS COMPLETELY LOST MIND, CLAIMS CONFIDANT, O.U.S. CHIEF TINE AT 
PRESS CONFERENCE: THREATENS TO DETONATE UPSIDE-DOWN MISSILES IN U.S. SILOS, 
IRRADIATE CANADA W/ AID OF ATHSCME HELL-FANS - Header; 

'WILLING TO ELIMINATE OWN MAP OUT OF SHEER PIQUE’ IF CANADA NIXES 
RECONFIGURATIVE TRANSFER OF 'AESTHETICALLY UNACCEPTABLE' TERRAIN - Pretty 
Obviously Homemade Subheader. 

This catastatic feature of the puppet-film's plot — that Johnny Gentle, Famous 
Crooner threatens to bomb his own nation and toxify neighbors in an insane pout over 
Canada's reluctance to take redemised title over O.N.A.N.'s very own vast dump — 



resonates powerfully with those members of the movie's E.T.A. audience who know that 
this whole parodic pseudo-ONANtiad scenario is actually a puppet-a-clef-type allusion to 
the dark legend of one Eric Clipperton and the Clipperton Brigade. In the very last 
couple years of solar. Unsubsidized Time, this kid Eric Clipperton appeared for the first 
time as an unseeded sixteen-year-old in East Coast regional tournament play. The little 
Town-or-Academy-Hailed-From slot after Clipperton's name on tournament draw- 
sheets just said 'Indpresumably for 'Independent. 1 Nobody'd heard of him before or 
knew where he came from. He'd just sort of seepily risen, some sort of human radon, 
from someplace low and unknown, whence he lent the cliche 'Win or Die in the 
Attempt' grotesquely literal new levels of sense. 

For the Clipperton legend derived from the fact that this Clipperton kid owned a 
hideous and immaculately maintained Glock 17 semiautomatic sidearm that came in a 
classy little leather-handled blond-wood case with German High-Gothic script on it and a 
velvet gun-shaped concavity inside where the Glock 17 lay nestled in plush velvet, 
gleaming, with another little rectangular divot for the 17-shot clip; and that he brought 
the gun-case and Glock 17 out on the court with him along with his towels and water- 
jug and sticks and gear bag, and from his very first appearance on the East Coast jr. tour 
made clear his intention to blow his own brains out publicly, right there on court, if he 
should lose, ever, even once. 

Thus there came to be, in most every tournament with an initial draw of 64, a group of 
three boys, then four, and by the semifinals five, then finally six boys who for that 
tournament formed the Clipperton Brigade, players who'd had the misfortune to draw 
and meet Eric Clipperton and Clipperton's well-oiled Glock 17, and who understandably 
declined to be the player to cause Clipperton to eliminate his own map for keeps in 
public for something as comparatively cheesy as a tournament win over Clipperton. A 
win over Clipperton had no meaning because a loss to Clipperton had no meaning and 
didn't hurt anybody's regional and U.S.T.A. ranking, not once the guys in the U.S.T.A. 
computer center caught on to the Clipperton strategic M.O. Thus an early exit from a 
tournament because of a loss to Clipperton came to be regarded as sort of like a walk in 
baseball, stats-wise; and a boy who found himself in the Clipperton Brigade and 
defaulted his round tended to view that tournament as a kind of unexpected vacation, a 
chance to rest and heal, to finally get some sun on the chest and ankles, to work on 
chinks in his game's armor, to reflect a little on what it all might mean. 

Clipperton's first meaningless victory ever came at sixteen, unseeded, at the Hartford 
Jr. Open, first round, against one Ross Reat, of Maddox OH and the just-opened Enfield 
Tennis Academy. For some reason it's Struck who sort of specializes in this story and 
never misses a chance to tell new E.T.A.s the tale of Clipperton v. Reat. Clipperton's an 
OK player, nothing spectacular but also not like absurdly out of place at a regional-grade 
tourney; but Reat is at fifteen seasoned and high-ranked, and the third seed at Hartford; 
and Reat is, for a while — as would be S.O.P. for a high seed in the first round — 
basically cleaning under his nails with this unseeded unknown Eric Clipperton. At 1-4 in 
the second set, Clipperton sits down at the side-change and, instead of toweling off, 
reaches into his gear bag and extracts his classy little blond-wood case and gets out the 
Glock 17. Fondles it. Takes out the clip and hefts it and rams it home in its slot at the 



base of the grip with a chillingly solid-sounding click. Caresses his left temple with the 
thing's blunt shiny barrel. Everybody watching the match agrees it is one ugly and all¬ 
business-looking piece of personal-defense hardware. Clipper-ton climbs up the rungs of 
the lifeguardish chair the umpire in his blue blazer 158 sits in and uses the umpire's mike 
to make public his intention of blowing his personal brains out all over the court with 
the hideous Glock, should he lose. The small first-round gallery stiffens and inhales and 
doesn't exhale for a long time. Reat audibly gulps. Reat is tall, densely freckled, a good 
kid, one of Incandenza's fair-haired boys, not too bright, with the Satellite Tour so 
clearly in his future that at only fifteen he's already starting cholera shots and mastering 
Third World exchange rates. And but for the remainder of the match (which lasts exactly 
eleven more games) Clipperton plays tennis with the Glock 17 held steadily to his left 
temple. The gun makes tossing kind of a hassle, on Clipperton's serve, but Reat is letting 
the serves go by untouched anyway. None of the E.T.A. staff has bothered to show up 
and coach Reat through what was supposed to be a standard first-round fingernail¬ 
cleaning, and so Reat is strategically and emotionally all alone out there, and he's opted 
for not even pretending to make an effort, given what the unseeded Clipperton seems 
willing to sacrifice for a win. Ross Reat was the first and last junior player ever to shake 
Clipperton's free hand at the end of a match, and the moment's captured in a Hartford 
Courant staff photo that some E.T.A. wiseacre'd later glued to the door of Struck's room 
with so much Elmer's all over the back that taking it off would gut the varnish, so the 
thing stays up for all in the hall to see, Reat here up at net on one knee, one arm over 
his eyes, the other hand extended upward to a Clipperton who'd simply obliterated him 
psychologically. And Ross Reat was never quite exactly the same ever again after that, 
both Schtitt and de Lint have assured all future potentially mercy-minded E.T.A. males. 

And, the legend's story goes, Eric Clipperton never henceforth loses. No one is willing 
to beat him and risk going through life with the sight of the Glock going off on his 
conscience. Nobody ever knows where Clipperton comes from, to play. Never seen at 
airports or Interstate exit ramps or ever even spotted carb-loading at any Denny's 
between matches. He just starts materializing, always alone, at increasingly high-level 
junior tournaments, appears on draw-sheets with 'Ind.' by his name, plays competitive 
tennis with a Glock at his left temple; 159 and his opponents, unwilling to sacrifice 
Clipperton's hostage (Clipperton meme), barely even try, or else they go for impossible 
angles and spins, or else talk on mobile phones while they play or try to hit every ball 
between their legs or behind their backs; and the matches' galleries tend to boo 
Clipperton just as much as they dare; and Clipperton sits and hefts his 17-shot clip and 
takes the brass-jacketed 9-mm. cartridges out sometimes and clicks a few together 
ruminatively in his hand in the sideline chair at all the odd-game breaks, and sometimes 
he tries little Western-gunslinger triggerguard-spins during the breaks; but when play 
resumes Clipperton's deadly serious once more and has the Glock 17 at his temple, 
playing, and mows through the lackadaisical Clipperton Brigade round by round, and 
wins the whole tournament by what is essentially psychic default, and then right after 
collecting his trophy vanishes like the ground itself inhaled him. His only even remote 
friend on the jr. tour is eight-year-old Mario Incandenza, whom Clipperton meets 
because, even though Disney Leith and an early prorector named Cantrell are 



shepherding the male tournament contingent (including a solid but sort of plateau-stuck 
and no longer much improving seventeen-year-old Orin Incandenza) that summer, 
E.T.A. Headmaster Dr. J. 0. Incandenza shows up at quite a few of the events on the 
domestic circuit, doing under ostensible U.S.T.A. auspices a two-part documentary on jr. 
competitive tennis, stress, and light, and so Mario's tottering around with lens-cases and 
Tuffy tripods etc. at most of that late summer's meaningful events, and meets 
Clipperton, and finds Clipperton intriguing and in ways he can't be very articulate about 
hilarious, and is kind to him and seeks out his company, Clipperton's, or at any rate at 
least treats Clipperton like he exists, whereas by late July everybody else's attitude 
toward Clipperton resembled that kind of stiffly conspicuous nonrecognition that e.g. 
accompanies farts at formal functions. One of Himself's short test-cartridges — shot to 
check out transverse aberration at various sun-angles, the case's little adhesive sticker 
says — contains the only available footage of the late Eric Clipperton 160 — from the 
preponderance of salt-tablet dispensers and littered Pledge husks and Dade County 
ambulances it was pretty likely shot at the hideous Sunkist Jr. Inv. cramp-fest in August 
in Miami — just a couple overexposed meters of Clipperton, head down and hunched 
on a low orange bleacher, bony-shouldered, in no shirt and untied Nikes, his Gothic- 
scripted case in his lap, his elbows on his knees and his hands spidered across both 
cheeks, staring down between his feet and trying not to smile as a withered-toddler¬ 
sized and forward-listing Mario stands beside him, supported by his portable police lock, 
holding a light-meter and something else too halated to make out on the tape, open 
very wide for a homodontic laugh at something funny Clipperton has apparently just let 
slip. 

Hal, having smoked cannabis on four separate occasions — twice w/ others — on this 
continental day of rest, plus still in a kind of guiltily sickening stomach-pit shock from 
the afternoon's Eschaton debacle and his failure to intervene or even get up out of his 
patio-chair, Hal has lost a bit of his grip and has just gotten on the outside of his fourth 
chocolate cannoli in half an hour, and is feeling the icy electric keening of some sort of 
incipient carie in the left-molar range, and also now as usual, after swinishness with 
sugar, finds himself sinking, emotionally, into a kind of distracted funk. The puppet-film 
is reminiscent enough of the late Himself that just about the only more depressing thing 
to pay attention to or think about would be advertising and the repercussions of 
O.N.A.N.ite Reconfiguration for the U.S. advertising industry. Mario's film executes some 
rather over-arty flash-cuts between the erections of Lucite fortifications and ATHSCME 
and E.W.D. displacement installations along the new U.S. border, on the one hand, and 
the shadowily implied Rodney-Tine-disastrous-love-interest element with the 
voluptuous puppet representing the infamous and enigmatic Quebecois fatale known 
publicly only as 'Luria P—,' on the other. 

Tine's puppet's tiny brown felt hand is on Luria's voluptuously padded little Popsicle- 
stick knee in the famous Vienna, Virginia Szechuan steakhouse where, according to dark 
legend. Subsidized Time was conceived on the back of a chintzy Chinese-zodiac paper 
placemat, by R. Tine. Hal happens to know the fall and rise of millennial U.S. advertising 
exceptionally well, because one of the only two academic things he's ever written about 
anything even remotely filmic 161 was a mammoth research paper on the tangled fates of 



broadcast television and the American ad industry. This was the final and grade¬ 
determining project in Mr. U. Ogilvie's year-long Intro to Entertainment Studies in May 
of Y.P.W.; and Hal, a seventh-grader and only up to R in the Condensed O.E.D., wrote 
about TV-advertising's demise with a reverent tone that sounded like the events had 
taken place at the misty remove of glaciers and guys in pelts instead of just four years 
prior, more or less overlapping with the waxing of the Gentle Era and Experialist 
Reconfiguration Mario's puppet-show makes fun of. 

There's no question that the Network television industry — meaning, since PBS is a 
whole different kettle, the Big Three plus the fast-starting but low-endurance Fox — had 
already been in serious trouble. Between the exponential proliferation of cable 
channels, the rise of the total-viewer-control hand-held remotes known historically as 
zappers, and VCR-recording advances that used subtle volume- and hysterical-pitch- 
sensors to edit most commercials out of any program taped (here a rather chatty 
digression on legal battles between Networks and VCR-manufacturers over the Edit- 
function that Mr. 0. drew a big red yawning skull next to, in the margin, out of 
impatience), the Networks were having problems drawing the kind of audiences they 
needed to justify the ad-rates their huge overhead's slavering maw demanded. The Big 
Four's arch-foe was America's 100-plus regional and national cable networks, which, in 
the pre-millennial Limbaugh Era of extraordinarily generous Justice Dept, interpretation 
of the Sherman statutes, had coalesced into a fractious but potent Trade Association 
under the stewardship of TCI's Malone, TBS's Turner, and a shadowy Albertan figure 
who owned the View-Out-the-Simulated-Window-of-Various-Lavish-Homes-in-Exotic- 
Locales Channel, the Yuletide-Fireplace Channel, CBC-Cable's Educational Programming 
Matrix, and four of Le Groupe Video-iron's five big Canadian Shop-at-Home networks. 
Mounting an aggressive hearts-and-minds campaign that derided the 'passivity' of 
hundreds of millions of viewers forced to choose nightly between only four statistically 
pussified Network broadcasters, then extolled the 'empoweringly American choice' of 
500-plus esoteric cable options, the American Council of Disseminators of Cable was 
attacking the Four right at the ideological root, the psychic matrix where viewers had 
been conditioned (conditioned, rather deliciously, by the Big Four Networks and their 
advertisers themselves, Hal notes) to associate the Freedom to Choose and the Right to 
Be Entertained with all that was U.S. and true. 

The A.C.D.C. campaign, brilliantly orchestrated by Boston MA's Viney and Veals 
Advertising, was pummelling the Big Four in the fiscal thorax with its ubiquitous anti¬ 
passivity slogan 'Don't Sit Still for Anything Less' when a wholly unintended coup de 
grace to Network viability was delivered in the form of an unrelated Viney and Veals 
side-venture. V&V, like most U.S. ad agencies, greedily buttered its bread on every 
conceivable side when it could, and started taking advantage of the plummeting Big 
Four advertising rates to launch effective Network-ad campaigns for products and ser¬ 
vices that wouldn't previously have been able to afford national image-proliferation. For 
the obscure local Nunhagen Aspirin Co. of Framingham MA, Viney and Veals got the 
Enfield-based National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation to sponsor a huge touring 
exhibition of paintings by artists with crippling cranio-facial pain about crippling cranio¬ 
facial pain. The resultant Network Nunhagen ads were simply silent 30-second shots of 



some of the exhibits, with NUNHAGEN ASPIRIN in soothing pale pastels at lower left. 
The paintings themselves were excruciating, the more so because consumer HDTV had 
arrived, at least in the very upscale Incandenza home. The ads with the more dental- 
pain-type paintings Hal doesn't even want to think back on, what with a fragment of 
cannoli wedged someplace upper-left he keeps looking around for Schacht to ask him to 
have an angle-mirrored look at. One he can recall was of an ordinary middle-class 
American guy's regular face, but with a tornado coming out of the right eyesocket and a 
mouth at the vortex of that tornado, screaming. And that was a mild one. 162 The ads 
cost next to nothing to produce. Nunhagen Aspirin sales went nationally roofward even 
as ratings-figures for the Nunhagen ads themselves went from low to abysmal. People 
found the paintings so excruciating that they were buying the product but recoiling from 
the ads. Now you'd think this wouldn't matter so long as the product itself was selling so 
well, this fact that millions of national viewers were zapping or surfing to a different 
channel with their remotes the moment a silent painted twisted face with a hatchet in 
its forehead came on. But what made the Nunhagen ads sort of fatally powerful was 
that they also compromised the ratings-figures for the ads that followed them and for 
the programs that enclosed the ads, and, worse, were disastrous because they were so 
violently unpleasing to look at that they awakened from their spectatorial slumbers 
literally millions of Network-devotees who'd hitherto been so numbed and pacified they 
usually hadn't bothered to expend the thumb-muscle-energy required to zap or surf 
away from anything on the screen, awakened legions of these suddenly violently 
repelled and disturbed viewers to the power and agency their thumbs actually afforded 
them. 

Viney and Veals's next broadcast cash-cow, a lurid series of spots for a national string 
of walk-in liposuction clinics, reinforced the V&V trend of high product-sales but 
dreadful ad-ratings; and here the Big Four were really put on the spot, because — even 
though the critics and P.T.A.s and eating-disorder-oriented distaff PACs were 
denouncing the LipoVac spots' shots of rippling cellulite and explicit clips of procedures 
that resembled crosses between hyperbolic Hoover Upright demonstrations and filmed 
autopsies and cholesterol-conscious cooking shows that involved a great deal of 
chicken-fat drainage, and even though audiences' flights from the LipoVac spots 
themselves were absolutely gutting ratings for the other ads and the shows around 
them — Network execs' sweaty sleep infected with vivid REM-visions of flaccid 
atrophied thumbs coming twitchily to life over remote zap and surf controls — even 
though the spots were again fatally potent, the LipoVac string's revenues were so 
obscenely enhanced by the ads that LipoVac Unltd. could soon afford to pay obscene 
sums for 30-second Network spots, truly obscene, sums the besieged Four now needed 
in the very worst way. And so the LipoVac ads ran and ran, and much currency changed 
hands, and overall Network ratings began to slump as if punctured with something 
blunt. From a historical perspective it's easy to accuse the Network corporations of 
being greedy and short-sighted w/r/t explicit liposuction; but Hal argued, with a 
compassion Mr. Ogilvie found surprising in a seventh-grader, that it's probably hard to 
be restrained and far-sighted when you're fighting against a malignant invasive V&V- 
backed cable kabal for your very fiscal life, day to day. 



In hindsight, though, the Big Four's spinal camel-straw had to have been V&V's trio of 
deep-focus b&w spots for a tiny Wisconsin cooperative firm that sold tongue-scrapers 
by pre-paid mail. These ads just clearly crossed some kind of psychoaesthetic line, 
regardless of the fact that they single-handedly created a national tongue-scraper 
industry and put Fond du Lac's NoCoat Inc. on the Fortune 500. 163 Stylistically 
reminiscent of those murderous mouthwash, deodorant, and dandruff-shampoo 
scenarios that had an antihero's chance encounter with a gorgeous desire-object ending 
in repulsion and shame because of an easily correctable hygiene deficiency, the NoCoat 
spots' chilling emotional force could be located in the exaggerated hideousness of the 
near-geologic layer of gray-white material coating the tongue of the otherwise 
handsome pedestrian who accepts a gorgeous meter maid's coquettish invitation to 
have a bit of a lick of the ice cream cone she's just bought from an avuncular sidewalk 
vendor. The lingering close-up on an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed, 
coat-wise. The slow-motion full-frontal shot of the maid's face going slack with disgust 
as she recoils, the returned cone falling unfelt from her repulsion-paralyzed fingers. The 
nightmarish slo-mo with which the mortified pedestrian reels away into street-traffic 
with his whole arm over his mouth, the avuncular vendor's kindly face now hateful and 
writhing as he hurls hygienic invectives. 

These ads shook viewers to the existential core, apparently. It was partly a matter of 
plain old taste: ad-critics argued that the NoCoat spots were equivalent to like 
Preparation H filming a procto-exam, or a Depend Adult Undergarment camera panning 
for floor-puddles at a church social. But Hal's paper located the level at which the Big 
Four's audiences reacted, here, as way closer to the soul than mere tastelessness can 
get. 

V&V's NoCoat campaign was a case-study in the eschatology of emotional appeals. It 
towered, a kind of Oberad, casting a shaggy shadow back across a whole century of 
broadcast persuasion. It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety 
relievable by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely, given the vulnerable 
psyche of an increasingly hygiene-conscious U.S.A. in those times. 

The NoCoat campaign had three major consequences. The first was that horrible year 
Hal vaguely recalls when a nation became obsessed with the state of its tongue, when 
people would no sooner leave home without a tongue-scraper and an emergency 
backup tongue-scraper than they'd fail to wash and brush and spray. The year when the 
sink-and-mirror areas of public restrooms were such grim places to be. The NoCoat co¬ 
op folks traded in their B'Gosh overalls and hand-woven ponchos for Armani and Dior, 
then quickly disintegrated into various eight-figure litigations. But by this time 
everybody from Procter & Gamble to Tom's of Maine had its own brand's scraper out, 
some of them with baroque and potentially hazardous electronic extras. 

The second consequence was that the Big Four broadcast Networks finally just plain 
fell off the shelf, fiscally speaking. Riding a crest of public disaffection not seen since the 
days Jif commercials had strangers shoving their shiny noses in your open jar, the 
Malone-Turner-and-shadowy-Albertan-led cable kabal got sponsors whose ads had 
been running as distant as seven or eight spots on either side of the NoCoat gaggers to 
jump ship to A.C.D.C. U.S. broadcast TV's true angels of death, Malone and Turner then 



immediately parlayed this fresh injection of sponsorial capital into unrefusable bids for 
the rights to the N.C.A.A. Final Four, the MLB World Series, Wimbledon, and the Pro 
Bowlers Tour, at which point the Big Four suffered further defections from Schick and 
Gillette on one side and Miller and Bud on the other. Fox filed for Ch. 11 protection 
Monday after A.C.D.C.'s coup-announcements, and the Dow turned Grizzly indeed on 
G.E., Paramount, Disney, etc. Within days three out of the Big Four Networks had 
ceased broadcasting operations, and ABC had to fall back on old 'Happy Days' 
marathons of such relentless duration that bomb threats began to be received both by 
the Network and by poor old Henry Winkler, now hairless and sugar-addicted in La 
Honda CA and seriously considering giving that lurid-looking but hope-provoking 
LipoVac procedure a try... 

And but the ironic third consequence was that almost all the large slick advertising 
agencies with substantial Network billings — among these the Icarian Viney and Veals — 
went down, too, in the Big Four's maelstrom, taking with them countless production 
companies, graphic artists, account execs, computer-enhancement technicians, ruddy- 
tongued product-spokespersons, horn-rimmed demographers, etc. The millions of 
citizens in areas for one reason or another not cable-available ran their VCRs into 
meltdown, got homicidally tired of 'Happy Days,' and then began to find themselves 
with vast maddening blocks of utterly choiceless and unentertaining time; and 
domestic-crime rates, as well as out-and-out suicides, topped out at figures that cast a 
serious pall over the penultimate year of the millennium. 

But these consequences' own consequence — with all the Yankee-ingenious irony that 
attends true resurrections — comes when the now-combined Big Four, muted and 
unseen, now, but with its remaining creditor-proof assets now supporting only those 
rapaciously clever executive minds that can survive the cuts down to a skeleton of a 
skeleton staff, rises from the dust-heap and has a collective last hurrah, ironically 
deploying V&V's old pro-choice/anti-passivity appeal to obliterate the A.C.D.C. that had 
just months before obliterated the Big Four, bringing TCI's Malone down on a golden 
bell-shaped 'chute and sending TBS's Turner into self-imposed nautical exile: 

Because enter one Noreen Lace-Forche, the USC-educated video-rental mogulette 
who in the B.S. '90s had taken Phoenix's Intermission Video chain from the middle of 
the Sun Belt pack to a national distribution second only to Blockbuster Entertainment in 
gross receipts. The woman called by Microsoft's Gates 'The Killer-App Queen' and by 
Blockbuster's Huizenga 'The only woman I personally fear.' 

Convincing the rapacious skeletal remains of the Big Four to consolidate its combined 
production, distribution, and capital resources behind a front company she'd had 
incorporated and idling ever since she'd first foreseen broadcast apocalypse in the 
Nunhagen ads' psycho-fiscal fallout — the front an obscure-sounding concern called 
InterLace TelEntertainment — Lace-Forche then went and persuaded ad-maestro P. 
Tom Veals — at that time mourning his remorse-tortured partner's half-gainer off the 
Tobin 

Bridge by drinking himself toward pancreatitis in a Beacon Hill brownstone — to 
regather himself and orchestrate a profound national dissatisfaction with the 'passivity' 
involved even in D.S.S.-based cob/e-watching: 



What matter whether your 'choices' are 4 or 104, or 504? Veals's campaign argued. 
Because here you were — assuming of course you were even cable-ready or dish- 
equipped and able to afford monthly fees that applied no matter what you 'chose' each 
month — here you were, sitting here accepting only what was pumped by distant 
A.C.D.C. fiat into your entertainment-ken. Here you were consoling yourself about your 
dependence and passivity with rapid-fire zapping and surfing that were starting to be 
suspected to cause certain rather nasty types of epilepsy over the longish term. The 
cable kabal's promise of 'empowerment,' the campaign argued, was still just the 
invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you'd sit there and open wide 
for. 164 And so but what if their campaign's appeal basically ran, what if, instead of 
sitting still for choosing the least of 504 infantile evils, the vox- and digitus-populi could 
choose to make its home entertainment literally and essentially adult? I.e. what if— 
according to InterLace — what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what's on at 
any given time? Choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of 
thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non- 
'Happy Days' programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the 
time-tested, newly lean Big Four's mammoth vaults and production facilities and 
packaged and disseminated by InterLace TelEnt. in convenient fiber-optic pulses that fit 
directly on the new palm-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes InterLace was marketing as 
'cartridges'? Viewable right there on your trusty PC's high-resolution monitor? Or, if you 
preferred and so chose, jackable into a good old pre-millennial wide-screen TV with at 
most a coaxial or two? Self-selected programming, chargeable on any major card or on a 
special low-finance-charge InterLace account available to any of the 76% of U.S. 
households possessed of PC, phone line, and verifiable credit? What if. Veals's 
spokeswoman ruminated aloud, what if the viewer could become her/his own 
programming director; what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it 
was her/his right to pursue? 

The rest, for Hal, is recent history. 

By the time not only second-run Hollywood releases but a good many first-run films, 
plus new sitcoms and crime-dramas and near-live sports, plus now also big-name- 
anchor nightly newscasts, weather, art, health, and financial-analysis cartridges were 
available and pulsing nicely onto cartridges everywhere, the ranks of A.C.D.C.'s own 
solvent program-pumpers had been winnowed back to the old-movie-and-afternoon- 
baseball major-metro regional systems of more like the B.S. '80s. Passive pickings were 
slim now. American mass-entertainment became inherently pro-active, consumer- 
driven. And because advertisements were now out of the televisual question — any 
halfway-sensitive Power-PC's CPU could edit out anything shrill or ungratifying in the 
post-receipt Review Function of an entertainment-diskette — cartridge production 
(meaning by now both the satellite 'spontaneous dissemination' of viewer-selected 
menu-programming and the factory-recording of programming on packaged 9.6 mb 
diskettes available cheap and playable on any CD-ROM-equipped system) yes cartridge 
production — though tentacularly controlled by an InterLace that had patented the 
digital-transmission process for moving images and held more stock than any one of the 
five Baby Bells involved in the InterNet fiber-optic transmission-grid bought for .17 on 



the dollar from GTE after Sprint went belly-up trying to launch a primitively naked early 
mask- and Tableauxless form of videophony — became almost Hobbes-ianly free- 
market. No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its 
commercials would pale in comparison. The more pleasing a given cartridge was, the 
more orders there were for it from viewers; and the more orders for a given cartridge, 
the more InterLace kicked back to whatever production facility they'd acquired it from. 
Simple. Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same 
demand curve, at least as far as home entertainment went. 

And as InterLace's eventual outright purchase of the Networks' production talent and 
facilities, of two major home-computer conglomerates, of the cutting-edge Froxx 2100 
CD-ROM licenses of Aapps Inc., of RCA's D.S.S. orbiters and hardware-patents, and of 
the digital-compatible patents to the still-needing-to-come-down-in-price-a-little 
technology of HDTV's visually enhanced color monitor with microprocessed circuitry and 

more lines of optical resolution — as these acquisitions allowed Noreen Lace- 
Forche's cartridge-dissemination network to achieve vertical integration and economies 
of scale, viewers' pulse-reception- and cartridge-fees went down markedly; 165 and then 
the further increased revenues from consequent increases in order- and rental-volume 
were plowed presciently back into more fiber-optic-InterGrid-cable-laying, into outright 
purchase of three of the five Baby Bells InterNet'd started with, into extremely 
attractive rebate-offers on special new InterLace-designed R.I.S.C. 166 -grade High-Def- 
screen PCs with mimetic-resolution cartridge-view motherboards (recognizably 
renamed by Veals's boys in Recognition 'Teleputers' or 'TPs'), into fiber-only modems, 
and, of course, into extremely high-quality entertainments that viewers would freely 
desire to choose even more. 167 

But there were — could be — no ads of any kind in the InterLace pulses or ROM 
cartridges, was the point Hal's presentation kept struggling to return to. And so then 
besides e.g. a Turner who kept litigating bitterly via shortwave radio from his equatorial 
yacht, the true loser in the shift from A.C.D.C. cable to InterLace Grid was an American 
advertising industry already reeling from the death of broadcast's Big Four. No 
significant markets seemed in any hurry to open up and compensate for the capping of 
TV's old gusher. Agencies, reduced to skeletal cells of their best and most rapacious 
creative minds, cast wildly about for new pulses to finger and niches to fill. Billboards 
sprouted with near-mycological fury alongside even rural two-laners. No bus, train, 
trolley, or hack went unfestooned with high-gloss ads. Commercial airliners began for a 
while to trail those terse translucent ad-banners usually reserved for like Piper Cubs 
over football games and July beaches. Magazines (already endangered by HD-video 
equivalents) got so full of those infuriating little fall-out ad cards that Fourth-Class postal 
rates ballooned, making the e-mail of their video-equivalents that much more attractive, 
in another vicious spiral. Chicago's once-vaunted Sickengen, Smith and Lundine went so 
far as to get Ford to start painting little domestic-product come-ons on their new lines' 
side-panels, an idea that fizzled as U.S. customers in Nike T-shirts and Marlboro caps 
perversely refused to invest in 'cars that sold out.' In contrast to just about the whole 
rest of the industry, a certain partnerless metro-Boston ad agency was doing so well 



that it was more out of ennui and a sense of unlikely challenge that P. Tom Veals 
consented to manage PR for the fringe candidacy of a former crooner and schmaltz- 
mogul who went around swinging a mike and ranting about literally clean streets and 
creatively refocused blame and rocketing people's waste into the forgiving chill of 
infinite space. 168 


30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


Marathe did not quite sleep. They had remained on the shelf for some hours. He 
thought it a bit of much that Steeply refused even for a brief time to sit down upon the 
ground. If his persona's skirt rode up above his weapon, what was the difference? Were 
grotesque and humiliating undergarments also involved? Marathe's wife had been in an 
irreversible coma for fourteen months. Marathe was able to refresh himself without 
quite sleeping. It was not a state of fugue or neural relaxation, but a type of detach¬ 
ment. He had learned this in the months after losing his legs to a U.S.A. train. Part of 
Marathe floated off and hovered somewhere just above him, crossing its legs, nibbling 
at his consciousness as does a spectator at popcorn. 

At some times on the outcropping Steeply went farther than crossing his arms, almost 
embracing himself, chilled but unwilling to comment on the chill. Marathe noted that 
the gesture of self-embrace appeared convincingly feminine and unconscious. Steeply's 
preparations for his returning field-assignment had been disciplined and effective. The 
feature of complete un-swallowability about M. Steeply as a U.S.A. female journalist — 
even a massive and unfortunate-looking U.S.A. female journalist — was his feet. These 
were broad and yellow-nailed, hairy and trollesque, the ugliest feet Marathe had 
observed anywhere south of 60° N, and the ugliest supposedly female feet of his 
experience. 

Both men were strangely reluctant, somehow, to broach the subject of plans for 
getting down off the shelf in the utter dark. Steeply didn't even waste time wondering 
how Marathe could have gotten up (or down) there in the first place, short of some sort 
of helicopter drop, which capricious winds and the proximity of the mountainside made 
unlikely. The dogma around Unspecified Services was that if Les Assassins des Fauteuils 
Rollents had one Achilles' heel it was their penchant for showing off, making a spectacle 
of denying any kind of physical limitation, etc. Steeply had field-interfaced with Remy 
Marathe once on a rickety-feeling Louisiana oil platform 50-plus clicks out of Caillou Bay, 
covered the whole time by armed Cajun sympathizers. Marathe always disguised the 
boggling size of his arms under a long-sleeved windbreaker. His eyelids were half-closed 



whenever Steeply turned to look. If he (Marathe) were a cat he would be purring. One 
hand stayed below the blanket at all times. Steeply noted. Steeply himself had a small 
and unregistered Taurus PT9 taped to his shaved inner thigh, which was the main 
reason he was reluctant to sit down on the outcropping's stone; the weapon was 
unsafetied. 

In the faint lume- and starlight Marathe found the four-limbed American's high-heeled 
feet compellingly grotesque, like loaves of soft processed U.S.A. bread being slowly 
squeezed and mangled by the footwear's straps. The meaty compression of the toes at 
the shoes' open tips, the leather faintly creaking as he bobbed up and down, hugging 
himself chillily in the sleeveless summer dress, his fleshy bare arms webbed redly with 
mottle in the chill, one arm luridly scratched. The received wisdom among Quebecois 
anti-O.N.A.N. cells was that there was something latent and sadistic in the Bureau des 
Services sans Specificity's assignments of fictional personae for its field-operatives — 
casting men as women, women as longshoremen or Orthodox rabbinicals, heterosexual 
men as homosexual men, Caucasians as Negroes or caricaturesque Haitians and 
Dominicans, healthy males as degenerative-nerve-disease-sufferers, healthy women 
operatives as hydrocephalic boys or epileptic public-relations executives, nondeformed 
U.S.O.U.S. personnel made not only to pretend but sometimes to actually suffer actual 
deformity, all for the realism of their field-personae. Steeply, silent, rose and fell 
absently on the toes of these feet. The feet were also visibly unused to high U.S.A. 
women's heels, for they were mangled-looking, deprived of flowing blood and 
abundantly blistered, and the smallest toes' nails were blackening and preparing, 
Marathe noted, in the future to fall off. 

But Marathe knew also that something within the real M. Hugh Steeply did need the 
humiliations of his absurd field-personae, that the more grotesque or unconvincing he 
seemed likely to be as a disguised persona the more nourished and actualized his deep 
parts felt in the course of preparation for the humiliating attempt to portray; he 
(Steeply) used the mortification he felt as a huge woman or pale Negro or palsied twit of 
a degenerative musician as fuel for the assignments' performance; Steeply welcomed 
the subsumption of his dignity and self in the very role that offended his dignity of self... 
the psychomechanics became too confusing for Marathe, who had not the capacity for 
abstractions of his A.F.R. superiors Fortier and BroullTme. But he knew this was why 
Steeply was one of Services sans Specificite's finest field-operatives, once spending the 
better part of a year in magenta robes, sleeping three hours nightly and allowing his 
large head to be shaved and teeth removed, shaking a tambourine in airports and selling 
plastic flowers on median strips to infiltrate a cult-fronted 3-amino-8-hydroxytetralin 169 - 
import ring in the U.S.A. city Seattle. 

Steeply said 'Because this is the thing about the A.F.R. that really gives them the 
fantods, if you're talking about fear and what to fear.' He spoke either quietly or not, 
that Marathe could determine. The empty expanse they both faced off the shelf sucked 
all resonance, causing every sound to sound self-enclosed and every utterance to seem 
flatly soft and somehow overintimate, almost post-coital. The sounds of things said 
beneath blankets, winter beating at the log walls. Steeply himself appeared frightened, 
perhaps, or confused. He continued: 'This disinterest, by you guys, it seems, in anything 



but the harm itself. Just getting the Entertainment out there to hurt us.' 

'The naked aggression by us.' 

Muscles beneath the nylons of the calves bulged and receded as Steeply bobbed. 'The 
boys in Behavioral Science say they can't see any sort of positive political goal the A.F.R. 
even wants. Anything DuPlessis was having your Fortier work toward.' 

'The U.S.A. fantods are meaning fear, confusion, standing hair.' 

The F.L.Q. and Montcalmists — shit, even the most whacked out of Alberta's ultra¬ 
rightists —' 

M. DuPlessis had once studied beneath radical Edmonton Jesuits, Marathe reflected. 

'— them we can begin to understand, as political bodies. Them we can more or less 
get a feel for dealing with.' 

Their aggression is clothed in agenda, the Bureau of you perceives.' 

Steeply's was a thinking face now, in apparent puzzlement. They at least have aims. 
Real desires.' 

'For themselves.' 

Steeply appeared convincingly to ruminate. 'It's like there's a context for the whole 
game, then, with them. We know where where we stand differs from where they stand. 
There's a sort of playing field of context.' 

Causing the chair to squeak, Marathe again rotated two fingers of a hand in the air, 
which for Quebecers signifies impatience. 'Rules of play. Rules of engagement.' The 
other hand was with the Sterling UL machine pistol beneath the blanket. 

'Even historically — the 60s bomb-tossers, the Spic Separatists, the Ragheads —' 

'Very charming. These are attractive terms.' 

'Ragheads, Colombians, Brazilians — they had positive objectives.' 

'Desires for self which you could understand.' 

'Even if the objectives were nothing more than things we could file, pin to the board 
under "STATED OBJECTIVES" — the pathetic Spies. They wanted certain things. There 
was a context. A compass for maneuvers against them.' 

'Your guardians of National Security could understand these positive desires of self- 
interest. Look at them and "relate" as one says, at least. Knowing where you stand on 
the field of play.' 

Steeply slowly nodded, as if to only himself. 'There wasn't just pure malice. There was 
never the sense that here were some people who had just all of a sudden let the air out 
of your tires for no reason.' 

'You allege we disperse our resources deflating automobile tires?' 

'A figure of speech. Or for example a serial killer. A sadist. Somebody who wants you 
down just for the deviant sake of wanting you down. A deviant.' 

Far south, a blinking system of tri-colored lights described a spiral over the airport's 
tower's pulsing tip — this was a landing aircraft. 

Steeply lit another cigarette off the butt of his previous and then tossed the butt, 
peering over the shelf's edge to watch its spiralled fall. Marathe was looking up and 
right. Steeply said: 

'Because politics are one thing. Even way-out-far-in-the-distance fringe politics are 
one thing. Your Fortier doesn't seem to care much about Reconfiguration, territory. 



redemisement, cartography, tariffs, Finlandization, O.N.A.N.ite Anschluss or toxic-waste 
displacement.' 

'Experialism.' 

Steeply said 'Or so-called Experialism. Even Separatism. None of the other cells' 
agendas seem to drive you people. Most of the Office sees it as just sheer malice with 
you. No agenda or story.' 

'And for you there is something appalling.' 

Steeply pursed his lips, as if trying to blow something off them. 'But when there are 
delineatable strategic political goals and objectives. When there's some set of ends we 
can make sense of the malice with. Then it's just business.' 

'Nothing of persons.' Marathe was looking up. Some of the stars seemed to flutter, 
others to burn with more steadiness. 

'We know which end is up when it's business. We've got a field and a compass.' He 
regarded Marathe directly in a way that was not accusing. 'This seems personal, 1 he said. 

Marathe could not think of descriptions for the way Steeply regarded him. Neither 
was it sad nor inquisitive nor quite ruminative. There were small flickers and shadows of 
movements around the flickers of the celebratory fire down far away on the floor of the 
desert. Marathe could not determine whether Steeply was truly revealing emotions 
about himself. The flickers continually went out. Small shreds of young laughter drifted 
up to them in the vacuous silence. There were also sometimes rustles in the hillside's 
scrub, of gravel or small living nightly things. Or whether perhaps Steeply was trying to 
give him something, let him know something and determine whether it went back to M. 
Fortier. Marathe's arrangement with the Office of Unspecified Services seemed most 
often to consist in submitting himself to numerous tests and games of truth and 
betrayal. He felt often with U.S.O.U.S. like a caged rodent being regarded blandly by 
bland men in white coats. 

Marathe shrugged. 'U.S.A. has previously been hated. Richly so. Shining Path and your 
Maxwell House company. The trans-Latin cocaine cartels and the poor late M. Kemp 
with his exploding home. Did not both Iraq and Iran call U.S.A. the Very Large Satan? As 
you hatefully say they have Heads of Rags?' 

Steeply exhumed smoke quickly to reply. 'Yes but there were still contexts and ends. 
Revenue, religion, spheres of influence, Israel, petroleum, neo-Marxism, post-Cold-War 
power-jockeying. There was always a third thing.' 

'Some desire.' 

'Some piece of business. Some third thing between them and us — it wasn't just us — 
it was something they wanted from us, or wanted us out of.' Steeply seemed earnestly 
to say it. The third thing, the goal or desire — it mediated the ill will, abstracted it 
somehow.' 

'For this is how one who is sane proceeds,' Marathe said, paying great concentration 
to aligning the blanket's hems against his chest and wheels; 'some desire of self, and 
efforts expending to meet that desire.' 

'Not just wanting negatives,' Steeply said, shaking the lurid head. 'Not just wanting 
some other's harm for no purpose.' 

Marathe again found himself pretending to sniff with the congestion. 'And a U.S.A. 



purpose, desires?' This he asked quietly; its sound was strange against stone. 

Steeply was pinching yet a next particle of tobacco from his lipstick. He said This you 
can't generalize on with most of us, since our whole system is founded on your 
individual's freedom to pursue his own individual desires.' His mascara had now cooled 
in the formations of its past running. Marathe kept silent and fussed with the blanket as 
Steeply sometimes regarded him. A whole minute passed this way. Finally Steeply said: 

'Me, for me personally, as an American, Remy, if you're really serious, I think it's 
probably your standard old basic American dreams and ideals. Freedom from tyranny, 
from excessive want, fear, censorship of speech and thought.' He was looking with 
seriousness, even in this wig. 'The old ones, tested by time. Relative plenty, meaningful 
work, adequate leisure-time. The ones you might call corny.' His smiling revealed to 
Marathe lipstick upon one incisor. 'We want choice. A sense of efficaciousness and 
choice. To be loved by someone. To freely love who you happen to love. To be loved 
irregardless of whether you can tell them Classified stuff about your job. To have them 
just trust you and trust that you know what you're doing. To feel valued. Not to be 
agendalessly despised. To have good neighborly relations. Cheap and abundant energy. 
Pride in your work and family, and home.' The lipstick had been smeared onto the tooth 
when the finger had removed the grain of tobacco. He was faisait monter la 
pression ': 170 'The little things. Access to transport. Good digestion. Work-saving 
appliances. A wife who doesn't mistake your job's requirements for your own fetishes. 
Reliable waste-removal and disposal. Sunsets over the Pacific. Shoes that don't cut off 
circulation. Frozen yogurt. A tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing.' 

Marathe's face, it showed nothing. 'The loyalty of a domestic pet.' 

Steeply pointed the cigarette. 'There you go, friend.' 

'High-quality entertainment. High value for the dollar of leisure and spectation.' 

Steeply laughed agreeably, exhaling a shaped sausage of smoke. In response to this, 
Marathe smiled. There was some silence for thinking until Marathe finally said, looking 
up and off to think: 'This U.S.A. type of person and desires appears to me like almost the 
classic, how do you say, utilitaire.' 

'A French appliance?' 

'Comme on dit,' Marathe said, 'utilitarienne. Maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure: 
result: what is good. This is the U.S.A. of you.' 

Steeply pronounced the U.S.A. English word for Marathe, then. Then a sustained 
pause. Steeply rose and fell upon his toes. A bonfire of young persons was burning some 
k. down away on the desert floor, the flames burning in a seeming ring instead of a 
sphere. 

Marathe said 'But yes, but precisely whose pleasure and whose pain, in this 
personality type's equation of what is good?' 

When Steeply removed a particle of the cigarette from the lip he would then roll it 
absently between his first finger and thumb; this did not appear womanly. 'Come 
again?' 

Mara the scratched inside the wind breaker. 'I am wondering, me, in the equations of 
this U.S.A. type: the best good is each individual U.S.A. person's maximum pleasure? or 
it is the maximum pleasure for all the people?' 



Steeply nodded in a way that indicated willing patience with someone whose wits 
were not too speedy. 'But there you go, but this question itself shows how our different 
types of national character part ways from each other, Remy. The American genius, our 
good fortune is that someplace along the line back there in American history them 
realizing that each American seeking to pursue his maximum good results together in 
maximizing everyone's good.' 

'Ah.' 

'We learn this as early as grade school, as kids.' 

'I am seeing.' 

'This is what lets us steer free of oppression and tyranny. Even your Greekly 
democratic howling-mob-type tyranny. The United States: a community of sacred 
individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual choice. The individual's right 
to pursue his own vision of the best ratio of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct. 
Defended with teeth and bared claws all through our history.' 

'Bien sur.' 

Steeply for the first time seemed to be feeling with his hand his wig's disorder. He was 
attempting to straightly reposition it without removing the wig. Marathe tried not to 
envision what his B.S.S. had done to the natural brown male hair of Steeply, to 
accommodate the complex wig. Steeply said: 'It might be hard for you to quite 
understand what's so precious about this for us, from across this chasm of different 
values that separates our peoples.' 

Marathe flexed his hand. 'Perhaps because it is so general and abstracted. In practice, 
however, you may force me to understand.' 

'We don't force. It's exactly about not-forcing, our history's genius. You are entitled to 
your values of maximum pleasure. So long as you don't fuck with mine. Are you seeing?' 

'Perhaps help me see by practical evidence. An instance. Suppose you are able at one 
moment to increase your own pleasure, but the cost of this is the displeasuring pain of 
another? Another sacred individual's displeasing pain.' 

Steeply said: 'Well now this is precisely what gives us the fantods about the A.F.R., 
why it's so important I think to remember how we come from different cultures and 
value systems, Remy. Because in our U.S. value system, anybody who derives an 
increase in pleasure from somebody else's pain is a deviant, a sadistic sicko, and is 
thereby excluded from the community of everybody's right to pursue their own best 
pleasure-to-pain ratio. 

Sickos deserve compassion and the best treatment feasible. But they're not part of the 
big picture.' 

Marathe willed himself not to rise on his stumps again. 'No, but not another's pain as a 
pleasurable end in itself. I did not mean where my pleasure is in your pain. How to say 
better. Imagine there arises a situation in which your deprivation or pain is merely the 
consequence, the price, of my own pleasure.' 

'You mean you're talking a tough-choices, limited-resources-type situation.' 

'But in the simplest of examples. The most child-like case.' Marathe's eyes 
momentarily gleamed with enthusiasm. 'Suppose that you and I, we both wish to enjoy 
a hot bowl of the Habitant soupe aux pois.' 



Steeply said 'You mean. . 

'But yes. French-Canadian-type pea soup. Produit du Montreal. Saveur Maison. Prete a 
Servir . ,m 

'What is it with you people and this stuff?' 

'In this case imagining both you and I are in the worst way craving for Habitant Soup. 
But there is one can only, of the small and well-known Single-Serving Size.' 

'An American invention, by the way, the 3-S, let's insert.' 

The part of Marathe's mind that hovered above and watched coldly, it could not know 
whether Steeply was being deliberately parodically dense and annoying, to arouse 
Marathe to some revealing passion. Marathe made his rotary gesture of impatience, 
slowly. 'But OK,' he said neutrally. 'It is simple here. We both want the soup. So me, my 
pleasure from eating the Habitant soupe aux pois has the price of your pain at not eating 
soup when you badly crave it.' Marathe was patting his pockets for something. 'And the 
reverse, if you are who eats this serving. By the U.S.A. genius of for each "pursuivre le 
bonheur," 172 then, who can decide who may receive this soup?' 

Steeply stood with weight on one leg. 'Example's a bit oversimplified. We bid on the 
soup, maybe. We negotiate. Maybe we divide the soup.' 

'No, for the ingenious Single-Serving Size of serving is notoriously for only one, and we 
are both large and vigorous U.S.A. individuals who have spent the afternoon watching 
huge men in pads and helmets hurl themselves at one another in the High Definition of 
InterLace, and we are both ravenous for the satiation of a complete hot bowl's serving. 
Half the bowl would only torment this craving I have.' 

The fast shadow of pain across the face of Steeply showed Marathe's choice of 
example was witty: the divorced U.S.A. man has much experience with the small size of 
Single-Serving products. Marathe said: 

'OK. OK, yes, why should I, as the sacred individual, give you half of my soup? My own 
pleasure over torment is what is good, for I am a loyal U.S.A., a genius of this individual 
desire.' 

The bonfire slowly was filling out. Another cross of colored lights circled the airport 
area of Tucson. Steeply's movements of smoothing the wig and twisting fingers through 
the snarls of hair became perhaps more abrupt and frustrated. Steeply said 'Well whose 
soup is it legally? Who actually bought the soup?' 

Marathe shrugged. 'Not relevant for my question. Suppose a third party, now 
unfortunately deceased. He appears at our flat with a can of soupe aux pois to eat while 
watching recorded U.S.A. sporting and suddenly is clutching his heart and falls to the 
carpeting deceased, holding the soup we are now both so wishing.' 

'Then we bid on the soup. Whoever's got the most desire for the soup and is willing to 
fork over the higher price buys out the other's half, then the other just jogs on down — 
jogs or rolls on down to Safeway and buys himself some more soup. Whoever's willing 
to put his money where his hunger is gets the dead guy's soup.' 

Marathe shook his head without any heat. 'The Safeway store and bidding, these are 
also not relevant to my question I hope the example of pea soup to raise. Which 
perhaps this is a dull-witted question.' 

Steeply was at the wig with both hands, for repair. Former perspiration had mashed 



its form inward on one side, as well as small clots and small burrs from the falls of his 
descent to the outcropping. Presumably there was no comb or brushes in his small 
evening's-wear purse. The rear of his dress was dirty. The straps of his prostheses' 
brassiere dug cruelly into the meat of his back and shoulders. Again there was for 
Marathe the picture of something soft being slowly throttled. 

Steeply was responding 'No, I know what you want to raise all right. You want to talk 
politics. Scarcity and allocating and tough choices. All right. Politics we can understand. 
All right. Politics we can discuss. I bet I know where you're — you want to raise the 
question of what prevents 310 million individual American happiness-pursuers from all 
going around bonking each other over the head and taking each other's soup. A state of 
nature. My own pleasure and to hell with all the rest.' 

Marathe had his handkerchief out. 'What does this wish to mean, this bonking?' 

'Because this simplistic example shows just how far apart across the chasm our 
people's values are, friend.' Steeply was saying this. 'Because a certain basic amount of 
respect for the wishes of other people is required, is in my interest, in order to preserve 
a community where my own wishes and interests are respected. OK? My total and 
overall happiness is maximized by respecting your individual sanctity and not simply 
kicking you in the knee and running off with the soup.' Steeply watched Marathe blow 
one nostril into the handkerchief. Marathe was one of the rare types who did not exam¬ 
ine the hankie after he blew. Steeply said: 

'And but then I can anticipate somebody on your side of the chasm retorting with 
something like, quote. Yes my very good ami, but what if your rival for the pleasurable 
soup is some individual outside your community, for example, you'll say, let's just make 
the example that it a hapless Canadian, foreign, "un autre," separated from me by a 
chasm of history and language and value and deep respect for individual freedom — 
then in this wholly random instance there would be no community-minded constraints 
on my natural impulse to bonk your head and commandeer the desired soup, since the 
poor Canadian is outside the equation of "pursuivre le bonheur" of each individual, since 
he is not a part of the community whose environment of mutual respect I depend on for 
pursuing my interest of maximal pleasure-to-pain.' 

Marathe, during this time, was smiling up and to the left, north, rolling his head like a 
blind person. His favorite personal place of off-duty in the U.S.A.'s city Boston was in the 
Public Garden of summer, a broad and treeless declivity leading down to the mare des 
canards, the duck pond, a grassy wedge facing south and west so that the grass of the 
slope turns pale green and then gold as the sun circles over the head, the pond's water 
cool and muddy green and overhung with impressionist willows, persons beneath the 
willows, also pigeons, and ducks with tight emerald heads gliding in circles, their eyes 
round stones, moving as if without effort, gliding upon the water as if legless below. Like 
films' idylls in cities the moment before the nuclear blast, in old films of U.S.A. death 
and horror. He was missing this time in U.S.A. Boston MA of refilling the pond for the 
ducks' return, the willows greening, the winelight of a northern sunset curving gently in 
to land without explosion. Children flew taut kites and adults lay supine on the slope 
absorbing the suntan, eyes closed as if in concentration. He was giving out a small and 
desolate smile, as of fatigue. His wrist's watch was unilluminated. Steeply threw a butt 



without turning away from Marathe to watch it fall. 

'And you'll accuse me of you'll say I won't only poke him in the eye and commandeer 
the whole serving of soup for myself,' Steeply said, 'but will, after eating it. I'll give him 
the dirty bowl and spoon and maybe even the no-deposit Habitant can to have to deal 
with, saddle him with my greed's waste, all under some sham-arrangement of quote 
Interdependence that's really just a crude nationalist scheme to indulge my own U.S. 
individual pleasure-lust without the complications or annoyance of considering some 
neighbor's own desires and interests.' 

Marathe said 'You will notice that I do not with sarcasm say "And herrrrrrrrrre we go 
off together once more, "which you enjoy saying.' 

Steeply's use of the body to shelter the lighting match for his smoking was not 
feminine, either. His parody of Marathe's accent sounded guttural and U.S.A.-Cajun with 
the cigarette in the mouth. He looked up past the flame. 'But no? Am I off-base?' 

Marathe had an almost Buddhist way of studying the blanket on his lap. 

For some seconds he behaved as if almost asleep, nodding very smally with the rise 
and fall of his lungs. The ponderous rectangles of moving light within Tucson's nightly 
spread were 'Barges of Land' ministering to nests of dumpsters in the deep part of night. 
Part of Marathe always felt almost a desire to shoot persons who anticipated his 
responses and inserted words and said they were from Marathe, not letting him speak. 
Marathe suspected Steeply of knowing this, sensing this in Marathe. All two of 
Marathe's older brothers from childhood had engaged in this, arguing every side and 
silencing Remy by inserting his words. Both had kissed trains head-on before reaching 
marriageable age; 173 Marathe had been part of the audience for the death of the better 
one. Some of the Barges of Land's waste would be vectored into the Sonora region of 
Mexico, but much would be shipped north for displacement-launch into the Convexity. 
Steeply was regarding him. 

'No, Remy? Am I off-base in terms of what you'd say?' 

The smile around Marathe's mouth cost him all his training in restraint. 'The cans 
containing Habitant, they say boldly "Veuillez Recycler Ce Contenant." You are not false, 
maybe. But I think I am asking less for nations' arguing and more for the example of you 
and me only, we two, if we pretend we are both of your U.S.A. type, each separate, both 
sacred, both desiring soupe aux pois. I am asking how is community and your respect 
part of my happiness in this moment, with the soup, if I am a U.S.A. person?' 

Steeply worked a finger under one strap of the brassiere to relieve the throttling 
pressure. 'I don't get you.' 

'Well. We both crave badly the entire recyclable Single-Serving can of this Habitant.' 
Marathe sniffed. Tn my mind I know it is true that I must not simply make a bonking of 
your head and take away the soup, because my overall happiness of pleasure of the long 
term needs a community of "rien de bonk." 174 But this is the long term. Steeply. This is 
down the road of my happiness, this respecting of you. How do I calculate this distant 
road of long term into my action of this moment, now, with our dead comrade clutching 
the soup and both of us with spittle on our chins as we regard the soup? My question is 
trying to say: if the most pleasure right now, en ce moment, is in the whole serving of 
Habitant, how is my self able to put aside this moment's desire to make bonk on you 



and take this soup? How am I able to think past this soup to the future of soup down my 
road?' 

'In other words delayed gratification.' 

'Good. This is well. Delayed gratification. How is my U.S.A. type able in my mind to 
calculate my long-term overall pleasure, then decide to sacrifice this intense soup¬ 
craving of this moment to the long term and overall?' 

Steeply sent out two hard tusks of smoke from the nostrils of his nose. His expression 
was one of patience together with polite impatience. 'I think it's called simply being a 
mature and adult American instead of a childish and immature American. A term we 
might use might be "enlightened self-interest." 

'D'eclaisant.' 

Steeply, he did not smile back. 'Enlightened. For example your example from before. 
The little kid who'll eat candy all day because it's what tastes best at each individual 
moment.' 

'Even if he knows inside his mind that it will hurt his stomach and rot his little fangs.' 

'Teeth,' Steeply corrected. 'But see that here it can't be a Fascist matter of screaming 
at the kid or giving him electric shocks each time he overindulges in candy. You can't 
induce a moral sensibility the same way you'd train a rat. The kid has to learn by his own 
experience how to learn to balance the short- and long-term pursuit of what he wants.' 

'He must be freely enlightened to self.' 

'This is the crux of the educational system you find so appalling. Not to teach what to 
desire. To teach how to be free. To teach how to make knowledgeable choices about 
pleasure and delay and the kid's overall down-the-road maximal interests.' 

Marathe farted mildly into his cushion, nodding as if with thought. 

'And I know what you'll say,' Steeply said, 'and no, the system isn't perfect. There is 
greed, there is crime, there are drugs and cruelty and ruin and infidelity and divorce and 
suicide. Murder.' 

'To bonk the head.' 

Steeply again dug at this strap. He would snap open the purse and then pause to move 
the brassiere's tight strap and then dig into the purse, which sounded femininely full 
and cluttered. He said 'But this is just the price. This is the price of the free pursuit. Not 
everybody learns it in childhood, howto balance his interests.' 

Marathe tried to envision thin men with horn-rim spectacles and natural-shoulder 
sportcoats or white coats of the laboratory, carefully packing with clutter the purse of a 
field-operative to create the female effect. Now Steeply had his pack of Flanderfumes 
cigarettes and his finger of pinkie in the pack's hole, evidently trying to gauge how many 
were left. Venus was low in the northeast rim. When Marathe's wife was born as an 
infant without a skull, there had been at first suspicion that the cause was that her 
parents smoked cigarettes as a habit. The light of the stars and moon had become 
sullen. The moon had not yet set. It seemed as if sometimes the bonfire of youthful 
mafficking was there and then when the eyes were averted in the next moment it was 
not there. Time was passing in a silence. Steeply was using a nail to extract slowly one of 
the cigarettes. Marathe, as a small child and with legs, had always disliked persons who 
made comments about how much others smoked. Steeply now had learned here just 



how he must stand to keep the match alive. Some wind had died down, but there were 
scattered chill gusts that it seemed came from nowhere. Marathe sniffed so deeply that 
it became a sigh. The struck match sounded loud; there was no echo. 

Marathe sniffed again and said: 

'But of these types of your persons — the different types, the mature who see down 
the road, the puerile type that eats the candy and soup in the moment only. Entre nous, 
here on this shelf, Hugh Steeply: which do you think describes the U.S.A. of O.N.A.N. and 
the Great Convexity, this U.S.A. you feel pain that others might wish to harm?' Hands 
which shake out matches act always as if they are burned, this motion of snapping. 
Marathe sniffed. 'Are you understanding? I am asking between only us. How could it be 
that A.F.R. malice could hurt all of the U.S.A. culture by making available something as 
momentary and free as the choice to view only this one Entertainment? You know there 
can be no forcing to watch a thing. If we disseminate the samizdat, the choice will be 
free, no? Free from force, no? Yes? Freely chosen?' 

M. Hugh Steeply of B.S.S. was standing then with his weight on one hip and looked his 
most female when he smoked, with his elbow in his arm and the hand to his mouth and 
the back of this hand to Marathe, a type of fussy ennui that reminded Marathe of 
women in hats and padded shoulders in black-and-white films, smoking. Marathe said: 

'You believe we are underestimating to see all you as selfish, decadent. But the 
question has been raised: are we cells of Canada alone in this view? Aren't you afraid, 
you of your government and gendarmes? If not, your B.S.S., why work so hard to 
prevent dissemination? Why make a simple Entertainment, no matter how seducing its 
pleasures, a samizdat and forbidden in the first place, if you do not fear so many U.S.A.s 
cannot make the enlightened choices?' 

This now was the closest large Steeply had come, to stand over Marathe to look down, 
looming. The rising astral body Venus lit his left side of the face to the color of pallid 
cheese. 'Get real. The Entertainment isn't candy or beer. Look at Boston just now. You 
can't compare this kind of insidious enslaving process to your little cases of sugar and 
soup.' 

Marathe smiled bleakly into the chiaroscuro flesh of this round and hairless U.S.A. 
face. 'Perhaps the facts are true, after the first watching: that then there seems to be no 
choice. But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place. This is still a 
choice, no? Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?' 


During that last pre-Subsidized year, after each tournament's perfunctory final, at the 
little post-final award-presentations and dance, Eric Clipperton would attend unarmed 
and eat maybe a little shaved turkey from the buffet and mutter out of the side of his 
slot-like mouth to Mario Incandenza, and would stand there expressionless and receive 
his outsized first-place trophy amid witheringly slight and scattered applause, and would 
melt into the crowd soon after and dematerialize back to wherever he lived and trained 
and target-practiced. Clipperton by this time must have had a whole mantel plus 
bookcase's worth of tall U.S.T.A. trophies, each U.S.T.A. trophy a marbled plastic base 
with a tall metal boy on top arched in mid-serve, looking rather like a wedding-cake 



groom with a very good outside slider. Clipperton must have been just broke out in 
brass and plastic, but he had no official ranking whatsoever: since his Glock 9 mm. and 
public intentions were instantly legendary, he was regarded by the U.S.T.A. as never 
having had a legitimate victory, or even a legit match, in sanctioned play. People on the 
jr. tour sometimes asked tiny Mario if that's why Eric Clipperton always seemed so 
terrifically glum and withdrawn and made such a big deal out of materializing and 
dematerializing at tournaments, that the very tactic that let him win in the first place 
kept the wins, and in a way Clipperton himself, from being treated as real. 

All this until the erection of O.N.A.N. and the inception, in Clipperton's eighteenth 
summer, of Subsidized Time, the adverted Year of the Whopper, when the U.S.T.A. 
became the O.N.A.N.T.A, and some Mexican systems analyst — who barely spoke 
English and had never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for 
crunching raw results-data — this guy stepped in as manager of the O.N.A.N.T.A. 
computer and ranking center in Forest Lawn NNY, and didn't know enough not to treat 
Clipperton's string of six major junior-tournament championships that spring as sanc¬ 
tioned and real. And when the first biweekly issue of the trilingual North American 
Junior Tennis that's replaced American Junior Tennis comes out, there's one E. R. 
Clipperton, Home Town 'Ind.,' ranked #1 in Boys' Continental 18-and-Unders; and 
competitive eyebrows ascend at all latitudes; and but everyone at E.T.A., from Schtitt on 
down, is highly amused, and some of them wonder whether maybe now Eric Clipperton 
will put down his psychic cuirass and take his unarmed competitive chances with the 
rest of them, now that he's got what he's surely been burning over and holding himself 
hostage for all along, a real and sanctioned #1; and the Continental Jr. Clay-Courts are 
coming up the following week, in Indianapolis IN, and little Michael Pemulis of Allston 
takes his PowerBook and odds-software and makes a killing on vig in the frenzy of 
locker-room wagering over whether Clipperton'II even bother to materialize at Indy now 
that he's extorted himself to the sanctioned top he must have craved so terribly, or 
whether he'll retire from the tour now and lie around masturbating over the Glock in 
one hand and the latest issue of NAJT in the other. 175 And so everyone's taken aback 
when Eric Clipperton of all people suddenly appears at the E.T.A. front gate's portcullis 
on a rainy warm late A.M. two days before the Clays, wearing a flap-frayed trench-type 
coat and toe-abraded sneakers and a five-day growth of armpitty adolescent beard, but 
without any sticks or anything in the way of competitive gear, not even his Glock 17's 
custom-made wooden case, and he makes the cold-eyed part-time portcullis attendant 
from the halfway place down the hill just about lean on the intercom-buzzer, pleading 
for entry and counsel — he's in a terrible way, is the portcullis attendant's intercom 
diagnosis — and rules about nonenrolled jr. players being on academies' grounds are 
strict and complex, and but little Mario Incandenza sways down the steep path to the 
portcullis in the warm rain and interfaces with Clipperton through the bars and has the 
attendant hold the intercom-button down for him and personally requests that Clip¬ 
perton be admitted under a special nonplay codicil to the regulations, saying the kid is 
truly in desperate psychic straits, Mario speaking first to Lateral Alice Moore and then to 
this prorector Cantrell and then to the Headmaster himself as Clipperton stares 
wordlessly up at the little wrought-iron racquet-heads that serve as spikes at the top of 



the portcullis and fencing around E.T.A., his expression so blackly haunted that even the 
hard-boiled attendant told some of the people back at the halfway place later that the 
spectral trench-coated figure had given him sobriety's worst fantods, so far; and J. 0. 
Incandenza finally lets Clipperton in over CantrelPs and then Schtitt's vehement 
objections when it's established that Clipperton wants only a few private minutes to 
obtain the counsel of Incandenza Sr. himself—of whom I think we can presume Mario's 
spoken glowingly to Clipperton — and Incandenza, while not quite strictly sober, is lucid, 
and has a very low melting-point of compassion for traumas connected with early 
success; and so up goes the portcullis, and the Clipperton and the two Incandenzas go at 
high noon up to an unused top-floor room in Subdorm C of East House, the structure 
nearest the front gate, for some sort of psycho-existential CPR-session or something — 
Mario has never spoken of what he got to sit in on, not even at night to Hal when Hal's 
trying to go to sleep. But it's a matter of record that at some point first E.T.A. counselor 
Dolores Rusk was beeped by Himself at her Winchester home and then her beep was 
canceled and Lateral Alice Moore was beeped and asked with due speed to get Lyle up 
from the weight room/sauna and over to East House ASAP, and that at some point while 
Lyle was delotusing from the dispenser and making his way with sideways Lateral Alice 
to this emergency-type huddle, at some point in this interval — in front of Dr. James 0. 
Incandenza and a Mario whose tiny borrowed head-clamped Bolex H128 Incandenza 
required Clipperton to consent to having digitally record the whole crisis-conversation, 
to protect E.T.A. from the O.N.A.N.T.A.'s Kafkaesque rules on unregistered recipients of 
any sort of counsel at U.S. academies — at some point, w/ Lyle in transit, Clipperton 
pulls out of various pockets in his wet complicated coat an elaborately altered copy of 
NAJT's biweekly ranking report, a sepia'd snapshot of some whey-faced Midwestern 
couple's wedding, and the hideous blunt-barreled Glock 17 9 mm. semiautomatic, which 
even as both Incandenzas reach for the sky Clipperton places to his right — not left — 
temple, as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face 
and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then 
some; and there's just an ungodly subsequent mess in there, and the Incandenzas 
respectively stagger and totter from the room all green-gilled and red-mist-stained, and 
— because reports of Lyle's appearance outside the weight room upright and walking 
across the grounds have spread and caused enormous excitement and student- 
snapshots — it's because it was just as Lyle and L. A. Moore hit the upstairs hallway that 
they reeled out of the room in a miasma of cordite and ghastly mist that they're 
preserved in various snapshots as resembling miners of some sort of really grisly coal. 

People in the competitive jr. tennis community somehow regarded it as healthy that 
Mario Incandenza's perfectly even smile never faltered even through tears at 
Clipperton's funeral. The funeral was poorly attended. It turned out Eric Clipperton had 
hailed from Crawfordsville, Indiana, where his Ma was a late-stage Valium addict and his 
ex-soybean-farmer Pa, blinded in the infamous hailstorms of B.S. '94, now spent all day 
every day playing with one of those little wooden paddles with a red rubber ball at¬ 
tached by elastic string, paddle-ball, with an understandable lack of success; and the 
tranquilized and sightless Clippertons had had no clue about where Eric had even 
disappeared off to most weekends, and bought his explanation that all the tall trophies 



came from an after-school job as a freelance tennis-trophy designer, the parents 
apparently being not exactly the two brightest bulbs in the great U.S. parental light- 
show. They held the interment under a threat of rain in Veedersburg IN, where there's a 
budget cemetery, and Himself skipped Indianapolis and took Mario to the first of his 
life's two funerals so far; and it was probably moving that Incandenza acceded to 
Mario's request that nothing get filmed or documented, at the funeral, for Himself's jr.- 
tennis documentary. Mario probably told Lyle all about everything, back down in the 
weight room, but he sure never told Hal or the Moms; and Himself was already in and 
out of rehabs and hardly a credible source on much of anything by this point. But 
Incandenza did let Mario insist that no one else get to clean up the scene in Subdorm C 
after Enfield's Finest had come and peered around and drawn a chalk ectoplasm around 
Clipperton's sprawled form and written things down in little spiral notebooks which they 
kept checking against one another with maddening care, and then EMTs had zipped 
Clipperton up in a huge rubber bag and taken him down and out on a wheeled stretcher 
with retractable legs they had to retract on all the stairs. Lyle was long gone by this 
time. It took the bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the 
room with his tiny contractured arms and square feet; the 18's girls in the rooms on 
either side could hear him falling around in there and picking himself up, again and 
again; and the finally spotless room in question had been locked ever since, with its 
tasteless sign — except G. Schtitt holds a special key, and when an E.T.A. jr. whinges too 
loudly about some tennis-connected vicissitude or hardship or something, he's invited 
to go chill for a bit in the Clipperton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other 
ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily 
slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with. 


It was Ennet House's Assistant Director Annie P. who coined the phrase that Don 
Gately 'sunlights on the side.' Five A.M.S a week, whether he's just getting off all-night 
Staff duty or not, he has to be on the Inbound Green Line by 0430h. to then catch two 
more trains to his other job at the Shattuck Shelter For Homeless Males down in 
bombed-out Jamaica Plain. Gately has become, in sobriety, a janitor. He mops down 
broad cot-strewn floors with anti-fungal delousing solvents. Likewise the walls. He 
scrubs toilets. The relative cleanliness of the Shattuck's toilets might seem surprising 
until you head into the shower area, with your equipment and face-mask. Half the guys 
in the Shattuck are always incontinent. There's human waste in the showers on a daily 
fucking basis. Stavros lets him attach an industrial hose to a nozzle and spray the worst 
of the shit away from a distance before Gately has to go in there with his mop and 
brushes and solvents, and his mask. 

Cleaning the Shattuck only takes three hours, since he and his partner got the routine 
down tight. Gately's partner is also the guy that owns the company that contracts with 
the Commonwealth for the Shattuck's maintenance, a guy like forty or fifty, Stavros 
Lobokulas, a troubling guy with a long cigarette-filter and an enormous collection of 
women's-shoes catalogues he keeps piled behind the seats in the cab of his 4x4. 

So at like 0800 usually they're done and by vendor's contract still get to bill for eight 



hours (Stavros L. only pays Gately for three, but it's sub-table), and Gately heads back to 
Government Center to take the westbound Greenie back up Commonwealth to Ennet 
House to put on his black eye-patch mask thing and sleep till 1200h. and the afternoon 
shift. Stavros L. himself gets a couple hours off to footwear-browse (Gately very much 
needs to assume that's all he does with the catalogues, is browse), then has to head 
over to Pine Street Inn, the biggest and foulest homeless shelter in all of Boston, where 
Stavros and two other broke and desperate yutzes from another of the halfway houses 
Stavros cruises for cheap labor will spend four hours cleaning and then bill the state for 
six. 

The inmates at the Shattuck suffer from every kind of physical and psychological and 
addictive and spiritual difficulty you could ever think of, specializing in ones that are 
repulsive. There are colostomy bags and projectile vomiting and cirrhotic discharges and 
missing limbs and misshapen heads and incontinence and Kaposi's Sarcoma and 
suppurating sores and all different levels of enfeeblement and impulse-control-deficit 
and damage. Schizophrenia is like the norm. Guys in D.T.s treat the heaters like TVs and 
leave broad spatter-paintings of coffee over the walls of the barrackses. There are 
industrial buckets for A.M. puking that they seem to treat like golfers treat the pin on 
like a golf course, aiming in its vague direction from a distance. There's one sort of 
blocked off and more hidden corner, over near the bank of little lockers for valuables, 
that's always got sperm moving slowly down the walls. And way too much sperm for just 
one or two guys, either. The whole place smells like death no matter what the fuck you 
do. Gately gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a 
kind of control switch. He screens input with a fucking vengeance the whole time. The 
barrackses's cots reek of urine and have insect-activity observable. The state employees 
who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the 
desk and are all around Gately's size and build, and he's been approached to maybe 
work there himself, nights, supervising, more than once, and has said Thanks Anyway, 
and always screws right out of there at 0801h. and rides the Greenie back up the hill 
with his Gratitude-battery totally recharged. 

Janitoring the Shattuck for Stavros Lobokulas was the menial job Gately had landed 
with only three days to go on his month's deadline to find some honest job, as a 
resident, and he's kept it ever since. 

The males in the Shattuck are supposed to be up and out by 0500h. regardless of 
weather or D.T.s, to let Gately and Stavros L. clean. But some never screw out of there 
on time — and these're always the worst guys, the ones you don't want anyplace near 
you, these ones that won't leave. They'll clump behind Gately and watch him jet feces 
off the shower-tiling, treating it like a sport and yelling encouragement and advice. 
They'll cringe and ass-kiss when the supervisor heaves himself on by to tell them to get 
out and then when he leaves not get out. A couple have those little shaved patches on 
their arms. They'll lie in the cots and hallucinate and thrash and scream in the cots and 
knock army blankets off onto the floors Gately's trying to mop. They'll skulk back over to 
the little dark spermy corner the minute Gately's got done scrubbing the night's sperm 
off and has backed away and started again to inhale. 

Maybe the worst is that there's almost always one or two guys in the Shattuck who 



Gately knows personally, from his days of addiction and B&E, from before he got to the 
no-choice point and surrendered his will to staying straight at any cost. These guys are 
always 25-30 and look 45-60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad 
agency could come up with. Gately'll slip them a finski or a pack of Kools and maybe 
sometimes try and talk a little AA to them, if they seem like maybe they're ready to give 
up. With everybody else in the Shattuck Gately adopts this expression where he lets 
them know he's ignoring them totally as long as they keep their distance, but it's a look 
that says Street and Jail and not to fuck with him. If they get in his way, Gately will stare 
hard at a point just behind their heads until they move off. The protective face-mask 
helps. 

Stavros Lobokulas's great ambition — which he goes on about regularly to Gately 
when they're cleaning the same barracks — Stavros's dream is to utilize his unique 
combination of entrepreneurial drives and janitorial savvy and flairs for creative billing 
and finding desperate recovering halfway-house guys who'll scrub shit for next to 
nothing, to pile up enough $ to open a women's shoe store in some mobilely upward 
part of Boston where the women are healthy and upscale and have good feet and can 
afford to take care of their feet. Gately spends a lot of the time around Stavros nodding 
and not saying really much of anything. Because what is there to really say about 
ambitious career-dreams involving feet? But Gately'll be paying court-scheduled 
restitution well into his thirties if he stays straight, and needs the work. Foot-thing or no 
foot-thing. Stavros has allegedly been clean for eight years, but Gately has his private 
doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved. E.g. like Stavros gets easily 
aggravated at the Shattuck guys that can't get up and out like they're supposed to and 
clear out, and almost daily he'll make a production of throwing down his mop in the 
middle of the floor and throwing his head back to scream: "Why don't you sorry 
motherfucks just go home?" which so far for over thirteen months he hasn't quit finding 
hilarious, his own witticism, Stavros. 


But the whole Clipperton saga highlights the way there are certain very talented jr. 
players who just cannot keep the lip stiff and fires stoked if they ever finally do achieve a 
top ranking or win some important event. Next to Clipperton, the most historically 
ghastly instance of this syndrome involved a kid from Fresno, in Central CA, also an 
unaffiliated kid (his dad, an architect or draftsman or something, functioned as his 
coach; his dad had played for UC-Davis or -Irvine or one of those; all the E.T.A. staff 
really emphasize is that again here was a kid w/o academy-support and -perspective), 
who, after upsetting two top seeds and winning the Pacific Coast Flardcourt Boys 18's 
and getting toasted wildly at the post-tourney ceremony and ball and carried off on the 
shoulders of his dad and Fresno teammates, came home late that night and drank a big 
glass of Nestle's Quik laced with the sodium cyanide his Dad kept around for ink for 
drafting, drinks cyanitic Quik in his family's home's redecorated kitchen, and keels over 
dead, blue-faced and still with a ghastly mouthful of lethal Quik, and apparently his dad 
hears the thump of the kid keeling over and rushes into the kitchen in his bathrobe and 
leather slippers and tries to give the kid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and but gets the 



odd bit of NaCN-laced Quik in his own mouth, from the kid, and also keels over and 
turns bright blue, and dies, and then the mom rushes in in a mud-mask and fluffy 
slippers and sees them both lying there bright blue and stiffening, and she tries giving 
the architect dad mouth-to-mouth and is of course in short order also lying there keeled 
over and blue, wherever she's not mud-colored, from the mask, and but anyway dead as 
a rivet. And since the family has six more various-aged kids who as the night wears on 
come in from dates or patter down the stairs in little pajamas with adorable little 
pajama-feet attached to them, drawn by the noise of all the cumulative keeling over, 
plus I should mention the odd agonized gurgle-sound, and but since all six kids had gone 
through a four-hour Rotary-sponsored CPR course at Fresno's YMCA, by the end of the 
night the whole family's lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally 
tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouths; and in sum 
this whole instance of unprepared-goal-attaintment-trauma is unbelievably gruesome 
and sad, and it's one historical reason why all accredited tennis academies have to have 
a Ph.D.-level counselor on full-time staff, to screen student athletes for their possibly 
lethal reactions to ever actually reaching the level they've been pointed at for years. 
E.T.A.'s staff counselor is the bird-of-prey-faced Dr. Dolores Rusk, M.S., Ph.D., and she's 
regarded by the kids as whatever's just slightly worse than useless. You go in there with 
an Issue and all she'll do is make a cage of her hands and look abstractly over the cage at 
you and take the last dependent clause of whatever you say and repeat it back to you 
with an interrogative lilt — 'Possible homosexual attraction to your doubles partner?' 
'Whole sense of yourself as a purposive male athlete messed with?' 'Uncontrolled boner 
during semis at Cleveland?' 'Drives you bats when people just parrot you instead of re¬ 
sponding?' 'Having trouble keeping from twisting my twittery head off like a game- 
hen's?' — all with an expression she probably thinks looks blandly deep but which really 
looks exactly the way a girl's face looks when she's dancing with you but would really 
rather be dancing with just about anyone else in the room. Only the very newest E.T.A. 
players ever go to Rusk, and then not for long, and she spends her massive blocks of 
free time in her Comm.-Ad. office doing involved acrostics and working on some sort of 
pop-psych manuscript the first four pages of which Axford and Shaw dickied her lock 
and had a look at and counted 29 appearances of the prefix self-. Lyle, a dewimpled 
Carmelite who works the kitchen day-shift, occasionally Mario Incandenza, and many 
times Avril herself take up most of the psychic slack, for practical purposes, among 
E.T.A.s in the know. 

It's possible that the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and stay 
there without going bats are the ones who are already bats, or else who seem to be just 
grim machines a la John Wayne. Wayne's sitting low on his spine in the dining hall with 
the other Canadian kids, watching the screen and squeezing a ball without any readable 
expression. Hal's eyes are fevered and rolling around in his head. And actually by this 
time a lot of the eyes in the l.-Day audience have lost a bit of that festive sparkle. 
Though there's a certain chortle-momentum left over from the film's self-felonious 
Gentle/Clipperton comparisons, the Rodney-Tine-Luria-P.-love-rumor-and-Tine-as- 
Benedict-Arnold thing seems brow-clutchingly slow and digressive. 176 Plus there's some 
retroactive puzzlement, because the advent of Subsidized Time is historically known to 



have been a revenue-response to the heady costs of the U.S.'s Reconfigurative 
giveaway, which means it must have come after formal Interdependence, and indeed in 
the film it does come after, but then the chronology of some of the end makes it seem 
like Tine sold Johnny Gentle on his whole Sino-temporal-endorsement revenue scheme 
sometime in Orin Incandenza's first major-sport year at Boston U., which ended in the 
Year of the Whopper, pretty obviously a Subsidized year. By this time the E.T.A.s are 
eating more slowly, playing in that idle post-prandial way with the orts on their plates, 
and people's hats are making some people's heads itch, and plus everybody's sugar- 
crashing a bit; and one of the really small E.T.A. kids crawling around with a bottle of 
adhesive under the tables has whacked his head on the sharp edge of an institutional 
chair and is in Avril l.'s lap crying with a desolate late-day hysteria that makes everybody 
feel jagged. 

GENTLE AT LARGE! - Superheader; 

TOURS NEW 'NEW-NEW' ENGLAND BORDER AMID TIGHT SECURITY - Header; 

WHACKS CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES AGAINST MASSIVE LUCITE WALLS SOUTH OF WHAT 
USED TO BE SYRACUSE, CONCORD NH, SALEM MA. - 10-point Subheader; 

GENTLE MORE OR LESS AT LARGE: WATCHES FROM OXYGENATED PORTABUBBLE AS 
CLEMSON DOWNS BOSTON U IN LAS VEGAS'S FORSYTHIA BOWL - Header from That 
Guy Who’s Now Reduced to Laying out Headlines for the Rantoul IL Eagle; 

CRANIALLY CHALLENGED, ACROMEGALIC INFANTS LOST IN EXPERIALIST SHUFFLE? - 
Editorial Header in Ithaca NY's Daily Odyssean; 

GENTLE CABINET TO DRAFT BUDGET OVERHAUL IN LIGHT OF WALL STREET ANGST 
OVER COSTS OF TERRITORIAL RECONFIGURATION 1 - Header; 

ADMINISTRATION HEADS PUT TOGETHER ON MISSILE INVERSION EXPENDITURES, 
RELOCATION COSTS, LOSS OF REVENUE FROM BETTER PART OF FOUR STATES - 
Subheader. 

GENTLE [substantially muffled by both Fukoama microfiltration mask and oxygenated 
Lucite portabubblej: Boys. 

ALL SECS EXCEPT SEC. MEX. & SEC. CAN. [the Cabinet's Motown-girl puppets, decked 
out for climactic camp, are all in wicked three-piecers with slicked-back-straight hair and 
enormous robber-baron steer-horn mustaches, which mustaches could be straighter but 
are on the whole pretty impressive mustaches, for female puppets]: Chief. 

SEC. DEF.: So then how was the big game, Mr. President? 

GENTLE: Ouster, boys: seminal, visionary. An outstanding experience. I now say things 
like outstanding instead of boss. But also seminal. Ollie, men, I saw something 
outstandingly visional and seminary yesterday. I do not refer to the football game. I 
normally don't much get into football. All that grunting. Mud everywhere. Not my scene 
ordinarily. The most diverting single thing of the game was one of the two teams' 
punters. This one slim cat with an outsized leg and slightly less outsized arm. Never saw 
punts I could hear before. Whoom. Blam. I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one 
punt was in the air. People stood around conferring and making a racket and going to 
the restroom and coming back and eating concessions, all while this one cat's punts 



were still in the air. What was that cat's name again, R.T.? 

SEC. INT.: May I respectfully ask whether this is to be a lunch meeting, Mr. President? 
Is that why these Chinese-calendar-zodiac-Year-of-the-Tiger-and-like-Rat Szechuan- 
restaurant paper placemats are at all our places next to our water-pitchers? Are we 
going to get to tuck into some Chinese takeout. Chief? 

[Mario's aural background becomes something with a brisk cornet, and there's some 
glove-muffled finger-snapping from J.G.F.C., who's lapsed into a visionary reverie.] 

SEC. TRANSP.: Always been partial to the General Tsu's Chicken, if we're — 

RODNEY TINE, CHIEF, UNITED STATES OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES: President 
Gentle's asked us all here this morning to put our collective expertise together on an 
issue about which we in Unspecified Services believe he's been hit with a truly seminal 
set of creative insights. 

GENTLE: Gentlemen, we're both pleased and concerned to report that our seminal 
experiment in the Territorial Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N. 177 has been a thoroughgoing 
logistical coup. More or less. Delaware's looking a bit crowded, and one or two curvy¬ 
horned animals apparently got by the tactical squads, and there's rather less overall 
good sportsmanship in downstate New New York than we'd like to see, but overall I 
think 'thoroughgoing coup' would not be out of line as a term to describe this sort of 
success. 

TINE: Now it's time to think about how to pay for it. 

ALL SECS.: [Stiff turns to look at each other, tie- and mustache-straightenings, gulping 
sounds.] 

GENTLE: Rod informs me Marty's got the preliminary figures on gross costs, while 
Chef's boys have provided us with some projections on gross revenue-losses from the 
Reconfiguration of taxable territories and households and businesses and that there. 

SEC. TRANSP. & SEC. TREAS.: [Pass around thick bound folders, each emblazoned with 
the yawning red skull that emblazons all bad-news memos in the Gentle administration. 
Folders opened and scanned by ALL SECS. Sounds of jaws hitting the tabletop. A couple 
mustaches fall off altogether. One SEC. heard to ask whether there's even a name for a 
figure with this many zeroes. GENTLE'S portabubble on-screen is hit right over his 
plastic-wrapped corsage by a half-chewed Raisinette, to half-hearted audience cheers. 
Another cross-dressed Motown puppet is throwing a tiny string noose over a beam at 
the back of the velvet-lined Cabinet Room.] 

GENTLE: Boys. Men. Before anybody needs oxygen here [holding a placative hand up 
against the bubble's glass], let Rod here explain that despite a quantitative downer-type 
quality to these figures, all we merely have here is just what Rod might call an 
exaggerated example of a quadrennial problem any administration with vision is going 
to have to face eventually anyway. By the way, the unfamiliar but welcome face on my 
left here is Mr. P. Tom Veals, of Veals Associates Advertising, Boston, USA, N.A. 

ALL SECS.: [Not terribly placated-sounding mutterings of salutation to Veals.] 

MR. P. TOM VEALS [A tiny little caucasoid Tootsie-Pop-stick-puppet body and 
enormous face that's mostly front teeth and spectacles]: Yo. 

TINE: And to Tom's own left may I also present the charming and delightful Ms. Luria 
P—[indicating with pointer a puppet simply beyond pulchritudinous belief; the Cabinet 



Room's conference table seems to ascend ever so slightly as Luria P— cocks a well- 
pencilled eyebrow], 

STILL TINE: Gentlemen, what the president is articulating is that what we face here is a 
microsmic exemplar of the infamous Democratic Triple Bind faced by visionarians from 
FDR and JFK on down. The American electorate, as is its every right, on one hand 
demands the sort of millennial statesmanship and vision — decisive action, tough 
choices, lots of programs and services — see for instance the Territorial Reconfiguration 
for example — that will lead a renewed community into a whole new era of 
interdependent choice and freedom. 

GENTLE: The rhetorical chapeau's off to you, babe. 

TINE [Rising, eyes now two glittery red points in his round face's felt, the eyes two tiny 
smoke-detector bulbs run off a single AAA cell taped to the back of the puppet's surgical 
gown]: Now, speaking in the very most general terms, if the president's vision dictates 
the tough choice of cutting certain programs and services, our statistical people predict 
with reasonable inductive certainty that the American electorate will whinge. 

VEALS: Whinge? 

LURIA P— [TO TINE]: This is a Canadian idiom, cheri. 

VEALS: And who is this chick? 

TINE [Looking momentarily blank]: Sorry Tom. Canadian idiom. Whinge. Complain. 
Petition for redress. Assemble. March in those five-abreast demonstrating lines. Shake 
upraised fists in unison. Whinge [indicating photos on easels behind him of various 
historical pressure- and advocacy groups whingeing], 

SEC. TREAS.: And we already have an all-too-good idea of what will happen if we 
attempt any sort of conventional revenue enhancements. 

SEC. STATE: Tax revolt. 

SEC. H.E.W.: A whingeathon. Chief. 

SEC. DEF.: Tea-party. 

GENTLE: Bullseye. Whingeville. Political whingeocide. A serious drag-caliber lapse in 
mandate. We've already promised no new enhancements. I told them on Inauguration 
Day. I said look into my eyes: no new enhancements. I pointed at my eyes up there and 
said that was one tough choice that was not going to rain on anybody's program. Rod 
and Tom and I had that three-planked platform-exhibit. One: waste. Two: no new 
enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to 
blame. 

TINE: So then a double bind, so far, with potential whingeing on both flanks. 

SEC. TREAS.: And yet the financial communities demand a balanced federal budget. 
The Reserve Board all but insists on a balanced budget. Our balance of trade with the 
handful of nations we're still trading with requires a stable buck and so a balanced 
budget. 

TINE: The third flank, Chet, of the Triple Bind. Outflows required, inflows restricted, 
balance demanded. 

GENTLE: The classic executive-branch Cerberus-horned dilemma. The thorn in the 
Achilles' tendon of democratic process. Does anybody here by the way hear a sort of 
high pitch? 



ALL SECS.: [Blank glances at one another.] 

VEALS: [Blows nose at high volume.] 

GENTLE [Knocking experimentally on interior surfaces of portabubble]: Sometimes I 
hear a pitch at a high range beyond most people's hearing, admittedly, but this seems 
like a different type of high pitch. 

ALL SECS. [Necktie-knot-adjusting, polished-tabletop-studying.] 

GENTLE: That would be a no on the pitch, then. 

VEALS: Could this all be moved along up to at least a canter, guys? 

TINE: Perhaps it's the distinctive high pitch that sometimes precedes your getting 
ready to announce some seminal, visionary insight you've achieved into the previously 
intractable Triple Bind, sir. 

GENTLE: Babe, Rod, again a direct hit. Gentlemen: have a gander at these restaurant 
exhibits of the Sino-epithetic calendrical scheme. 

TINE: Meaning of course these placemats right here, bearing directly on the 
president's revenue vision. 

GENTLE: Gentlemen, as you all know I've just returned, at extremely high speeds, 
burping up the taste of wieners I'm pretty sure were just crawling with every sort of 
microbe that makes publicly vended concessions a scourge and menace that — 

TINE: flxnayish hand-signal] 

GENTLE: But so gentlemen I'm fresh back from a goodwill appearance at a post- 
collegiate bowl game. At which I ingested the pre-mentioned franks. But the real point 
is: do any of you guys happen to know the name of that collegiate bowl game? 

SEC. H.U.D.: We thought you'd said it was the Forsythia Bowl, Chief. 

GENTLE: That, Mr. Sivnik, is because that's what I was thinking its name in fact was, en 
route, when we'd all interfaced on the old scrambler. That's what the name was when I 
did the anthem there in '91. 

LURIA P— [Holding up zodiacalized placemat with a slight grease-corona'd spot of Hot 
and Sour Soup in the upper left corner]: Perhaps you would care now to tell your 
cabinet what ze contest of football calls itself, M. President. 

GENTLE [With a showmanlike look at VEALS, who's probing the gap between his 
mammoth incisors with the business cards of the CEOs of Pillsbury and Pepsico]: Boys, I 
heard punts, burped redhots, smelled beer-foam and recoiled from public urinals at the 
Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-lnsurance-Forsythia Bowl. 



YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


On a White Flag Group Commitment to the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group 
down in Braintree this past July, Don G., up at the podium, revealed publicly about how 
he was ashamed that he still as yet had no real solid understanding of a Higher Power. 
It's suggested in the 3rd of Boston AA's 12 Steps that you to turn your Diseased will over 
to the direction and love of 'God as you understand Him.' It's supposed to be one of AA's 
major selling points that you get to choose your own God. You get to make up your own 
understanding of God or a Higher Power or Whom-/Whatever. But Gately, at like ten 
months clean, at the TSBYSCD podium in Braintree, opines that at this juncture he's so 
totally clueless and lost he's thinking that he'd maybe rather have the White Flag 
Crocodiles just grab him by the lapels and just tell him what AA God to have an 
understanding of, and give him totally blunt and dogmatic orders about how to turn 
over his Diseased will to whatever this Higher Power is. He notes how he's observed 
already that some Catholics and Fundamentalists now in AA had a childhood 
understanding of a Stern and Punishing-type God, and Gately's heard them express 
incredible Gratitude that AA let them at long last let go and change over to an under¬ 
standing of a Loving, Forgiving, Nurturing-type God. But at least these folks started out 
with some idea of Him/Her/It, whether fucked up or no. You might think it'd be easier if 
you Came In with 0 in the way of denominational background or preconceptions, you 
might think it'd be easier to sort of invent a Higher-Powerish God from scratch and then 
like erect an understanding, but Don Gately complains that this has not been his 
experience thus far. His sole experience so far is that he takes one of AA's very rare 
specific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the 
knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he's talking to 
Anything/body or not, and he somehow gets through that day clean. This, after ten 
months of ear-smoking concentration and reflection, is still all he feels like he 
'understands' about the 'God angle.' Publicly, in front of a very tough and hard-ass¬ 
looking AA crowd, he sort of simultaneously confesses and complains that he feels like a 
rat that's learned one route in the maze to the cheese and travels that route in a ratty- 
type fashion and whatnot. W/ the God thing being the cheese in the metaphor. Gately 
still feels like he has no access to the Big spiritual Picture. He feels about the ritualistic 
daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like like a hitter that's on a hitting streak and 
doesn't change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he's on the streak. 
W/ sobriety being the hitting streak and whatnot, he explains. The whole church 
basement is literally blue with smoke. Gately says he feels like this is a pretty limp and 
lame understanding of a Higher Power: a cheese-easement or unwashed athletic 
supporter. He says but when he tries to go beyond the very basic rote automatic get- 
me-through-this-day-please stuff, when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates 
or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of a God as he can understand 



Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing but Nothing , an edgeless blankness that somehow 
feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with. He says he doesn't 
know if any of this is coming through or making any sense or if it's all just still 
symptomatic of a thoroughgoingly Diseased will and quote 'spirit.' He finds himself 
telling the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink audience dark doubtful thoughts he 
wouldn't have fucking ever dared tell Ferocious Francis man to man. He can't even look 
at F.F. in the Crocodile's row as he says that at this point the God-understanding stuff 
kind of makes him want to puke, from fear. Something you can't see or hear or touch or 
smell: OK. All right. But something you can't even feel? Because that's what he feels 
when he tries to understand something to really sincerely pray to. Nothingness. He says 
when he tries to pray he gets this like image in his mind's eye of the brainwaves or 
whatever of his prayers going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, 
radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything 
out there, much less Something with an ear. Much much less Something with an ear 
that could possibly give a rat's ass. He's both pissed off and ashamed to be talking about 
this instead of how just completely good it is to just be getting through the day without 
ingesting a Substance, but there it is. This is what's going on. He's no closer to carrying 
out the suggestion of the 3rd Step than the day the Probie drove him over to his halfway 
house from Peabody Holding. The idea of this whole God thing makes him puke, still. 
And he is afraid. 

And the same fucking thing happens again. The tough chain-smoking TSBYSCD Group 
all stands and applauds and the men give two-finger whistles, and people come up at 
the raffle-break to pump his big hand and even sometimes try and hug on him. 

It seems like every time he forgets himself and publicizes how he's fucking up in 
sobriety Boston AAs fall all over themselves to tell him how good it was to hear him and 
to for God's sake Keep Coming, for them if not for himself, whatever the fuck that 
means. 

The Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group seems to be over 50% bikers and biker- 
chicks, meaning your standard leather vests and 10-cm. boot heels, belt-buckles with 
little spade-shaped knives that come out of a slot in the side, tattoos that are more like 
murals, serious tits in cotton halters, big beards, Harleywear, wooden matches in 
mouth-corners and so forth. After the Our Father, as Gately and the other White Flag 
speakers are clustered smoking outside the door to the church basement, the sound of 
high-cc. hawgs being kick-started is enough to rattle your fillings. Gately can't even start 
to guess what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It's like what would be 
the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like 
playing a lot of really precise pool. 

This one sober biker that can't be much older than Gately and is nearly Gately's size — 
though with a really small head and a tapered jaw that makes him look kind of like a 
handsome mantis — as they're massed around the door he brings a car-length chopper 
up alongside Gately. Says it was good to hear him. Shakes his hand in the complex way 
of Niggers and Harleyheads. He introduces his name as Robert F., though on the lapel of 
his leather vest it says BOB DEATH. A biker-chick's got her arms around his waist from 
behind, as is SOP. He tells Gately it was good to hear somebody new share from the 



heart about his struggles with the God component. It's weird to hear a biker use the 
Boston AA word share, much less component or heart. 

The other White Flaggers have stopped talking and are watching the two men sort of 
just awkwardly stand there, the biker embraced from behind and straddling his 
throbbing hawg. The guy's got on leather spats and a leather vest with no shirt, and 
Gately notices the guy's got a jailhouse tatt of AA's weird little insignia of a triangle 
inside a circle on one big shoulder. Robert F./Bob Death asks Gately if by any chance 
he's heard the one about the fish. Glenn K. in his fucking robe overhears, and of course 
he's got to put his own oar in, and breaks in and asks them all if they've heard the one 
What did the blind man say as he passed by the Quincy Market fish-stall, and without 
waiting says He goes 'Evening, Ladies.' A couple male White Flaggers fall about, and 
Tamara N. slaps at the back of Glenn K.'s head's pointy hood, but without real heat, as in 
like what are you going to do with this sick fuck. 

Bob Death smiles coolly (South Shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in 
everything they do) and manipulates a wooden match with his lip and says No, not that 
fish-one. He has to assume a kind of bar-shout to clear the noise of his idling hawg. He 
leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This 
wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the 
water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at 
each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away. The young biker leans back 
and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top's tits 
mashed against his back. 

Gately's forehead was wrinkled in emotional pain all the way up Rte. 3 home. They 
were in the back of Ferocious Francis's old car. Glenn K. was trying to ask what was the 
difference between a bottle of 15-year-old Hennessey and a human female vagina. 
Crocodile Dicky N. up riding shotgun told Glenn to try to fucking remember there was 
ladies present. Ferocious Francis kept moving the toothpick around in his mouth and 
looking at Gately in the rearview. Gately wanted to both cry and hit somebody. Glenn's 
cheap pseudo-demonic robes had the faint rank oily smell of a dish towel. There was no 
smoking in the car: Ferocious Francis had a little oxygen tank he had to carry around and 
a little thin pale-blue plastic-like tube thing that lay under his nose and was taped there 
and sent oxygen up his nose. All he'd ever say about the tank and the tube is that they 
were not his personal will but that he'd submitted to advice and now here he was, still 
sucking air and staying rabidly Active. 

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of 
your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll 
all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention 
that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in 
spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from 
Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then 
now that you're clean and don't even much want Substances and feeling like you want 
to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling 
you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless 
pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. 



At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive 
gerbil-wheel of addictive pain. 

They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've 
been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' 
with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was 
you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting 
In Touch With Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up 
masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. 178 It starts to turn out that the 
vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers. 

Near the end of his Ennet residency, at like eight months clean and more or less free 
of any chemical compulsion, going to the Shattuck every A.M. and working the Steps 
and getting Active and pounding out meetings like a madman, Don Gately suddenly 
started to remember things he would just as soon not have. Remembered. Actually 
remembered 's probably not the best word. It was more like he started to almost 
reexperience things that he'd barely even been there to experience, in terms of 
emotionally, in the first place. A lot of it was undramatic little shit, but still somehow 
painful. E.g. like when he was maybe eleven, pretending to watch TV with his mother 
and pretending to listen to her P.M. nightly monologue, a litany of complaint and regret 
whose consonants got mushier and mushier. To the extent it's Gately's place to 
diagnose anybody else as an alcoholic, his mom was pretty definitely an alcoholic. She 
drank Stolichnaya vodka in front of the TV. They weren't cable-ready, for reasons of $. 
She drank little thin glasses with cut-up bits of carrot and pepper that she'd drop into 
the vodka. Her maiden name was Gately. Don's like organic father had been an Estonian 
immigrant, a wrought-iron worker, which is like sort of a welder with ambition. He'd 
broken Gately's mother's jaw and left Boston when Gately was in his mother's stomach. 
Gately had no brothers or sisters. His mother was subsequently involved with a live-in 
lover, a former Navy M.P. who used to beat her up on a regular schedule, hitting her in 
the vicinities between groin and breast so that nothing showed. A skill he'd picked up as 
a brig guard and Shore Patrol. At about 8-10 Heinekens he used to all of a sudden throw 
his Readers' Digest against the wall and get her down and beat her with measured 
blows, she'd go down on the floor of the apartment and he'd hit her in the hidden 
vicinity, timing the blows between her arms' little waves — Gately remembered she 
tried to ward off the blows with a fluttered downward motion of her arms and hands, as 
if she were beating out flames. Gately still hasn't ever quite gotten over to look at her in 
State Care in the Long-Term-Care Medicaid place. The M.P.'s tongue was in the corner 
of his mouth and his little-eyed face wore a look of great concentration, as if he were 
taking something delicate apart or putting it together. He'd be on one knee knelt over 
her with his look of sober problem-solving, timing his shots, the blows abrupt and 
darting, her writhing and trying to kind of shoo them away. The darting blows. Out of 
the psychic blue, very detailed memories of these fights surfaced one afternoon as he 
was getting ready to mow the Ennet House lawn for Pat in May Y.D.A.U., when Enfield 
Marine P.H.H. withheld maintenance services in reprisal for late utilities. After the little 
Salem decayed beach-cottage with Herman the Ceiling That Breathed, the little like tract 
house by Mrs. Waite's tract house in Beverly's good dining room chairs had fluted legs 



and Gately had scratched Donod and Donold in each leg with a pin, low down. Higher up 
on the legs, the scratches became correctly spelled. It's like a lot of memories of his 
youth sank without bubbles when he quit school and then later only in sobriety bubbled 
back up to where he could Get In Touch with them. His mother used to call the M.P. a 
bastuhd and sometimes go oof when he landed one in the vicinity. She drank vodka with 
vegetables suspended in it, a habit she'd picked up from the missing Estonian, whose 
first name, Gately read on a torn and then fucked-uppedly Scotch-taped paper out of 
her jewelry box after his mother's cirrhotic hemorrhage, was Bulat. The Medicaid Long- 
Term place was way the fuck out the Yirrell Beach bridge in Point Shirley across the 
water from the Airport. The former M.P. delivered cheese and then later worked in a 
chowder factory and kept weights in the Beverly house's garage and drank Heineken 
beer, and logged each beer he drank carefully in a little spiral notebook he used to 
monitor his intake of alcohol. 

His mom's special couch for TV was nubbly red chintz, and when she shifted from 
seated upright to lying on her side with her arm between her head and the little 
protective doily on the couch's armrest and the glass held tilting on the little space her 
breasts left at the cushion's edge, it was a sign she was going under. Gately at like ten or 
eleven used to pretend to listen and watch TV on the floor but really be dividing his 
attention between how close his Mom was to unconsciousness and how much 
Stolichnaya was left in the bottle. She would only drink Stolichnaya, which she called her 
Comrade in Arms and said Nothing but the Comrade would do. After she went under for 
the evening and he'd carefully taken the tilted glass out of her hand, Don'd take the 
bottle and mix the first couple vodkas with Diet Coke and drink a couple of those until it 
lost its fire, then drink it straight. This was like a routine. Then he'd put the near-empty 
bottle back next to her glass with its vegetables darkening in the undrunk vodka, and 
she'd wake up on the couch in the morning with no idea she hadn't drank the whole 
thing. Gately was careful to always leave her enough for a wake-up swallow. But this 
gesture of leaving some, Gately's now realized, wasn't just filial kindness on his part: if 
she didn't have the wake-up swallow she wouldn't get off the red couch all day, and 
then there would be no new bottle that night. 

This was at age ten or eleven, as he now recalls. Most of the furniture was wrapped in 
plastic. The carpet was burnt-orange shag that the landlord kept saying he was going to 
take up and go to wood floors. The M.P. worked nights or else most nights went out, 
and then she'd take the plastic off the couch. 

Why the couch had little protective doilies on the arms when it usually had a plastic 
cover on it Gately cannot recall or explain. 

For a while in Beverly they had Nimitz the kitty. 

This all came burpling greasily up into memory in the space of two or three weeks in 
May, and now more stuff steadily like dribbles up, for Gately to Touch. 

Sober, she'd called him Bimmy or Bim because that's what she heard his little friends 
call him. She didn't know the neighborhood cognomen came from an acronym for 'Big 
Indestructible Moron.' His head had been huge, as a child. Out of all proportion, though 
with nothing especially Estonian about it, that he could see. He'd been very sensitive 
about it, the head, but never told her not to call him Bim. When she was drunk and 



conscious she called him her Doshka or Dochka or like that. Sometimes, well in the bag 
himself, when he turned off the uncabled set and covered her with the afghan, easing 
the mostly empty Stoly bottle back onto the little TV Guide table by the bowl of 
darkening chopped peppers, his unconscious Mom would groan and titter and call him 
her Doshka and good sir knight and last and only love, and ask him not to hit her 
anymore. 

In June he Got In Touch with memories that their front steps in Beverly were a pocked 
cement painted red even in the pocks. Their mailbox was part of a whole tract-housing 
complex's honeycomb of mailboxes on a like small pole, brushed-steel and gray with a 
postal eagle on it. You needed a little key to get your mail out, and for a long time he 
thought the sign on it said 'US MAIL,' as in us instead of U.S. His mom's hair had been 
dry blond-white with dark roots that never lengthened or went away. No one tells you 
when they tell you you have cirrhosis that eventually you'll all of a sudden start choking 
on your own blood. This is called a cirrhotic hemorrhage. Your liver won't process any 
more of your blood and it quote shunts the blood and it goes up your throat in a high- 
pressure jet, is what they told him, is why he'd first thought the M.P.'d come back and 
cut his Mom or stabbed her, when he first came in, after football, his last season, at age 
seventeen. She'd been Diagnosed for years. She'd go to Meetings 179 for a few weeks, 
then drink on the couch, silent, telling him if the phone rang she wasn't home. After a 
few weeks of this she'd spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire. Then 
she'd go back to Meetings for a while. Eventually her face began to swell and make her 
eyes piggy and her big breasts pointed at the floor and she turned the deep yellow of 
quality squash. This was all part of the Diagnosis. At first Gately just couldn't go out to 
the Long-Term place, couldn't see her out there. Couldn't deal. Then after some time 
passed he couldn't go because he couldn't face her and try and explain why he hadn't 
come before now. Ten-plus years have gone like that. Gately hadn't probably 
consciously thought of her once for three years, before getting straight. 

Right after their neighbor Mrs. Waite got found by the meter-guy dead, so he must 
have been nine, when his Mom was first Diagnosed, Gately had gotten the Diagnosis 
mixed up in his head with King Arthur. He'd ride a mop-handle horse and brandish a 
trashcan-lid and a batteryless plastic Light-Saber and tell the neighborhood kids he was 
Sir Osis of Thuliver, most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur's vessels. Since the 
summer now, when he mops Shattuck Shelter floors, he hears the Clopaclopaclop he 
used to make with his big square tongue as Sir Osis, then, riding. 

And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to 
set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim 
and the same temperature he is. 



VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U. 


Hal Incandenza had this horrible new recurring dream where he was losing his teeth, 
where his teeth had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew, and 
fragmented and melted into grit in his mouth; in the dream he was going around 
squeezing a ball and spitting fragments and grit, getting more and more hungry and 
scared. Everything in there loosened by a great oral rot that the nightmare's Teddy 
Schacht wouldn't even look at, saying he was late for his next appointment, everyone 
Hal saw seeing Hal's crumbling teeth and looking at their watch and making vague 
excuses, a general atmosphere of the splintering teeth being a symptom of something 
way more dire and distasteful that no one wanted to confront him about. He was pricing 
dentures when he woke. It was about an hour before dawn drills. His keys were on the 
floor by the bed with his College Board prep books. Mario's great iron bed was empty 
and made up tight, all five pillows neatly stacked. Mario'd been spending the last few 
nights over at HmH, sleeping on an air mattress in the living room in front of Tavis's 
Tatsuoka receiver, listening to WYYY-109 into the wee hours, weirdly agitated about 
Madame Psychosis's unannounced sabbatical from the '60 Minutes +/-' midnight thing 
where she'd been an unvarying M-F presence for several years, it seemed like. WYYY 
had been evasive and unforthcoming about the whole thing. For two days some alto 
grad student had tried to fill in, billing herself as Miss Diagnosis, reading Horkheimer and 
Adorno against a background of Partridge Family slowed down to a narcotized slur. At 
no time had anyone of managerial pitch or timbre mentioned Madame Psychosis or 
what her story was or her date of expected return. Hal'd told Mario that the silence was 
a positive sign, that if she'd left the air for good the station would have had to say 
something. Hal, Coach Schtitt, and the Moms had all remarked Mario's odd mood. 
Mario was usually next to impossible to agitate. 180 

Now WYYY was back to running 'Sixty Minutes More or Less' without anybody at all at 
the helm. For the past several nights Mario has lain there in a sarcophagally tapered 
sleeping bag of GoreTex and fiberfill and listened to them run the weird static ambient 
musics Madame Psychosis uses for background, but now without any spoken voice as 
foreground; and the static, momentumless music as subject instead of environment is 
somehow terribly disturbing: Hal listened to a few minutes of the stuff and told his 
brother it sounded like somebody's mind coming apart right before your ears. 



9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


The Enfield Tennis Academy has an accredited capacity of 148 junior players — of 
whom 80 are to be male — but an actual Fall Y.D.A.U. population of 95 paying and 41 
scholarship students, so 136, of which 72 are female, right now, for some reason, 
meaning that while there's room for twelve more (preferably full-tuition) junior players, 
there ought ideally to be fully sixteen more males than there are, meaning Charles Tavis 
and Co. are wanting to fill all twelve available spots with males — plus they wouldn't 
exactly mind, is the general scuttlebutt, if a half dozen or so of the better girls left 
before graduation and tried for the Show, simply because housing more than 68 girls 
means putting some in the male dorms, which creates tensions and licensing- and 
conservative-parent-problems, given that coed hall bathrooms are not a good idea what 
with all the adolescent glands firing all over the place. 

It also means that, since there are twice as many male prorectors as female, A.M. drills 
have to be complexly staggered, the boys in two sets of 32, the girls in three of 24, 
which creates problems in terms of early-P.M. classes for the lowest-ranked C-squad 
girls, who drill last. 

Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, mealtimes, 
rankings, class v. drill schedules, prorector-hiring, accommodating changes in drill 
schedule consequent to a player's movement up or down a squad. It's all the sort of 
thing that's uninteresting unless you're the one responsible, in which case it's 
cholesterol-raisingly stressful and complex. The stress of all the complexities and 
priorities to be triaged and then weighted against one another gets Charles Tavis out of 
bed in the Headmaster's House at an ungodly hour most mornings, his sleep-swollen 
face twitching with permutations. He stands in leather slippers at the living-room 
window, looking southeast past West and Center Courts at the array of A-team players 
assembling stiffly in the gray glow, carrying gear with their heads down and some still 
asleep on their feet, the first bit of snout of the sun protruding through the city's little 
skyline far beyond them, the aluminum glints of river and sea, east, Tavis's hands 
working nervously around the cup of hazlenut decaf that steams upward into his face as 
he holds it, hair unarranged and one side hanging, high forehead up against the 
window's glass so he can feel the mean chill of the dawn just outside, his lips moving 
slightly and without sound, the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered 
asleep up next to the sound system with its claws on its chest and four pillows for 
bradypnea-afflicted breathing that sounds like soft repetitions of the words sky or ski, 
making no unnecessary sound, not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and 
have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it's quite possible is 
nothing but Tavis's imagination, so lips moving w/o sound but breath and cup's steam 
spreading on the glass, and little icicles from the rainy melt of yesterday's snow hanging 
from the anodized gutters just above the window and seen by Tavis as a distant skyline 



upside-down. In the lightening sky the same two or three clouds seem to move back and 
forth like sentries. The heat comes on with a distant whoom and the glass against his 
forehead trembles slightly. A hiss of low static from the speaker it had fallen into sleep 
without turning off. The A-team's array keeps shifting and melding as they await Schtitt. 
Permutations of complications. 

Tavis watches the boys stretch and confer and sips from the cup with both hands, the 
concerns of the day assembling themselves in a sort of tree-diagram of worry. Charles 
Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the 
successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of 
reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry. 

So the best E.T.A. players' special perk is they get hauled out of bed at dawn, still 
crusty-eyed and pale with sleep, to drill in the first shift. 

Dawn drills are of course alfresco until they erect and inflate the Lung, which Hal 
Incandenza hopes is soon. His circulation is poor because of tobacco and/or marijuana, 
and even with his DUNLOP-down-both-legs sweatpants and a turtleneck and thick old 
white alpaca tennis jacket that had been his father's and has to be rolled up at the 
sleeves, he's sullen and chilled, Hal is, and by the time they've run the pre-stretch 
sprints up and down the E.T.A. hill four times, swinging their sticks madly in all 
directions and (at A. deLint's dictate) making various half-hearted warrior-noises, Hal is 
both chilled and wet, and his sneakers squelch from dew as he hops in place and looks 
at his breath, wincing as the cold air hits the one bad tooth. 

By the time they're all stretching out, lined up in rows along the service-and baselines, 
flexing and bowing, genuflecting to nothing, changing postures at the sound of a 
whistle, by this time the sky has lightened to the color of Kaopectate. The ATHSCME fans 
are idle and the E.T.A.s can hear birds. Smoke from the stacks of the Sunstrand complex 
is weakly sunlit as it hangs in plumes, completely still, as if painted on the air. Tiny cries 
and a repetitive scream for help come up from someplace downhill to the east, presum¬ 
ably Enfield Marine. This is the one time of day the Charles doesn't look bright blue. The 
pines' birds don't sound any happier than the players. The grounds' non-pines are bare 
and canted at circuitous hillside angles all up and down the hill when they sprint again, 
four more times, then on bad days another four, maybe the most hated part of the day's 
conditioning. Somebody always throws up a little; it's like the drills' reveille. The river at 
dawn is a strip of foil's dull side. Kyle Coyle keeps saying it's co-wo-wo/d. All the lesser 
players are still abed. Today there's multiple retching, from last night's sweets. Hal's 
breath hangs before his face until he moves through it. Sprints produce the sick sound 
of much squelching; everyone wishes the hill's grass would die. 

Twenty-four girls are drilled in groups of six on four of the Center Courts. The 32 boys 
(minus, rather ominously, J. J. Penn) are split by rough age into fours and take a semi- 
staggered eight of the East Courts. Schtitt is up in his little observational crow's nest, a 
sort of apse at the end of the iron transom players call the Tower that extends west to 
east over the centers of all three sets of courts and terminates w/ the nest high above 
the Show Courts. He has a chair and an ashtray up there. Sometimes from the courts 
you can see him leaning over the railing, tapping the edge of the bullhorn with his 
weatherman's pointer; from the West and Center Courts the rising sun behind him gives 



his white head a pinkish corona. When he's seated you just see misshapen smoke-rings 
coming up out of the nest and moving off with the wind. The sound of the bullhorn is 
scarier when you can't see him. The waffled iron stairs leading up to the transom are 
west of the West Courts, all the way across from the nest, so sometimes Schtitt paces 
back and forth along the transom with his pointer behind his back, his boots ringing out 
on the iron. Schtitt seems immune to all weather and always dresses the same for drills: 
the warm-ups and boots. When the E.T.A.s' strokes or play's being filmed for study, 
Mario Incandenza is positioned on the railing of Schtitt's nest, leaning way out and 
filming down, his police lock protruding into empty air, with somebody beefy assigned 
to stand behind him and grip the back of the Velcro vest: it always scares hell out of Hal 
because you can never see Dunkel or Nwangi behind Mario and it always looks like he's 
leaning way out to dive Bolex-first down onto Court 7's net. 

Except during periods of disciplinary conditioning, alfresco A.M. drills work like this. A 
prorector is at each relevant court with two yellow Ball-Hopper-brand baskets of used 
balls, plus a ball machine, which machine looks like an open footlocker with a blunt 
muzzle at one end pointed across the net at a quartet of boys and connected by long 
orange industrial cords to a three-prong outdoor outlet at the base of each light-pole. 
Some of the light-poles cast long thin shadows across the courts as soon as the sun is 
strong enough for there to be shadows; in summertime players try to sort of huddle in 
the thin lines of shade. Ortho Stice keeps yawning and shivering; John Wayne wears a 
small cold smile. Hal hops up and down in his capacious jacket and plum turtleneck and 
looks at his breath and tries a la Lyle to focus very intently on the pain of his tooth 
without judging it as bad or good. K. D. Coyle, out of the infirmary after the weekend, 
opines that he doesn't see why the better players' reward for hard slogging to the upper 
rungs is dawn drills while for instance Pemulis and the Vikemeister et al. are still 
horizontal and sawing logs. Coyle says this every morning. Stice tells him he's surprised 
at how little they've missed him. Coyle is from the small Tucson AZ suburb of Erythema 
and claims to have thin desert blood and special sensitivity to the wet chill of Boston's 
dawn. The WhataBurger Jr. Invitational is a sort of double-edged Thanksgiving 
homecoming for Coyle, who at thirteen was lured from Tucson's own Rancho Vista Golf 
and Tennis Academy by promises of self-transcendence from Schtitt. 

Drills work like this. Eight different emphases on eight different courts. Each quartet 
starts at a different court and rotates around. The top four traditionally start drills on 
the first court: backhands down the line, two boys to a side. Corbett Thorp lays down 
squares of electrician's tape at the court's corners and they are strongly encouraged to 
hit the balls into the little squares. Hal hits with Stice, Coyle with Wayne; Axford's been 
sent down with Shaw and Struck for some reason. Second court: forehands, same deal. 
Stice consistently misses the square and gets a low-pH rejoinder from Tex Watson, 
hatless and pattern-balding at twenty-seven. Hal's tooth hurts and his ankle is stiff and 
the cold balls come off his strings with a dead sound like chung. Tiny bratwursts of 
smoke ascend rhythmically from Schtitt's little nest. Third court is 'Butterflies,' a 
complex VAPS deal where Hal hits a backhand down the line to Stice while Coyle 
forehands it to Wayne and then Wayne and Stice cross-court the balls back to Hal and 
Coyle, who have to switch sides without bashing into each other and hit back down the 



line now to Wayne and Stice, respectively. Wayne and Hal amuse themselves by making 
their cross-court balls collide on every fifth exchange or so — this is known around 
E.T.A. as 'atom-smashing' and is understandably hard to do — and the collided balls 
sprong wildly out onto the other practice courts, and Rik Dunkel is less amused than 
Wayne and Hal are, so, nicely warm now and arms singing, they're shunted quickly onto 
the fourth court: volleys for depth, then for angle, then lobs and overheads, which latter 
drill can be converted into a disciplinary Puker if a prorector's feeding you the lobs: the 
overhead drill's called Tap & Whack': Hal pedals back, terribly ankle-conscious, jumps, 
kicks out, nails Slice's lob, then has to sprint up and tap the net's tape with his Dunlop's 
head as Stice lobs deep again, and Hal has to backpedal again and jump and kick and hit 
it, and so on. Then Hal and Coyle, both sucking wind after twenty and trying to stand up 
straight, feed lobs to Wayne and Stice, neither of whom is fatiguable as far as anyone 
can tell. You have to kick out on overheads to keep your balance in the air. Overhead, 
Schtitt uses an unamplified bullhorn and careful enunciation to call out for everyone to 
hear that Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza was letting the ball get the little much behind 
him on overheads, fears of the ankle maybe. Hal raises his stick in acknowledgment 
without looking up. To hang in past age fourteen here is to become immune to 
humiliation from staff. Coyle tells Hal between the lobs they send up he'd love to see 
Schtitt have to do twenty Tap & Whacks in a row. They're all flushed to a shine, all chill 
washed off, noses running freely and heads squeaking with blood, the sun well above 
the sea's dull glint and starting to melt the frozen slush from I.-Day's snow and rain that 
night-custodians had swept into little wedged lines up against the lengthwise fences, 
which grimy wedges are now starting to melt and run. There's still no movement in the 
Sunstrand stacks' plumes. The watching prorectors stand easy with their legs apart and 
their arms crossed over their racquets' faces. The same three or four booger-shaped 
clouds seem to pass back and forth overhead, and when they cover the sun people's 
breath reappears. Stice blows on his racquet-hand and cries out thinly for the inflation 
of the Lung. Mr. A. F. deLint ranges behind the fence with his clipboard and whistle, 
blowing his nose. The girls behind him are too bundled up to be worth watching, their 
hair rubber-banded into little bouncing tails. 

Fifth court: serves to both corners of both boxes, catching each others' serves and 
serving them back. First serves, second serves, slice serves, shank serves, and back- 
snapping American Twist serves that Stice begs off of, telling the prorector — Neil 
Hartigan, who's 2 m. tall and of so few words everybody fears him by default — he's 
having lower spasms from a mispositioned bed. Then Coyle — he of the weak bladder 
and suspicious discharge — gets excused to go back into the eastern tree-line out of 
sight of the distaffs and pee, so the other three get a minute to jog over to the pavilion 
and stand with their hands on their hips and breathe and drink Gatorade out of little 
conic paper cups you can't put down til they're empty. The way you flush out a cottony 
mouth between drills is you take a mouthful of Gatorade and puff out your cheeks to 
make a globe of liquid that you mangle with your teeth and tongue, then lean out and 
spit out into the grass and take another drink for real. The sixth court is returns of serve 
down the line, down the center, cross-court for depth, then for placement, then for 
deep placement, w/ more taped squares; then chipped center- and cross-returns 



against a server who follows his serve to the net. The server practices half-volleys off the 
chips, although Wayne and Stice are so fast that they're on top of the net by the time 
the return gets to them and they can volley it away at chest-height. Wayne drills with 
the casual economy of somebody who's in about second gear. The urns' dispensers' 
cups can't stand up, their bottoms are pointy and they'll spill any liquid still in them, is 
why you have to empty them. Between squads Harde's guys will sweep the pavilion of 
dozens of cones. 

Then, blessedly, on the seventh court, physically undemanding Finesse drills. Drops, 
drops for angles, topspin lobs, extreme angles, drops for extreme angles, then restful 
microtennis, tennis inside the service lines, very soft and precise, radical angles much 
encouraged. Touch- and artistry-wise nobody comes close to Hal in microtennis. By this 
time Hal's turtleneck is soaked through under the alpaca jacket, and exchanging it for a 
sweatshirt out of the gear bag is a kind of renewal. What wind there is down here is out 
of the south. The temperature is now probably in the low 10's C.; the sun's been up an 
hour, and you can almost see the light-pole and transom shadows rotating slowly 
northwest. The Sunstrand stacks' plumes stand there cigarette-straight, not even 
seeming to spread at the top; the sky is going a glassy blue. 

No (tennis) balls required on the final court. Wind sprints. Probably the less said about 
wind sprints the better. Then more Gatorade, which Hal and Coyle are breathing too 
hard to enjoy, as Schtitt comes slowly down from the transom. It takes a while. You can 
hear his steel-toed boots hit each iron step. There is something creepy about a very fit 
older man, to say nothing of jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of claret-colored silk. He's 
coming this way, both hands behind his back and the pointer poking out to the side. 
Schtitt's crew cut and face are nacreous as he moves east in the yellowing A.M. light. 
This is sort of the signal for all the quartets to gather at the Show Courts. Behind them 
the girls are still hitting groundstrokes in baroque combinations, much high-pitched 
grunting and the lifeless chung of cold hit balls. Three 14's are made to squeegee the 
more extrusive melt back into the little banks of frozen leaves along the fence. At the 
horizon to the north a bulbous cone of picric clouds that gets taller by the hour as the 
Methuen-Andover border's mammoth effectuators force northern MA's combined 
oxides north against some sort of upper-air resistance, it looks like. You can see little 
bits of glitter from broken monitor-glass in the frozen stuff up by the fences behind 6-9, 
and one or two curved shards of floppy disk, and they're a troubling sight, Penn being 
absent amid troubling leg-rumors, Postal-Weight with two black eyes and his nose 
covered with horizontal bandages that are starting to loosen and curl at the edges from 
sweat, and Otis P. Lord alleged to have come back from the emergency room at St. 
Elizabeth's last night with the Hitachi monitor over his head, still, its removal, with all 
the sharp teeth of the broken screen's glass pointing at key parts of Lord's throat, 
apparently calling for the sort of esoteric expertise you have to fly in by private medical 
jet, according to Axford. 

They all get on the outside of three cones of Gatorade, bent or squatting, sucking 
wind, while Schtitt stands at a sort of Parade Rest with his weatherman's pointer behind 
his back and shares overall impressions with the players on the morning's work thus far. 
Certain players are singled out for special mention or humiliation. Then more wind 



sprints. Then a brief like strategy-clinic-thing from Corbett Thorp on how approach shots 
down the line aren't always the very best tactic, and why. Thorp's a first-rate tennis 
mind, but his terrible stutter makes the boys so uncomfortable they have a hard time 
listening. 181 

The whole first shift's on the eighth court for the final conditioning drills. 182 First are 
Star Drills. A dozen-plus boys on either side of the net, behind the baselines. Form a line. 
Go one at a time. Go: run up the side line, touch the net with your stick; then backwards 
to the outside corner of the service box and then forward to touch the net again; 
backward to the middle of the service box, forward to touch net; back to the baseline's 
little jut of centerline, up to net; service box's other outside corner, net, baseline's 
corner, net, then turn and run like hell for the corner you started from. Schtitt has a 
stopwatch. There's a janitorial bucket 183 placed in the doubles alley by the finish point, 
for potential distress. They each do the Star Drill three times. Hal has 41 seconds and 38 
and 48, which is average both for him and for any seventeen-year-old with a resting 
pulse rate in the high 50s. John Wayne's low of 33 occurs on his third Star, and he stops 
dead at the finish point and always just stands there, never bending or walking it off. 
Stice gets a 29 and everyone gets very excited until Schtitt says he was slow starting the 
watch: the arthritis in a thumb. Everyone but Wayne and Stice uses the retch-bucket in a 
sort of pro forma way. Sixteen-year-old Petropolis Kahn, a.k.a. 'W.M.' for 'Woolly 
Mammoth' because he's so hairy, gets a 60 and then a 59 and then pitches forward onto 
the hard surface and lies very still. Tony Nwangi tells people to walk around him. 

The cardiovascular finale is Side-to-Sides, conceived by van der Meer in the B.S. '60s 
and demonic in its simplicity. Again split into fours on eight courts. For the top 18's, 
prorector R. Dunkel at net with an armful of balls and more in a hopper beside him, 
hitting fungoes, one to the forehand corner and then one to the backhand corner and 
then farther out to the forehand corner and so on. And on. Hal Incandenza is expected 
at least to get a racquet on each ball; for Stice and Wayne the expectations are higher. A 
very unpleasant drill fatigue-wise, and for Hal also ankle-wise, what with all the stopping 
and reversing. Hal wears two bandages over a left ankle he shaves way more often than 
his upper lip. Over the bandages goes an Air-Stirrup inflatable ankle brace that's very 
lightweight but looks a bit like a medieval torture-implement. It was in a stop-and- 
reverse move much like Side-to-Sides 184 that Hal tore all the soft left-ankle tissue he 
then owned, at fifteen, in his ankle, at Atlanta's Easter Bowl, in the third round, which 
he was losing anyway. Dunkel goes fairly easy on Hal, at least on the first two go- 
arounds, because of the ankle. Hal's going to be seeded in at least the top 4 at the 
WhataBurger Inv. in a couple weeks, and woe to the prorector who lets Hal get hurt the 
way Hal let some of his Little Buddies get hurt yesterday. 

What's potentially demonic about Side-to-Sides is that the duration of the drill and 
pace and angle of the fungoes to be chased down from side to side are entirely at the 
prorector's discretion. Prorector Rik Dunkel, a former 16's-doubles runner-up at Jr. 
Wimbledon and a decent enough guy, the son of some kind of plastic-packaging-systems 
tycoon on the South Shore, tied with Thorp for brightest of the prorectors (more or less 
by default), regarded as kind of a mystic because he refers people sometimes to Lyle 
and has been observed sitting at community gatherings with his eyes closed but not 



sleeping... but the point is a decent enough guy but not much into any kind of exchange 
of quarter. He seems to have received instructions to put the particular hurt on Ortho 
Stice this time, and by his third go-around Stice is trying to weep without breath and 
mewing for his aunts. 185 But anyway everybody goes through Sides-to-Sides three times. 
Even Petropolis Kahn staggers through them, who after Stars had had to be sort of 
lugged over by Stephan Wagenknecht and Jeff Wax with his Nikes dragging behind him 
and his head swinging free on his neck and given kind of a swingset-shove to get started. 
Hal feels for Kahn, who's not fat but is in the Schacht-type mold, very thick and solid, 
except also carrying extra weight in terms of leg-and-back-hair, and who always tires 
easily no matter how hard he conditions. Kahn makes it through but stays bent over the 
distress-bucket long after the third go-around, staring into it, and stays that way while 
everybody else removes more soaked bottom layers of clothing and accepts clean 
towels from a halfway-house part-time black girl with a towel cart, and picks up balls. 186 

It is 0720h. and they are through with the active part of dawn drills. Nwangi, at the 
edge of the hillside, is whistling the next shift over for opening sprints. Schtitt shares 
more overall impressions as minimum-wage aides dispense Kleenex and paper cones. 
Nwangi's reedy voice carries; he's telling the B's he wishes to see nothing but assholes 
and elbows on these sprints. It's unclear to Hal what this might connote. The A-players 
have formed those ragged rows behind the baseline again, and Schtitt paces back and 
forth. 

'Am seeing sluggish drilling, by sluggards. Not meaning insults. This is the fact. Motions 
are gone through. Barely minimal efforts. Cold, yes? The cold hands and nose with 
mucus? Thoughts on getting through, going in, hot showers, water very hot. A meal. The 
thoughts are drifting toward the comfort of ending. Too cold to demand the total, yes? 
Master Chu, too cold for tennis at the high level, yes?' 

Chu: 'It does seem pretty cold out, sir.' 

'Ah.' Pacing back and forth with about-faces at every tenth step, stopwatch around his 
neck, pipe and pouch and pointer in his hands behind his back, nodding to himself, 
clearly wishing he had a third hand so he could stroke his white chin, pretending to 
ruminate. Every A.M. essentially the same, except when Schtitt does the females and 
the males get dressed down by deLint. All the older boys' eyes are glazed with 
repetition. Hal's tooth gives off little electric shivers with each inbreath, and he feels 
slightly unwell. When he moves his head slightly the monitor-glass bits' glitter shifts and 
dances along the opposite fence in a sort of sickening way. 

'Ah.' Turns crisply toward them, looking briefly skyward. 'And when is hot? Too pretty 
hot for the total self on the court? The other hand of the spectrum? Ach. Is always 
something that is too. Master Incandenza who cannot quickly get behind lob's descent 
so weight can move forvart into overhand, 187 please tell your thinking: it is always hot or 
cold, yes?' 

A small smile, "s been our general observation out there, sir.' 

'So then then so. Master Chu, from California's temperance regions?' 

Chu brings down his hankie. 'I guess we have to learn to adjust to conditions, sir, I 
believe is what you're saying.' 

A full sharp half-turn to face the group. 'Is what I am not saying, young LaMont Chu, is 



why you cease to seem to give total effort of self since you begin with the clipping 
pictures of great professional figures for your adhesive tape and walls. No? Because, 
privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. 
Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have 
no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of heaters, echo, 
being jammed in together, tarp is overdose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside 
clubs which ring the hour loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for 
coins. Inside roof too low for the lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside: the bad surface. Oh no 
look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline. Who could give the total, with crabgrass. 
Look here is low net high net. Opponent's relatives heckle, opponent cheats, linesman in 
semifinal is impaired or cheats. You hurt. You have the injury. Bad knee and back. Hurt 
groin area from not stretching as asked. Aches of elbow. Eyelash in eye. The throat is 
sore. A too pretty girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd 
overwhelming or too small to inspire. Always something.' 

His turns as he paces are crisp and used to punctuate. 'Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. 
No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? 
On the tennis court the you the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. 
Different world mside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, 
shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.' Pacing gradually faster, the 
turns becoming pirouettic. The older kids stare straight ahead; some of the younger 
follow every move of the pointer with wide eyes. Trevor Axford is bent at the waist and 
moving his head slightly, trying to get the sweat dripping off his face to spell something 
out on the surface. Schtitt is silent for two fast about-faces, ranging before them, 
tapping his jaw with the pointer. 'Not ever I think this adjusting. To what, this adjusting? 
This world inside is the same, always, if you stay there. This is what we are making, no? 
New type citizen. Not of cold and wind outside. Citizens of this sheltering second world 
we are working to show you every dawn, no? To make your introduction.' The Big 
Buddies translate Schtitt into accessible language for the littler kids, is a big part of their 
assignment. 

'Borders of court for singles Mr. Rader are what.' 

'Twenty-four by eight sir,' sounding hoarse and thin. 

'So. Second world without cold or purple dots of bright for you is 23.8 meters, 8 I think 
.2 meters. Yes? In that world is joy because there is shelter of something else , of 
purpose past sluggardly self and complaints about uncomfort. I am speaking to not just 
LaMont Chu of the temperance world. You have a chance to occur, playing. No? To 
make for you this second world that is always the same: there is in this world you, and in 
the hand a tool, there is a ball, there is opponent with his tool, and always only two of 
you, you and this other, inside the lines, with always a purpose to keep this world alive, 
yes?' The pointer-motions through all this become too orchestral and intricate to 
describe. 'This second world inside the lines. Yes? Is this adjusting? This is not adjusting. 
This is not adjusting to ignore cold and wind and tired. Not ignoring "as if." Is no cold. Is 
no wind. No cold wind where you occur. No? Not "adjust to conditions." Make this 
second world inside the world: here there are no conditions.' 

Looks around. 



'So put a lid on it about the fucking cold,' says deLint, with his clipboard under his arm 
and his strangler-sized hands in his pockets, hopping a little in place. 

Schtitt is looking around. Like most Germans outside popular entertainment, he gets 
quieter when he wants to impress or menace. (There are very few shrill Germans, 
actually.) 'If it is hard,' he says softly, hard to hear because of the rising wind, 'difficult, 
for you to move between the two worlds, from cold hot wind and sun to this inside 
place inside the lines where is always the same,' he says, seeming now to study the 
weatherman's pointer he holds down and out with both hands, 'it can be arranged for 
you gentlemen not to leave, ever here, this world inside the lines of court. You know. 
Can stay here until there is citizenship. Right here.' The pointer is pointed at the spots 
they're standing at breathing and blotting their faces and blowing their noses. 'Can 
today put up Testar Lung, for world's shelter. Sleep bags. Meals brought to you. Never 
across the lines. Never leave the court. Study here. A bucket for hygienic needs. At 
Gymnasium Kaiserslautern where I am privileged boy who whining about cold wind, we 
live inside tennis court for months, to learn to live inside. Very lucky days when they 
bring us meals. Not possible to cross a line for months of living.' 

Left-hander Brian van Vleck picks a bad moment to break wind. 

Schtitt shrugs, half-turning away from them to look off somewhere. 'Or else leave here 
into large external world where is cold and pain without purpose or tool, eyelash in eye 
and pretty girl — not worry anymore about how to occur.' Looks around. 'No one is a 
prisoner here. Who would like to escape into large world? Master Sweeny?' 

Little eyes down. 

'Mr. Coyle, with always too co-wold to give total?' 

Coyle studies the vasculature on the inside of his elbow with deep interest as he 
shakes his head. John Wayne is joggling his head around like a Raggedy-Andy-head, 
stretching out the neck hardware. John Wayne is notoriously tight and can't touch 
anything below the knee with straight legs during stretches. 

'Mr. Peter Beak with always the weeping to home on the telephone?' 

The twelve-year-old says Not Me Sir several times. 

Hal very subtly shoots in a small plug of Kodiak. Aubrey deLint has his arms crossed 
over the clipboard and is looking around beadily like a crow. Hal Incandenza has an 
almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite 
believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z 
coordinate or is just a cutout or projection. The kids of the next shift are walking 
downhill and sprinting back up and walking down, warrior-whooping without conviction. 
The other male prorectors are drinking cones of Gatorade, clustered in the little 
pavilion, feet up on patio-chairs, Dunkel's and Watson's eyes closed. Neil Hartigan, in his 
traditional Tahitian shirt and Gaugin-motif sweater, has to stay sitting down to fit under 
the Gatorade awning. 

'Simple,' Schtitt shrugs, so that the upraised pointer seems to stab at the sky. 'Hit,' he 
suggests. 'Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over 
baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total. Is nothing else. Learn. Try. Drink your green 
juice. Perform the Butterfly exercises on all eight of these courts, please, to warm down. 
Mr. deLint, please to bring them back down, make sure of stretching the groins. 



Gentlemen: hit tennis balls. Fire at your will. Use a head. You are not arms. Arm in the 
real tennis is like wheels of vehicles. Not engine. Legs: not either. Where is where you 
apply for citizenship in second world Mr. consciousness of ankle Incandenza, our 
revenant?' 

Hal can lean out and spit in a way that isn't insolent. 'Head, sir.' 

'Excuse?' 

'The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I'm going to occur as a player. The 
game's two heads' one world. One world, sir.' 

Schtitt sweeps the pointer in an ironic morendo arc and laughs aloud: 

'Play.' 


Part of Don Gately's live-in Staff job is that he hurtles here and there on selected 
Ennet House errands. He cooks the communal supper on weekdays, 188 which means he 
does the House's weekly shopping, which means that at least a couple times a week he 
gets to take Pat Montesian's black 1964 Ford Aventura and drive to the Purity Supreme 
Market. The Aventura is an antique variant of the Mustang, the sort of car you usually 
only see waxed and static in car shows with somebody in a bikini pointing at it. Pat's is 
functional and mint-reconditioned — her shadowy husband with something like ten 
years sober being big into cars — with such a wicked nice multilayer paint job that its 
black has the bottomless quality of water at night. It has two different alarm systems 
and a red metal bar you're supposed to lock across the steering wheel when you get 
out. The engine sounds more like a jet engine than a piston engine, plus there's a scoop 
poking periscopically from the hood, and for Gately the vehicle's so terrifically tight and 
sleek it's like being strapped into a missile and launched at the site of a domestic errand. 
He can barely fit in the driver's seat. The steering wheel is about the size of an old video¬ 
arcade game's steering wheel, and the thin canted six-speed shift is encased in a red 
leather baglet that smells strongly of leather. The height of the car's roof compromises 
Gately's driving-posture, and his right ham like exceeds the seat and squeezes against 
the gearshift so that shifting pinches his hip. He does not care. Some of the profoundest 
spiritual feelings of his sobriety so far are for this car. He'd drive this car if the driver's 
seat was just a sharp pointy spike, he told Johnette Foltz. Johnette Foltz is the other live- 
in Staffer, though between ultra-rabid Commitment-activity in NA and a somehow 
damaged NA fiance she spends a lot of time pushing around places in a wicker 
wheelchair, she's around Ennet House less and less now, and there are rumblings about 
a possible replacement, which Gately and the heterosexual male residents pray daily 
will be the leggy alumna and part-time counselor Danielle Steenbok, who's rumored also 
to attend Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which engages everyone's imagination to 
the max. 

It's a mark of serious regard and questionable judgment that Director Pat M. lets Don 
Gately drive her priceless Aventura, even just to like the Metro Food Bank or Purity 
Supreme, because Gately lost his license more or less permanently back in the Year of 
the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster for getting pinched on a DUI in Peabody on a 
license that had already been suspended for a previous DUI in Lowell. This was not the 



only Loss Don Gately incurred as his chemical careers moved toward their life-reversing 
climax. Once every couple months now, still, he has to put on his brown dress slacks and 
slightly irregular green sportcoat from Brighton Budget Large 'N Tall Menswear and take 
the commuter rail up to selected District Court venues on the North Shore and meet 
with his various P.D.s and P.O.s and caseworkers and sometimes appear briefly up in 
front of Judges and Review Boards to review the progress of his sobriety and 
reparations. When he first came to Ennet House last year, Gately had Bad-Check and 
Forgery issues, he had a Malicious Destruction of Property issue, plus two D&Ds and a 
bullshit Public Urination out of Tewksbury. He had a Break-and-Enter from a silent- 
alarmed Peabody mansion where he and a colleague got pinched before anything could 
get promoted. He had a Possession With Intent from 38 50-mg. tablets of Demerol 189 in 
a Pez container which he'd shoved down into the crack of the Peabody Finest's cruiser's 
back seat, but which got found anyway on the routine post-transport cruiser-search all 
cops perform when the arrestee's pupils are unresponsive both to light and to head- 
slaps. 

There was, too, of course, a certain darker issue, vis-a-vis a certain upscale Brookline 
home whose late owner had been eulogized at terrifying length and headline-size in 
both the Globe and Herald. After eight months of indescribable psychic cringing, waiting 
for the legal footwear to drop on the Nuck-VIP issue — toward the end of his drug-use 
Gately'd gotten sloppy and crazy and stuck idiotically with a method of straight meter¬ 
shunting that he'd learned up at MCl-Billerica and was pretty sure now constituted a 
signature Gately M.O., since the older guy that'd taught it to him in the Billerica metal- 
shop had subsequently got out and gone to Utah and died of a morphine overdose (and 
like who on earth hopes to get reliable morphine in fucking Utah?) over two years ago 
— after eight months of cringing and nail-biting, the last couple months of the torment 
in Ennet House — even though the House's D.S.A.S.-license put it legally off-limits to all 
constabulary without Pat Montesian's physical presence and notarized permission — 
after he was down to the cuticles on all ten digits, Gately had very discreetly 
approached a certain Percodan-devoted court stenographer an old girlfriend had once 
dealt to, and had the guy make equally discreet inquiries, and found that the potential 
Murder-2 investigation of the botched burglary 190 had been taken over — pace the loud 
howls of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A. — by something federal the addled 
stenographer called 'Non-Specific Services Bureau,' whereupon the case vanished from 
any sort of investigative scene the stenographer could make inquiries about, though 
quiet rumor had it that current suspicions were being directed at certain shadowy 
Nucko-political bodies all the way up in Quebec, far north of the Enfield MA where 
Gately had been cringing his way to nightly AA meetings with his fingers in his mouth. 

Most of the cases Gately had had pending his P.D. had gotten Closed Without 
Finding, 191 contingent on Gately's entering long-term treatment and maintaining 
chemical abstinence and submitting to random urinalyses and making biweekly 
reparation payments out of the pathetic paychecks he earned cleaning shit and sperm 
under Stavros Lobokulas and now also cooking and live-in-Staffing at Ennet House. The 
only issue not resolved on a Blue-File deferral was the business of driving with a DUI- 
suspended license. In the Commonwealth of MA, this issue carries a mandatory 90-day 



bit, as in like the penalty's written right into the statute; and the case's P.D. has been up¬ 
front with Gately about it's only a matter of the time of the wheels' slow judicial grind 
before some judge Red-Files the issue and the case and Gately has to do the bit at 
someplace MCl-Minimum like Concord or Deer Island. Gately isn't too hinked about 90 
inside. At twenty-four he'd done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two bouncers in a 
nightclub — it was more like he'd beaten the second bouncer bloody with the 
unconscious body of the first — and he knew quite well he could get by in a Common¬ 
wealth lockdown. He was too big to fuck or fuck with and not interested in fucking with 
anyone else: he did his time stand-up and gave nobody any provoking cause; and when 
the first couple hard guys had come after him for his canteen cigarettes he'd laughed it 
off with ferocious jolliness, and when they came back a second time Gately beat them 
half to death in the corridor behind the weight room where he could be sure plenty of 
other guys could hear it, and after that one incident was out of the way he could simply 
get by and not get fucked with. Gately now was hinked only about the prospect of 
getting just one or two AA meetings a week in jail — the only meetings sober inmates 
get are when an area Group comes in on an Institutional Commitment, which Gately's 
been on — when Demerol and Talwin and good old weed are almost easier to get in jail 
than in the outside world. Gately cringed now only at the thought of the Sergeant at 
Arms, the distinguished-looking shepherd guy. Going back to ingesting Substances had 
become his biggest fear. Even Gately can tell this is a major psychic turn-around. He tells 
the newer residents right up front that AA's somehow gotten him by the mental curlies: 
he'll now go to literally Any Lengths to stay clean. 

He'll tell them right out that he'd first come to Ennet House only to keep out of jail, 
and hadn't had much interest or hope about actually staying clean for any length of 
time; and he'd been up-front with Pat Montesian about this during his application 
interview. The grim honesty about his disinterest and hopelessness was one reason Pat 
even let such a clearly bad-news specimen into the House on nothing but a lukewarm 
referral from a P.O. up at the 5th District office in Peabody. Pat told Gately that grim 
honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from 
Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. 
Desperation helped also, she said. Gately scratched at her dog's stomach and said he 
wasn't sure if he was desperate about anything except wanting to somehow stop 
getting in trouble for things he usually afterward couldn't even remember he did them. 
The dog trembled and shuddered and its eyes rolled up as Gately, who hadn't been told 
about Pat's thing about wanting her dogs petted, rubbed its scabby stomach. Pat had 
said like well that was enough, that desire for the shitstorm to end. 192 Gately said her 
dog sure did like having its stomach rubbed, and Pat explained that the dog was 
epileptic, and said that just a desire to stop blacking out was more than enough to start 
with. She pulled some Commonwealth Substance-Abuse study in a black plastic binder 
off a long black plastic bookshelf filled with black plastic binders. It turned out Pat 
Montesian liked the color black a lot. She was dressed — really kind of overdressed, for 
a halfway house — in black leather pants and a black shirt of silk or something silky. 
Outside the bay window a Green Line train was laboring up the first Enfield hill in the 
late-summer rain. The downhill view from the bay window over Pat's black lacquer or 



enamelish desk was like the only spectacular thing about Ennet House, which was 
otherwise a wicked awful dump. Pat made a sound against the binder with a Svelte nail- 
extension and said that in this state study right here, conducted in the Year of the Tucks 
Medicated Pad, over 60% of the inmates serving Life sentences in hellish MCl-Walpole 
and not disputing that they'd done what they'd done to get in there nevertheless had no 
memory of having done it, whatever got them in there. For Life. None. Gately had to 
have her run it by him a couple times before he isolated her point. They'd been in 
blackouts. Pat said a blackout was where you continued to function — sometimes 
disastrously — but weren't aware later of what you did. It's like your mind wasn't in 
possession of your body, and it was usually brought on by alcohol but could also be 
brought on by chronic use of other Substances, synthetic narcotics among them. Gately 
said he couldn't recall ever having a real blackout, and Pat M. got it but didn't laugh. The 
dog was heaving and quivering with its legs spronged out to all points of the compass 
and kind of spasming, and Gately didn't know whether to quit rubbing on it. To be 
honest he didn't know what epilepsy was but suspected Pat was not referring to the 
woman's leg-shaver thing his totally alcoholic past girlfriend Pamela Hoffman-Jeep used 
to scream in the bathroom when she used. Everything mental for Gately was kind of 
befogged and prone to misprision for well into his first year clean. 

Pat Montesian was both pretty and not. She was in maybe her late thirties. She'd 
supposedly been this young and pretty and wealthy socialite out on the Cape until her 
husband had divorced her for being a nearly fullblown alcoholic, which seemed like 
abandonment and didn't improve her subsequent drinking one jot. She'd been in and 
out of rehabs and halfway places in her twenties, but then it wasn't until she'd almost 
died from a stroke during the D.T.s one A.M. that she'd been able to Surrender and 
Come In with the requisite hopeless desperation, etc. Gately didn't wince when he 
heard about Pat's stroke because his mom hadn't had D.T.s or a classic stroke, but 
rather a cirrhotic hemorrhage that made her choke and deprived her brain of oxygen 
and had irreparably vegetabilized her brain. The two cases were totally, like, apart in his 
mind. Pat M. was never in any way a mother-figure for Gately. Pat liked to smile and 
say, when residents pissed and moaned about their own addictions' Losses during the 
weekly House Community Meeting, she'd nod and smile and say that for her, the stroke 
had been far and away the best thing that's ever happened to her because it enabled 
her to finally Surrender. She'd come to Ennet House in an electric wheelchair at thirty- 
two and been unable to communicate except via like Morse-Code blinks or something 
for the first six months, 193 but had even without use of her arms demonstrated a 
willingness to try and eat a rock when the founding Guy Who Didn't Even Use His First 
Name told her to, using her torso and neck to like chop downwardly at the rock and 
chipping both incisors (you can still see the caps at the corners), and had gotten sober, 
and remarried a different and older South Shore like trillionaire with what sounded like 
psychotic kids, and but regained an unexpected amount of function, and had been 
working at the House ever since. The right side of her face was still pulled way over in 
this sort of rictus, and her speech took Gately some getting used to — it sounded like 
she was still loaded all the time, a kind of overenunciated slurring. The half of her face 
that wasn't rictusized was very pretty, and she had very long pretty red hair, and a 



sexually credible body even though her right arm had atrophied into a kind of semi¬ 
claw 194 and the right hand was strapped into this black plastic brace to keep its nail- 
extensioned fingers from curling into her palm; and Pat walked with a dignified but 
godawful lurch, dragging a terribly thin right leg in black leather pants behind her like 
something hanging on to her that she was trying to get away from. 

During his residency, she'd gone personally with Gately on most of his bigger court- 
dates, driving him up to the North Shore in the killer Aventura with its Handicapped 
plates — she because of the neurological right-leg thing literally had a lead foot, and 
drove all the time like a maniac, and Gately had usually almost wet himself on Rte. 1 — 
and she'd throw all Ennet House's substantial respect and clout behind him with Judges 
and Boards, until every issue that could be resolved without finding was Blue-Filed. 
Gately still couldn't figure out why all the personal extra attention and help. It was like 
he'd been Pat M.'s biggest favorite among the residents last year. She did have favorites 
and nonfavorites; it was probably unavoidable. Annie Parrot and the counselors and 
House Manager always had their particular favorites, too, so it all tended to work out 
square. 

About four months into his Ennet House residency, the agonizing desire to ingest 
synthetic narcotics had been mysteriously magically removed from Don Gately, just like 
the House Staff and the Crocodiles at the White Flag Group had said it would if he 
pounded out the nightly meetings and stayed minimally open and willing to persistently 
ask some extremely vague Higher Power to remove it. The desire. They said to get 
creakily down on his mammoth knees in the A.M. every day and ask God As He 
Understood Him to remove the agonizing desire, and to hit the old knees again at night 
before sack and thank this God-ish figure for the Substanceless day just ended, if he got 
through it. They suggested he keep his shoes and keys under the bed to help him 
remember to get on his knees. The only times Gately had ever been on his knees before 
were to throw up or mate, or shunt a low-on-the-wall alarm, or if somebody got lucky 
during a beef and landed one near Gately's groin. He didn't have any God- or J.C.- 
background, and the knee-stuff seemed like the limpest kind of dickless pap, and he felt 
like a true hypocrite just going through the knee-motions that he went through faithfully 
every A.M. and P.M., without fail, motivated by a desire to get loaded so horrible that 
he often found himself humbly praying for his head to just finally explode already and 
get it over with. Pat had said it didn't matter at this point what he thought or believed or 
even said. All that mattered was what he did. If he did the right things, and kept doing 
them for long enough, what Gately thought and believed would magically change. Even 
what he said. She'd seen it happen again and again, and to some awfully unlikely 
candidates for change. She said it had happened to her. The left side of her face was 
very alive and kind. And Gately's counselor, an ex-coke and -phone-bunko guy whose 
left ear had been one of his Losses, had hit Gately early on with the infamous Boston AA 
cake analogy. The grizzled Filipino had met with the resident Don G. once a week, 
driving Gately around Brighton-Allston in aimless circles in a customized Subaru 4x4 just 
like the ones Gately used to hotwire and promote to use for burgling. Eugenio Martinez 
had this eccentric thing where he maintained he could only be in touch with his own 
Higher Power when he was driving. Down near E.W.D.'s barge-docks off the Allston Spur 



one night he invited Gately to think of Boston AA as a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix. 
Gately had smacked himself in the forehead at yet another limp oblique Gene M. 
analogy, which Gene had already bludgeoned him with several insectile tropes for 
thinking about the Disease. The counselor had let him vent spleen for a while, smoking 
as he crawled along behind land-barges lined up to unload. He told Gately to just 
imagine for a second that he's holding a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix, which repre¬ 
sented Boston AA. The box came with directions on the side any eight-year-old could 
read. Gately said he was waiting for the mention of some kind of damn insect inside the 
cake mix. Gene M. said all Gately had to do was for fuck's sake give himself a break and 
relax and for once shut up and just follow the directions on the side of the fucking box. 
It didn't matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether 
he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if he just 
followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly 
more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused 
somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake 
would result. He'd have his cake. The only thing Gately knew about cake was that the 
frosting was the best part, and he personally found Eugenio Martinez a smug and self- 
righteous prick — plus he'd always distrusted both Orientals and spies, and Gene M. 
managed to seem like both — but he didn't screw out of the House or quite do anything 
they could Discharge him for, and he went to meetings nightly and told the more or less 
truth, and he did the shoe-under-bed knee thing every A.M./P.M. 24/7, and he took the 
suggestion to join a Group and get rabidly Active and clean up ashtrays and go out 
speaking on Commitments. He had nothing in the way of a like God-concept, and at that 
point maybe even less than nothing in terms of interest in the whole thing; he treated 
prayer like setting an oven-temp according to a box's direction. Thinking of it as talking 
to the ceiling was somehow preferable to imagining talking to Nothing. And he found it 
embarrassing to get down on his knees in his underwear, and like the other guys in the 
room he always pretended his sneakers were like way under the bed and he had to stay 
down there a while to find them and get them out, when he prayed, but he did it, and 
beseeched the ceiling and thanked the ceiling, and after maybe five months Gately was 
riding the Greenie at 0430 to go clean human turds out of the Shattuck shower and all 
of a sudden realized that quite a few days had gone by since he'd even thought about 
Demerol or Talwin or even weed. Not just merely getting through those last few days — 
Substances hadn't even occurred to him. I.e. the Desire and Compulsion had been 
Removed. More weeks went by, a blur of Commitments and meetings and gasper- 
smoke and cliches, and he still didn't feel anything like his old need to get high. He was, 
in a way. Free. It was the first time he'd been out of this kind of mental cage since he 
was maybe ten. He couldn't believe it. He wasn't Grateful so much as kind of suspicious 
about it, the Removal. How could some kind of Higher Power he didn't even believe in 
magically let him out of the cage when Gately had been a total hypocrite in even asking 
something he didn't believe in to let him out of a cage he had like zero hope of ever 
being let out of? When he could only get himself on his knees for the prayers in the first 
place by pretending to look for his shoes? He couldn't for the goddamn life of him 
understand how this thing worked, this thing that was working. It drove him bats. At 



about seven months, at the little Sunday Beginners' Mtg., he actually cracked one of the 
Provident's fake-wood tabletops beating his big square head against it. 195 

White Flagger ('Ferocious') Francis Gehaney, one of the most ancient and gnarled of 
the Crocodiles, had a white crew cut and skallycap and suspenders over the flannel shirt 
that encased his gut, and an enormous cucumber-shaped red schnoz you could actually 
see whole arteries in the skin of, and brown stumpy teeth and emphysema and a 
portable little oxygen-tank thing whose blue tube was held under the schnoz with white 
tape, and the very clear bright eye-whites that went along with the extremely low 
resting pulse-rate of a guy with geologic amounts of sober AA time. Ferocious Francis G., 
whose mouth was never without a toothpick and who had on his right forearm a faded 
martini-glass-and-naked-lady tattoo of Korean-War-vintage, who'd gotten sober under 
the Nixon administration and who communicated in the obscene but antiquated 
epigrams the Crocs all used 196 — F.F. had taken Gately out for eye-rattling amounts of 
coffee, after the incident with the table and the head. He'd listened with the slight 
boredom of detached Identification to Gately's complaint that there was no way 
something he didn't understand enough to even start to believe in was seriously going 
to be interested in helping save his ass, even if He/She/It did in some sense exist. Gately 
still doesn't quite know why it helped, but somehow it helped when Ferocious Francis 
suggested that maybe anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand 
probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass from the 
well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was it? 

That was months ago. Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or 
not. Fie does the knee-and-ceiling thing twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens to 
dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet Flouse residents, and tries to 
help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help. And when Ferocious Francis G. 
and the White Flaggers presented him, on the September Sunday that marked his first 
year sober, with a faultlessly baked and heavily frosted one-candle cake, Don Gately had 
cried in front of nonrelatives for the first time in his life. Fie now denies that he actually 
did cry, saying something about candle-fumes in his eye. But he did. 

Gately is an unlikely choice for Ennet Flouse chef, having fed for most of the last 
twelve years on sub-shop subs and corporate snack foods consumed amid some sort of 
motion. Fie is 188 cm. and 128 kg. and had never once eaten broccoli or a pear until last 
year. Chef-wise, he offers up an exceptionless routine of: boiled hot dogs; dense damp 
meat loaf with little pieces of American cheese and half a box of cornflakes on top, for 
texture; Cream of Chicken soup over spirochete-shaped noodles; ominously dark, 
leathery Shake 'N Bake chicken legs; queasily underdone hamburgs; and hamburg-sauce 
spaghetti whose pasta he boils for almost an hour. 197 None but the most street- 
hardened Ennet residents would ever hazard an open crack about the food, which 
appears nightly at the long dinner table still in the broad steaming pans it was cooked in, 
with Gately's big face hovering lunarly above it, flushed and beaded under the floppy 
chef's hat Annie Parrot had given him as a dark joke he hadn't got, his eyes full of 
anxiety and hopes for everyone's full enjoyment, basically looking like a nervous bride 
serving her first conjugal dish, except this bride's hands are the same size as the blouse's 
dinner plates and have jailhouse tatts on them, and this bride seems to need no oven- 



mitts as he sets down massive pans on the towels that have to be laid down to keep the 
plastic tabletop from searing. Any sort of culinary comments are always extremely 
oblique. Randy Lenz up at the northeast corner likes to raise his can of tonic and say that 
Don's food is the kind of food that helps you really appreciate whatever you're drinking 
along with it. Geoffrey Day talks about what a refreshing change it is to leave a dinner 
table not feeling bloated. Wade McDade, a young hard-core flask-alkie from Ashland KY, 
and Doony Glynn, who's still woozy and infirm from some horrendous Workers Comp, 
scam gone awry last year, and is constantly sickly and who's probably going to get 
Discharged soon for losing his menial job at Brighton Fence & Wire and not even 
pretending to look for another one — the two have this bit they do on spaghetti night 
where McDade comes into the living room right before chow and goes 'Some of that 
extra-fine spay-ghetti tonight, Doonster,' and Doony Glynn goes 'Ooo, will it be all lovely 
and soft?' and McDade goes 'Leave your teeth at home, boy' in the voice of a Kentucky 
sheriff, leading Glynn to the table by the hand as if Glynn were a damaged child. They 
take care to do the bit while Gately's still in the kitchen tossing salad and worrying about 
course-presentation. Though Tiny Ewell never fails to thank Gately for the meal, and 
April Cortelyu is lavish in her praises, and Burt F. Smith always rolls his eyes with 
pleasure and makes yummy-noises whenever he can get a fork to his mouth. 


PRE DAWN, 1 MAY — Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF 
TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL 


'Do you remember hearing,' U.S.O.U.S.'s Hugh Steeply said, 'in your own country, in 
the late I think B.S. 70s, of an experimental program, a biomedical experiment, 
involving the idea of electro-implantations in the human brain?' Steeply, at the shelf's 
lip, turned to look. Marathe merely looked back at him. Steeply said: 'No? Some sort of 
radical advance. Stereotaxy. Epilepsy-treatment. They proposed to implant tiny little 
hair-thin electrodes in the brain. Some leading Canadian neurologist — Elder, Elders, 
something — at the time had hit on evidence that certain tiny little stimulations in 
certain brain-areas could prevent a seizure. As in an epileptic seizure. They implant 



electrodes — hair-thin, just a few millivolts or —' 

'Briggs electrodes.' 

'Beg pardon?' 

Marathe coughed slightly. 'Also the type used in pacemakers of the heart.' 

Steeply felt his lip. Tm thinking I'm recalling a tentative Bio-entry saying your father 
had had a pacemaker.' 

Marathe touched his own face absently. The plutonium-239 pack of power. The Briggs 
electrode. The Kenbeck DC circuit. I am recalling terms and instructions. Avoid all 
microwaving ovens and many transmitters. Cremation for burial forbidden — this is 
because of plutonium-239.' 

'So but you know of this old program with epileptics? Experiments they thought could 
avoid ablative surgery for severe epilepsy?' 

Marathe said nothing and made what might be seen as slightly shaking the head. 

Steeply turned back to face the east with his hands clasped before his back, wishing to 
speak of it one way or another way, Marathe could tell. 

'I can't remember if I read about it or heard a lecture or what. The implantation was a 
pretty inexact science. It was all experimental. A whole lot of electrodes had to be 
implanted in an incredibly small area in the temporal lobe to hope to find the nerve- 
terminals that involved epileptic seizures, and it was trial and error, stimulating each 
electrode and checking the reaction.' 

'Temporal lobes of the brain,' Marathe said. 

'What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find, 
during all the trial and error, that firing certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes 
gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.' Steeply looked back over his shoulder at 
Marathe. 'I mean we're talking about intense pleasure, Remy. I'm remembering Olders 
called these little strips of stimulatable pleasure-tissue p-terminals.' 

' "P" wishing to mean "the pleasure." 

'And that their location seemed maddeningly inexact and unpredictable, even within 
brains of the same species — a p-terminal'd turn out to be right up next to some other 
neuron whose stimulation would cause pain, or hunger, or God knows what.' 

'The human brain is very dense; it is the truth.' 

'The whole point is they weren't doing it on humans yet. It was regarded as radically 
experimental. They used animals and animal-lobes. But soon the pleasure-stimulation 
phenomenon was its own separate radical experiment, while the second-string neuro¬ 
team stuck with the epileptic animals. Older — or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name — 
headed the team to map these what he called quote "Rivers of Reward," the p-terminals 
in the lobes.' 

Marathe idly felt at the little pills of cotton in his windbreaker's cotton pockets, 
pleasantly nodding. 'An experimental program of Canada, you stated.' 

'I even remember. The Brandon Psychiatric Center.' 

Marathe pretended to cough in the recognition of this. 'This is a mental hospital. The 
far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.' 

'Because they were theorizing that these quote "rivers" or terminals were also the 
brain's receptors for things like beta-endorphins, L-dopa, Q-dopa, serotonin, all the 



various neurotransmitters of pleasure.' 

'The Department of Euphoria, so to speak, within the human brain.' 

There was no hint or suggestion yet of dawn or light. 

'But not humans yet,' Steeply said. 'Older's earliest subject were rats, and the results 
were apparently sobering. The Nu— the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto¬ 
stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and 
over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, 
completely fixated on the lever's stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat 
finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.' 

Marathe said 'Not of the pleasure itself, however.' 

'I think dehydration. I'm fuzzy on just what the rat died of.' 

Marathe shrugged. 'But the envy of all experimental rats everywhere, this rat, I think.' 

'Then likewise implantations and levers for cats, dogs, swine, monkeys, primates, even 
a dolphin.' 

'Up the evolving scale, p-terminals for each. Each died?' 

'Eventually,' Steeply said, 'or else they had to be lobotomized. Because I remember 
even if the pleasure-electrode was removed, the stimulation-lever removed, the 
subject'd run around pressing anything that could be pressed or flipped, trying to get 
one more jolt.' 

'The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think.' 

'You seem amused by this, Remy. This was totally a Canadian show, this little 
neuroelectric adventure.' 

'I am amused while you make a way toward your point so slowly.' 

'Because then eventually Elder and company of course wanted to try human subjects, 
to see whether the human lobe had p-terminals and so on; and because of the sobering 
consequences for the subject-animals in the program they couldn't legally use prisoners 
or patients, they had to try to secure volunteers.' 

'Because of a risk,' Marathe said. 

'The whole thing was apparently a nightmare of Canadian legalities and statutes.' 

Marathe pursed the lips: 'I have doubts in my mind: Ottawa could easily have asked 
your then CIA for, what is the term, "Persons of Expendability" from Southeast Asia or 
Negroes, the subjects expended for your inspiring U.S.A.'s MK-Ultra.' 198 

Steeply elected ignoring this, rummaging in the purse. 'But what apparently happened 
was that somehow word of the p-terminal discovery and experiments had gotten out up 
in Manitoba — some low-level worker at Brandon had broken security and leaked 
word.' 

'Very little else to do in northern Manitoba besides leaking and gossiping.' 

'...And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human 
volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I 
should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling 
each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation 
and stimulation.' 

'In full knowledge of the rat's and dolphin's death, from pressing the lever.' 

Marathe's father had always assigned it to Remy, his youngest, to go first inside some 



public restaurant or shop to check for the presence of a microwave or GC-type of 
transmitter. Of special concerns were stores with instruments for thwarting a shoplifter, 
the shrieking instruments at doors. 

Steeply said 'And of course this eagerness for implantation put a whole new disturbing 
spin on the study of human pleasure and behavior, and a whole new Brandon Hospital 
team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people willing to 
trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation 

_i 

'To become some crazed rats.' 

'— All just for the chance at this kind of pleasure, and the M.M.P.I.s and Millon's and 
Approception tests on all these hordes of prospective volunteers — the hordes were 
told it was part of the screening — the scores came out fascinatingly, chillingly average, 
normal.' 

'In other words not any deviants.' 

'Nonabnormal along every axis they could see. Just regular young people — Canadian 
young people.' 

'Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.' 

'But Remy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural 
distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire 
on a winter night — the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and 
deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.' 

Marathe gave him a bland look. 

Steeply examined a cuticle. 'By free choice, of course.' 

Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard's hard thought. 'Thus, but 
how long before these leaks and rumors of p-terminals reach the Ottawa of government 
and public weal, for Canada's government reacts with horror at the prospect of this.' 

'Oh, and not just Ottawa,' Steeply said. 'You can see the implications if a technology 
like Elder's really became available. I know Ottawa informed Turner, Bush, Casey, 
whoever it was at the time, and everyone at Langley bit their knuckle in horror.' 

'The CIA chewed a hand?' 

'Because surely you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven, 
high-discretionary-spending society.' 

'But it would be illegalized,' Marathe said, noting to remember the various routines of 
movements Steeply made for keeping warm. 

'Stop with the babe-in-woods charade,' Steeply said. 'There was still the prospect of an 
underground market exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The 
electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to foresee 
enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes'd be no more 
exotic than syringes.' 

'But yes, but surgery, this would be a different matter to implant.' 

'Plenty of surgeons were already willing to perform illegal procedures. Abortions. 
Electric penile implants.' 

'The MK-Ultra surgeries.' 

Steeply laughed without mirth. 'Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train- 



cultists, no?' 

Marathe blew just one nostril of his nose. This was the Quebecois way: one of the 
nostrils at a time. Marathe's father's generation, they had used to bend and blow the 
one nostril out into the gutter in the street. 

Steeply said 'Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted 
with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, 
never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.' 

'Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting. Having rivers of reward without 
earning reward.' 

'Bug-eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated. Not working, not 
consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life. Finally pitching forward 
from sheer —' 

Marathe said 'Giving away their souls and lives for p-terminal stimulation, you are 
saying.' 

'You can maybe see the analogy,' Steeply said, over the shoulders to smile in a wry 
way. 'In Canada, my friend, this was.' 

Marathe made a very slight version of his rotary motion of impatience: 'From the A.D. 
1970s of time. This never has come to be. There would have been no development of 
the Happy Patch ...' 

'We both went in. Both our nations.' 

Tn secret.' 

'Ottawa first cutting the Brandon program's funding, which Turner or Casey or 
whoever howled at — our old CIA wanted the procedure developed and perfected, then 
Classified — military use or something.' 

Marathe said 'But the civilian guardians of the weal of the public felt differently.' 

'I think I'm remembering Carter was President. Both our combined nations made it a 
Security priority, shutting it down. Our old N.S.A., your old C7 with the R.C.M.P.s.' 

'Bright red jackets and hats with wide brims. In the 1970s still on horses.' 

Steeply held his mouth of the purse half up to the faint lights of Tucson, peering for 
something. 'I recall they went in directly. As in guns drawn. Boomed the doors. 
Dismantled the labs. Mercy-killed dolphins and goats. Olders disappeared somewhere.' 

Marathe's slow circular gesture. 'Your point finally is Canadians also, we would choose 
dying for this, the total pleasure of a passive goat.' 

Steeply turned, fiddling with an emery board. 'But you don't see a more specific 
analogy with the Entertainment?' 

Marathe tongued the inside of his cheek. 'You are saying the Entertainment, a 
somehow optical stimulation of the p-terminals? A way to bypass Briggs electrodes for 
orgasm-and-massage pleasures?' 

The dry rasp of the emerying a nail. 'All I'm saying is analogy. A precedent in your own 
nation.' 

'Us, our nation is the Quebec nation. Manitoba is —' 

'I'm saying that if he could get past the blind desire for harm against the U.S., your M. 
Fortier might be induced to see just what it is he's proposing to let out of the cage.' His 
training was such that he could emery without watching the procedure. For Steeply's 



most effective interviewing tactic was chis long looking down into the face without 
emotion of any kind. For Marathe felt more uncomfortable not knowing whether 
Steeply believed a thing than if Steeply's emotion of face showed he did not believe. 


Then tonight, at the prospect of boiled hot dogs, the two newest residents had pulled 
the typically standard new-resident princess-and-pea special-food-issue thing: the new- 
today girl Amy J. that just sits there on the vinyl couch shaking like an aspen and having 
people bring her coffee and light her gaspers and with just short of a like HELPLESS 
VICTIM: PLEASE CODDLE sign hung around her neck now claiming Red Dye #4 gives her 
'cluster migraines' (Gately gives this girl like a week tops before she's a vapor trail back 
to the Xanax 199 ; she has that look), and the weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding 
girl Joelle van D. with the past-believing bod and the linen face announcing she was a 
vegetarian and would 'rather eat a bug' than even get downwind of a boiled frank. And 
but in an incredible move Pat M. has asked Gately, at like 1800h., to blast down to the 
Purity Supreme down in Allston and pick up some eggs and peppers so the two new 
delicate-tummied newcomers can make themselves quiche or whatever. To Gately's 
way of thinking, this looks like catering to just the sort of classic addict's claim of special 
uniqueness that it's supposed to be Pat's job to help break down. The Joelle v.D. girl 
seems to have like inordinate immediate weight and pet-status with Pat, who's already 
making noises about exempting the girl from the menial-job requirement, and wants 
Gately to look for some kind of weird Big Red Soda Water tonic for the girl, who's 
apparently still dehydrated. It's sure a long way from making somebody chew feldspar. 
Gately has long since quit trying to figure Pat Montesian out. 

It's a weird-weather evening, both thundering and spitting snow. Gately had finally 
become able to distinguish genuine thunder from the Enfield sounds of ATHSCME fans 
and E.W.D. catapults, this after nine months of wearing a Goodwill rain-slicker every 
morning on the 0430 Green Line. 

One of the possible weak spots in Gately's AA recovery-program of rigorous personal 
honesty is that once he's jammed himself into a black-as-water Aventura and watched 
the spoiler throb as he turns over the carnivorous engine, etc., he often finds himself 
taking a little bit less of a direct route to a given Ennet-errand-site than he probably 
could. If he had to come right down to the heart of the issue he likes to cruise around 
town in Pat's car. He's able to minimize the suspicious time any particular bit of extra 
cruising adds to his errands by basically driving like a lunatic: ignoring lights, cutting 
people off, scoffing at One-Ways, veering wildly in and out, making pedestrians drop 
things and lunge curbward, leaning on a horn that sounds more like an air-raid siren. 
You'd think this would be judicially insane, in terms of not having a license and facing a 
no-license jail-bit anyway, but the fact is that this sort of on-the-way-to-the-E.R.-with-a- 
passenger-in-labor driving doesn't usually raise so much as an eyebrow among Boston's 
Finest, since they have more than enough other stuff to attend to, in these troubled 
times, and since everybody else in metro Boston drives exactly the same sociopathic 
way, including the Finest themselves, so that the only real risk Gately's running is to his 
own sense of rigorous personal honesty. One cliche he's found especially serviceable 



w/r/t the Aventura issue is that Recovery is about Progress Not Perfection. He likes to 
make a stately left onto Commonwealth and wait to get out of view of the House's bay 
window and then produce what he imagines is a Rebel Yell and open her up down the 
serpentine tree-lined boulevard of the Ave. as it slithers through bleak parts of Brighton 
and Allston and past Boston U. and toward the big triangular CITGO neon sign and the 
Back Bay. He passes The Unexamined Life club, where he no longer goes, at 1800h. 
already throbbing with voices and bass under its ceaseless neon bottle, and then the 
great gray numbered towers of the Brighton Projects, where he definitely no longer 
goes. Scenery starts to blur and distend at 70 kph. Comm. Ave. splits Enfield-Brighton- 
Allston from the downscale north edge of Brookline on the right. He passes the meat- 
colored facades of anonymous Brookline tenements. Father & Son Market, a dumpster- 
nest, Burger Kings, Blanchard's Liquors, an InterLace outlet, a land-barge alongside 
another dumpster-nest, corner bars and clubs — Play It Again Sam's, Harper's Ferry, 
Bunratty's, Rathskeller, Father's First I and II — a CVS, two InterLace outlets right next to 
each other, the ELLIS THE RIM MAN sign, the Marty's Liquors that they rebuilt like ants 
the week after it burned down. He passes the hideous Riley's Roast Beef where the 
Allston Group gathers to pound coffee before Commitments. The giant distant CITGO 
sign's like a triangular star to steer by. He's doing 75 k down a straightaway, keeping 
abreast of an Inbound Green Line train ramming downhill on the slightly raised track 
that splits Comm.'s lanes into two and two. He likes to match a Green train at 75 k all 
the way down Commonwealth's integral $ and see how close he can cut beating it 
across the tracks at the Brighton Ave. split. It's a vestige. He'd admit it's like a dark 
vestige of his old low-self-esteem suicidal-thrill behaviors. He doesn't have a license, it's 
not his car, it's a priceless art-object car, it's his boss's car, who he owes his life to and 
sort of maybe loves, he's on a vegetable-run for shattered husks of newcomers just out 
of detox whose eyes are rolling around in their heads. Has anybody mentioned Gately's 
head is square? It's almost perfectly square, massive and boxy and mysticetously blunt: 
the head of somebody who looks like he likes to lower his head and charge. He used to 
let people open and close elevator doors on his head, break things across his head. The 
'Indestructible' in his childhood cognomen referred to the head. His left ear looks a bit 
like a prizefighter's left ear. The head's nearly flat on top, so that his hair, long in back 
but with short Prince Valiant bangs in front, looks sort of like a carpet remnant 
someone's tossed on the head and let slide slightly back but stay. 200 Nobody that lives in 
these guano-spotted old brown buildings along Comm, with bars on the low floors' 
windows 201 ever goes inside, it seems like. Even in thunder and little asterisks of snow, 
all kinds of olive Spanish and puke-white Irish are on every corner, bullshitting and 
trying to look like they're just out there waiting for something important and drinking 
out of tallboys wrapped tight in brown bags. A strange nod to discretion, the bags, 
wrapped so tight the outline of the cans can't be missed. A Shore boy, Gately'd never 
used a paper bag around streetcorner cans: it's like a city thing. The Aventura can do 80 
kph in third gear. The engine never strains or whines, just eventually starts to sound 
hostile, is how you to know to hurt your hip and shift. The Aventura's instrument panel 
looks more like the instrument panel of military aircraft. Something's always blinking 
and Indicating; one of the blinking lights is supposed to tell you when to shift; Pat has 



told him to ignore the panel. He loves to make the driver's-side window go down and 
rest his left elbow on the jamb like a cabbie. 

He's caught behind a bus whose big square ass is in both lanes and he can't get around 
it in time to beat the train across the split, though, and the train crosses in front of the 
bus with a blast of its farty-sounding horn and what Gately sees as a kind of swagger to 
its jiggle on the street-level track. He can see people bouncing around inside the train, 
holding on to straps and bars. Below the split on Comm, it's Boston U., Kenmore and 
Fenway, Berklee School of Music. The CITGO sign's still off in the distance ahead. You 
have to go a shocking long way to actually get to the big sign, which everybody says is 
hollow and you can get up inside there and stick your head out in a pulsing neon sea but 
nobody's ever personally been up in there. 

Arm out like a hack's arm, Gately blasts through B.U. country. As in backpack and 
personal-stereo and designer-fatigues country. Soft-faced boys with backpacks and high 
hard hair and seamless foreheads. Totally lineless untroubled foreheads like cream 
cheese or ironed sheets. All the storefronts here are for clothes or TP cartridges or 
posters. Gately's had lines in his big forehead since he was about twelve. It's here he 
especially likes making people throw their packages in the air and dive for the curb. B.U. 
girls who look like they've eaten nothing but dairy products their whole lives. Girls who 
do step-aerobics. Girls with good combed long clean hair. Nonaddicted girls. The weird 
hopelessness at the heart of lust. Gately hasn't had sex in almost two years. At the end 
of the Demerol he physically couldn't. Then in Boston AA they tell you not to, not in your 
first year clean, if you want to be sure to Hang In. But they like omit to tell you that after 
that year's gone by you're going to have forgotten how to even talk to a girl except 
about Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in the cage. Gately's 
never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody's hand except to say the Our 
Father in a big circle. He's gone back to having wet dreams at age twenty-nine. 

Gately's found he can get away with smoking in the Aventura if he opens the 
passenger window too and makes sure no ashes go anywhere. The crosswind through 
the open car is brutal. He smokes menthols. He'd switched to menthols at four months 
clean because he couldn't stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them 
were Niggers and he'd figured that if menthols were the only gaspers he let himself 
smoke he'd be more likely to quit. And now he can't stand anything but menthols, which 
Calvin T. says are even worse for you because they got little bits of asbestosy shit in the 
filter and whatnot. But Gately had been living in the little male live-in Staffer's room 
down in the basement by the audio pay phone and tonic machines for like two months 
before it turned out the Health guy came and inspected and said all the big pipes up at 
the room's ceiling were insulated in ancient asbestos that was coming apart and 
asbestosizing the room, and Gately had to move all his shit and the furniture out into 
the open basement and guys in white suits with oxygen tanks went in and stripped 
everything off the pipes and went over the room with what smells like it was a 
flamethrower. Then hauled the decayed asbestos down to E.W.D. in a welded drum 
with a skull on it. So Gately figures menthol gaspers are probably the least of his lung- 
worries at this point. 

You can get on the Storrow 50 0 202 off Comm. Ave. below Kenmore via this long twiny 



overpass-shadowed road that cuts across the Fens. Basically the Storrow 500 is an urban 
express route that runs along the bright-blue Chuck all the way along Cambridge's spine. 
The Charles is vivid even under gloomy thundering skies. Gately has decided to buy the 
newcomers' omelette stuff at Bread & Circus in Inman Square, Cambridge. It will explain 
delay, and will be a subtle nonverbal stab at unique dietary requests in general. Bread & 
Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party 
granola-crunchers, and everything's like micro-biotic and fertilized only with organic 
genuine llama-shit, etc. The Aventura's low driver's seat and huge windshield afford 
your thinking man maybe a little more view of the sky than he'd like. The sky is low and 
gray and loose and seems to hang. There's something baggy about the sky. It's 
impossible to tell whether snow is still actually falling or whether just a little snow that's 
already fallen is blowing around. To get to Inman Square you veer over three lines to get 
off the Storrow 500 on Prospect St.'s Ramp of Death and slalom between the sinkholes 
and go right, north, and take Prospect through Central Square and all the way north 
through heavy ethnicity up almost into Somerville. 

Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it's in 
Cambridge's Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese, which means also Brazilians in the 
antiquated bellbottoms and flare-collared leisure suits they've never let go of, and 
where there are disco-ized Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away. The 
district's Brazilians are another solid rationale for driving at excessive rates of speed, for 
Gately. Plus Gately's solidly pro-American, and north of Central Square's clot and snarl 
Prospect St.'s a copless straight shot through eerily alien lands: billboards in Spanish, 
plaster madonnas in fenced front yards, intricately latticed grape arbors looking seized 
and clutched at, now, by networks of finger-thick bare woody vines; ads for lottery 
tickets in what isn't quite Spanish, all the houses gray, more bright plastic madonnas in 
nunnish getups on peeling front porches, stores and bodegas and low-suspension cars 
triple-parked, an all-out full-cast creche-type scene hung from a second-floor balcony, 
clotheslines hanging between houses, gray houses in rows squished right up next to 
each other in long rows with tiny toy-strewn yards, and tall, the houses, like being 
squished in from either side distends them. A couple Canadian and Nuck-owned stores 
mashed in here and there, between the propinquous Spanish three-deckers, looking 
subjugated and exiled and etc. The street shitty with litter and holes. Indifferent 
drainage. Big-assed girls stuffed like stuffed sausage into cigarette jeans in always trios 
in the twilight with that weird blond-brown hair Portuguese girls dye their hair to. A 
store in good old English advertising Chickens Fresh Killed Daily. Ryle's Jazz Club's 
upscale pub-type bar, guys in tweed caps and briar pipes in mouths at angles taking all 
day on a pint of warm stout. Gately's always thought dark beer tasted like cork. An 
intriguing single-decker medical-looking bldg, with a sort of tympanum over the 
smoked-glass door with an ad that says COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CONFIDENTIAL 
RECORDS that Gately's always wanted to poke the old head in and have a look at what 
on earth they might be up to in there. Little Portuguese markets with food in there you 
can't even tell what species it's from. Once at a Portuguese take-out at Inman Square's 
east end a coke-whore tried to get Gately to eat something that had tentacles. He had a 
sub instead. Gately now simply blows through Inman, heading for B&C over on the 



upscale northwest side nearer to Harvard, every light suddenly green and kind, the 
Aventura's ten-cylinder backwash raising an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets 
and glassine bags and corporate-snack bags and a syringe's husk and filterless gasper- 
butts and general crud and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup, like from a stand, which 
whirls in his exhaust, the tornado of waste does, moving behind him as the last pearly 
curve of the sun through baggy clouds is eaten by the countless Sancta Something and 
then whitewashed WASP church roofs' finials farther west, nearer Harvard, at 60 k but 
sustained in its whirl by the strong west breeze as the last of the sun goes and a blue- 
black shadow quietly fills the canyon of Prospect, whose streetlights don't work for the 
same municipal reasons the street is in such crummy repair; and one piece of the debris 
Gately's raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by a 
sudden gust as it falls, twirling, is caught at some aerodyne's angle and blown spinning 
all the way to the storefront of one 'Antitoi Entertainent' 203 on the street's east side, and 
hits, its waxed bottom making a clunk, hits the glass pane in the locked front shop door 
with a sound for all the world like the rap of a knuckle, so that in a minute a burly 
bearded thoroughly Canadian figure in one of those Canadianly inevitable checked- 
flannel shirts appears out of the dim light in the shop's back room and wipes its mouth 
on first one sleeve then the other and opens up the front door with a loud hinge-squeak 
and looks around a bit, viz. for who knocked, looking not overly pleased at being 
interrupted at what his sleeves betray as a foreign supper, and also, below that harried 
expression, looking edgy and emotionally pale, which might explain the X of small-arms 
ammo-belts across his checked chest and the rather absurdly large .44 revolver tucked 
and straining in the waistband of his jeans. Lucien Antitoi's equally burly partner and 
brother Bertraund — currently still back there in the little back room where they sleep 
on cots with serious weaponry underneath and listen to CQBC radio and scheme and 
smoke killer U.S.A. hydroponic dope and cut and mount glass and sew flags and cook 
over sterno in L.L. Bean upscale survivalist cookware, he's back there eating Habitant 
soupe aux pois and bread with Bread & Circus molasses and some sort of oblong blue- 
veined patties of a meat your thinking American wouldn't even want to try to identify — 
Bertraund's forever laughing in Quebecois and telling Lucien he looks forward with 
humorous anticipation to the day Lucien forgets to check the big Colt's safety before he 
jams it into the waistband of his pants and goes lumbering around the shop in his 
hobnail boots making every reflective and blown-glass item in the place tinkle and clink. 
The unautomatic revolver, it is a souvenir of affiliation. Once or twice doing work of 
affiliation with the Separatist/Anti-O.N.A.N. F.L.Q., they are for the most part a not very 
terrifying insurgent cell, the Antitois, more or less loners, self-contained, a monomitotic 
cell, eccentric and borderline-incompetent, protected gently by their late regional 
patron M. Guillaume DuPlessis of the Gaspe Peninsula, spurned by F.L.Q. after 
DuPlessis's assassination and also ridiculed by the more malignant anti-O.N.A.N. cells. 
Betraund Antitoi is in charge, the brains of the outfit, pretty much by default, since 
Lucien Antitoi is one of the very few natives of Notre Rat Pays ever who cannot 
understand French, just never caught on, and so has very limited veto-powers, even 
when it comes to such harebrained Bertraund-schemes as hanging a sword-stemmed 
fleur-de-lis flag from the nose of a U.S.A. Civic War hero's Boylston St. statue when it 



would simply be cut down by bored O.N.A.N.ite chiens-courcmts gendarmes the next 
morning, or taping bricks to the return-postage-paid solicitation cards of Scms-Christe 
Gentle's C.U.S.P. party, or fashioning Astroturf doormats with a likeness of Scms-Christe 
Gentle on them and distributing them gratis to home-supply outlets throughout their 
insurgency-grid — puerile and on the whole rather sad little gestures that M. DuPlessis 
would have interdicted with a merry laugh and a friendly hand on Bertraund's bowling 
ball of a shoulder. But M. DuPlessis had been martyred, an assassination only O.N.A.N. 
would be stupid enough to believe Command would be stupid enough to believe was 
merely an unfortunate burglary-and-mucus mishap. And Bertraund Antitoi, after 
DuPlessis's death and F.L.Q.'s rejection left to his own conceptual devices for the first 
time since their all-terrain vehicle was packed with quality Van Buskirk of Montreal 
exotic reflective glasswares and glass-blowing hardware and broom and ordnance and 
survivalist cookware and hip postcards and black-lather gag soap and cheesy old low- 
demand InterLace 3rd-Grid cartridges and hand-buzzers and fraudulent but seductive X- 
ray spectacles and they were sent through the remains of Provincial Autoroute 557 
U.S.A. 91 in protective garb they'd shed and buried just south of the Convexity's Bellow's 
Falls VT O.N.A.N.ite checkpoint, sent as a kind of primitive two-celled organism to 
establish a respectable front and abet more malignant cells and to insurge and terrorize 
in small sad anti-experialist ways, now Bertraund has shown a previously DuPlessis- 
restrained flair for stupid wastes of time, including this branching out into harmful 
pharmaceuticals as an attack on the fiber of New New England's youth — as if the U.S.A. 
youth were not already more than fiberless enough, in Lucien's mute opinion. Bertraund 
had actually been credulous enough with a wrinkled long-haired person of advanced 
years in a paisley Nehru jacket also of great age and a puzzling cap with a skeleton 
playing at the violin emblazoned upon it, on the front, wearing also the most stupid¬ 
appearing small round wire spectacles with salmon-colored lenses, and also continually 
forming the letter of V with fingers of his hand and directing this letter of V at Bertraund 
and Lucien — Bertraund felt the gesture was a subtle affirmation of solidarity with 
patriotic Struggle everywhere and stood for Victoire, but Lucien suspected a U.S.A. 
obscenity laughingly flashed at persons who would not comprehend its insult, just as 
one of Lucien's sadistic ecoie-speciaie tutors back in Ste.-Anne-des-Monts had spent 
weeks in Second Form teaching Lucien to say Vo chier, putain!' which he (the tutor) 
claimed meant 'Look Maman I can speak French and thus finally express my love and 
devotion to you' — Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the 
person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary's mirror for 
eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the long-haired old person had 
claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a frop-formidable 
harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one's most hair- 
raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot- 
springs resort, throwing in as well a kitchen-can waste bag filled with crusty old mossy 
boot-and-leg Read-Only cartridges, sans any labels, that appeared to have been stored 
in a person's rear yard and then run through a gaseous dryer of clothes, as if Lucien did 
not have already more than plenty of crusty old cartridges which Bertraund removed 
from InterLace dumpsters or was cheated in barters for and brought back to the shop 



for Lucien's job to view and label and organize the cartridges for storing and were never 
bought except the occasional cartridge in Portuguese, or pornographical. And the aged 
person had flopped off in his cap and sandals with a lamp and an apothecary's mirror to 
which Lucien had been personally much attached, particularly to the lavender mirror, 
flashing this covert obscenity of V and with smiles urging the brothers to write their 
name and address on the palm of their hands with the drenching-sweat-proof ink before 
they dropped any of the so-called 'tu-sais-quoi,' if they were going to be the persons 
who ingested these lozenges. 

The front door squeaks loudly of the hinge and Lucien recloses it and drives the bolt 
home: squeak. The upper hinge squeaks no matter the oil, as the shop drives Lucien 
crazy by becoming again dusty each time the door is opened to the street's grit, and 
from the dust of the alley with so many dumpsters behind the back room which 
Bertraund refuses not to open the iron service door of, to spit. The squeak functions in 
the place of a customer-bell, however. The front knock of the closed door clearly is once 
again big-bottomed Brazilian children playing at unamusing pranks. He does not pull the 
window shade, but he does grab the stout trusty homemade broom he sweeps the shop 
all day with and stands there, chewing anxiously the nail of a thumb, looking out. Lucien 
Antitoi enjoys standing at the door's glass pane and looking blankly out at the light snow 
of dust bright against the blue-shadowed twilight eating the American street outside. 
The door continues to squeak faintly even after he's driven home the bolt. He can stand 
here happily for hours, leaning on the sturdy broom he'd carved from a snow-snapped 
limb as a boy during the Gaspe's terrible blizzards of Quebec of A.D. 1993 and bound 
broom-corn onto and sharpened the tip of, as a sort of domestic weapon, even then, 
before O.N.A.N.ite experialist impost made any sort of struggle or sacrifice remotely 
necessary, as a silent boy, keenly interested in weapons and ammunitions of all the 
different sorts. Which along with the size thing helped with the teasing. He could and 
does stand here for hours, complexly backlit, transparently reflected, looking at alien 
traffic and commerce. He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary 
that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see. 
'Squeak.' The visual bulk of the shoproom of Antitoi Entertainent is devoted to glass: 
they have set curved and planar mirrors at studied angles whereby each part of the 
room is reflected in every other part, which flusters and disorients customers and keeps 
haggling to a minimum. In a sort of narrow fashioned corridor behind one gauntlet of 
angled glass is their stock of gags, notions, ironic postcards, and unironic sentimental 
greeting cards as well. 204 Flanking another are shelf after shelf of used and bootleg 
InterLace and independent and even homemade digital entertainment cartridges, in no 
discernible order, since Bertraund handles acquisition and Lucien's in charge of 
inventory and order. Nevertheless, once he's viewed it even once, he can identify any 
used cartridge in stock and will point it out to the rare customer with the sharpened 
whitewood tip of his homemade broom. Some of the cartridges do not even have labels, 
they're so obscure or illicit. To keep up with Bertraund, Lucien must watch new 
acquisitions on the small cheap viewer beside the manual cash register as he sweeps the 
shop with the imposing broom he has loved and kept sharpened and polished and floor- 
fuzz-free since adolescence, and which he sometimes imagines he is conversing with. 



very quietly, telling it to va chier putain in tones surprisingly gentle and kind for such a 
large terrorist. The viewer's screen has something wrong with its Definition and there is 
a wobble that makes all cartridge performers on the left section of it appear to have 
Tourette's syndrome. The pornographical cartridges he finds nonsensical and views 
them in Fast Forward to get them over with as quickly as possible. So but he knows all 
but the most recent acquisitions' colors and visual plots, but some still have no labels. 
Fie still has not gotten to see and shelve many of the massive assortment Bertraund 
lugged home and out of the all-terrain vehicle in Saturday's chilling rain, several old 
exercise and film cartridges a small Back Bay TelEntertainment outlet was discarding as 
outdated. Also there were one or two Bertraund claimed he had picked up literally on 
the street downtown from the site of the flag-draped Shaw statue from untended 
commercial displays that stupidly contained detachable cartridges anyone could detach 
and lug home in the rain. The displays' cartridges he had immediately viewed, for 
though they were unlabelled save for a commercialed slogan in tiny raised letters of IL 
NE FAUT PLUS QU'ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR - which to Lucien Antitoi signified zilch 
— each was stamped also with a circle and arc that resembled a disembodied smile, 
which made Lucien himself smile and pop them in right away, to find to his 
disappointment and impatience with Bertraund that they were blank, without even HD 
static, just as the old rude person's bartered tapes he had removed from the waste bag 
of their storage for viewing had proved, blank beyond static, to the satisfaction of 
Lucien's disgust. 205 Through the door's window, passing headlights illumine a disabled 
person in a wheelchair laboring along the rutted walk outside the Portuguese grocery 
opposite Antitoi Entertainent's storefront. Lucien forgets he was eating bread with 
upscale molasses and soupe aux pois; he forgets he is eating the moment the food's 
taste leaves his mouth. His mind is usually as clean and transparent as anything in the 
shop. He sweeps a little, absently, in front of the pane, watching his face's reflection bob 
against the blackening night outside. Light snowfall almost is bouncing back and forth 
between sides of Prospect's canyon. The broom's bristles say 'Hush, hush.' The tin-and- 
static sound of CQBC has been silenced, he can hear Bertraund moving about rattling 
some pans and dropping one, and Lucien works his sharp-pointed broom against the 
chipped Portuguese tile of the nonwood floor. He is a gifted domestic, the best 125-kilo 
domestic ever to wear a beard and suspenders of small-arms ordnance. The shop, 
crammed to the acoustic-tile ceiling and dustless, resembles a junkyard for anal 
retentives. He bobs and sweeps, and bobbing shafts of mirror-light gleam and dance, 
backed by night, in the locked door's pane. The figure in the wheelchair still labors at his 
wheels, but appears, queerly, still to be where he was before, in front of the Portuguese 
grocery. Moving closer to the pane, so that his face's transparent image fills the glass 
and he can now see clearly beyond it, Lucien sees that what it is is it's a different figure 
in a different wheelchair from the one before, this new figure's face also downcasted 
and queerly masked, laboring around the sidewalk's jagged holes; and that not too far 
behind this seated figure is yet another figure in a wheelchair, coming this way; and as 
Lucien Antitoi twists his head and presses his hairy cheek to the glass of the squeaking 
door — except but now how can a door's upper hinge loudly squeak when the door is 
tightly closed and the bolt driven home with the solid snick of a .44 bullet slipping home 



in a revolver's chamber? — looking due southeast up Prospect, Lucien can see the 
variegated glints of passing low-chassis headlights off a whole long single-file column of 
polished metal wheels stolidly turning, being turned by swarthy hands in fingerless 
wheelchair-gloves. 'Squeak.' 'Squeak.' Lucien has been hearing squeaks for several 
minutes from what he had naively like the babe assumed was the door's upper hinge. 
This hinge does truly squeak. 206 But Lucien now hears whole systems of squeaks, slow 
and soft but not stealthy squeaks, the squeaks of weighted wheelchairs moving slow, 
implacable, calm and businesslike and yet menacing, moving with the indifference of 
things at the very top of the food-chain; and, now, turning, heart loud in his head, can 
now see, in the carefully placed display mirrors' angles, spikes of light off rotary metal 
rotating at a height about waist-level to a huge standing man w/ broom clutched to 
barrel chest, there are great quiet numbers of persons in wheelchairs moving in the 
room with him, in the shoproom, moving calmly into position behind waist-high glass 
counters full of wacky notions. The street outside is flanked on both sidewalks by defiles 
of wheelchaired, blanket-lapped persons whose faces are obscured by what look like 
large and snow-dotted leaves, and the shades of the Portuguese grocery have been 
drawn and a ROPAS sign hung by a circumflex of twine in the pane of the front door. 
Wheelchair Assassins. Lucien has been taught the glyph of a profiled wheelchair with an 
enormous bone-crossed skull below. It is the worst possible scenario; it is worse than 
O.N.A.N.ite gendarmes by far: A.F.R. Whimpering to his broom, Lucien disengages the 
mammoth Colt from his pants and finds that a length of black thread from the denim 
panel that surrounds his zipper has gotten looped around the barrel's sight-blade and 
comes ripping out with a long high squeak from the pants with the convulsive force of 
his drawing the weapon, so that his pants split open alongside the zipper and the force 
of his mammoth Canadian gut extends the tear all up and down the front so that the 
snap unsnaps and the jeans burst open and fall immediately to his ankles, puddling 
around his hobnail boots, revealing red union-suit underwear beneath and forcing 
Lucien to take tiny undignified shuffling steps frantically toward the back room as he 
tries with the thread-snagged Colt to cover every piece of fragmented waist-high motion 
the mirror's shards of light reveal in the shoproom while scuttling as fast as the fallen 
jeans allow toward the back room to alert, nonverbally, using the sort of demon-eyed 
tongue-protruded neck-corded tortured rigid bug-eyed face a small child makes when 
he is playing Le Monstre, to alert Bertraund that They have come, not Bostonian 
gendarmes or white-suited O.N.A.N.ite chiens but They, Them, Les Assassins des 
Fauteuils Rollents, A.F.R.s, the ones who come always in the twilight, implacably 
squeaking, and cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, feel no pity or remorse, or 
fear (except a rumored fear of steep hills), and now they're all in here all over the 
shoproom like faceless rats, the devil's own hamsters, moving with placid squeaks just 
beyond view of the shop's mirrored peripheries, regally serene; and Lucien, with the big 
broom in one hand and the thread-webbed Colt in the other, tries to cover his little- 
stepped flight with a thunderous shot that goes high and shatters an angled full-length 
planar door-mirror, spraying anodized glass and replacing the reflection of a blanket- 
lapped A.F.R. wearing a plastic fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem mask on his face with a 
jagged stelliform hole, with glittered shards and glass-dust in the air all over the place 



and the imperturbable squeaks — 'squeak squeak squeak squeak,' it is awful — 
sounding right through clatter and tinkle and frantic hobnailed bootfalls, and through 
the flying glass, aiming every which way behind him, Lucien bursts almost falling 
through the curtains, bug-eyed and corded and webbed in thread, to alert Bertraund 
facially that the shot had signified A.F.R.s and to break out the sub-cot weaponry and 
prepare to bunker for encirclement, only to horrifically see the shop's rear service door 
standing agape in a gritty breeze and Bertraund still at the card table they use for their 
supper — used — with pea soup and troubling meat-patty still on his ration-tray, sitting, 
squinting piratically straight ahead, with a railroad spike in his eye. The spike, its tip is 
both domed and squared, also rusty, and it protrudes from the socket of his brother's 
former blue right eye. There are maybe about six or nine A.F.R. here in the drafty back 
room, silent as ever, seated with motionless wheels, flannel blankets obscuring an 
absence of the legs, also of course flannel-shirted, masked in synthetic-blend heraldic- 
flag irises with flaming transper^ant stems at the chin and slits for eyes and round utter 
holes for mouths — all except for one particular of the A.F.R., in an unpretentious 
sportcoat and tie and the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an 
obscenely simple smily-face in thin black lines, who is speculatively dipping a baguette's 
heel in Bertraund's metal soup-cup and popping the bread into his mask's mouth's 
cheery hole with an elegantly cerise-gloved hand. Lucien, staring goggle-eyed at the only 
brother he's ever had, is standing very still, face still unwittingly teratoid, the broom at 
an angle in his hand, the Colt dangling at his side, and the long black zipper-thread he's 
pulled from his zipper caught somehow now and wrapped around his thumb and hung 
trailing on the spotless floor with slack between gun and thumb, his pants woppsed 
around his red woolen ankles, when he hears a quick efficient squeak and feels from 
behind a tremendous wallop on the backs of his knees that drives him down to his knees 
on the floor, the .44 bucking as it discharges by reflex into the wood-pattern Portuguese 
tile, so that he's down in a supplicant's posture on his red knees, encircled by fauteuils 
des rollents, still holding his broom but now down near the broom-corn's wire binding; 
his face is now of equal height to the yellow empty smiling chewing face of the A.F.R. as 
this leader — everything about him radiates pitiless and remorseless command — 
rotates a right wheel to bring himself about and with three squeakless rotations has his 
hideous blank black smile within cm. of Lucien Antitoi's face. The A.F.R. bids him "7? soir, 
'sieur,' which means nothing to Lucien Antitoi, whose chin has caved and lips are 
quivering, though his eyes are not what you would call jacklighted or terrified eyes. 
Lucien's brother's pierced and rigid profile is visible over the leader's left shoulder. The 
man still has some soup-sopped bread in his glove's left hand. 

'Malheureusement, ton collegue est decide. II faisait une excellente soupe aux pois.' 
He looks amused. 'Non? Ou c'etait toi, faisait-elle?' The leader leans forward in the 
graceful way people who always sit can lean, revealing wiry hair and a small and 
strangely banal bald-spot, and gently removes the hot revolver from Lucien's hand. He 
engages the safety without having to look at the revolver. Spanish-language music is 
thinly audible from somewhere up above the alley. The A.F.R. looks warmly into Lucien's 
eyes for a moment, then with a professionally vicious backhanded motion pegs the gun 
at Bertraund's profiled head, striking Bertraund in the side of the head; and Bertraund 



rocks away and then toward and forward and slides forward-left off the rickety 
camping-chair and with a ghastly and moist thump comes to rest chairless but upright, 
his left hip on the floor, the eye's sturdy railroad spike's thick tip caught on the edge of 
the card table and tilted up as the table tilts downward and cookery slides nautically off 
and onto the tile as the weight of Bertraund's large upper body is somehow held by the 
spike and tilted table. His brother's face is now turned away from Lucien, and his overall 
posture is of some person crumpled with hilarity or regret, maybe beer — a man 
overcome. Lucien, who never has apprehended what the safety-switch is or where, 
thinks it a small miracle that the Colt .44 with its tail of thread does not discharge again 
as it wangs off Bertraund's temple and hits the slick tile and slides from sight under a 
cot. Somewhere in the tall house next door a toilet flushes, and the back room's pipes 
sing. The black thread has remained snagged on the Colt's sight-blade and in the middle 
caught somewhere on Bertraund's ear; the other remains also attached to Lucien by a 
persistent hangnail on his well-gnawed right thumb, so that a black filament still 
connects the knelt Lucien to his hidden revolver, with a surreal angled turn at the ear of 
his overcome frere. 

The happy-masked A.F.R. leader, politely ignoring the fact that Lucien's sphincter has 
failed them all in the small room, after complimenting them both on the craftsmanship 
of some of the front's blown-glass notions, pulls his velvet gloves tighter and tells Lucien 
that it has fallen to him, Lucien, to direct their attention without delay to an 
entertainment item they have come here to acquire. And require, this Copy-Capable 
item. They are here on business, ne pas plaisanter, this is not the social call. They will 
acquire this thing and then iront paitre. They have no wish to disturb anyone's repast, 
but the A.F.R. fears that it is fearfully urgent and key, this Master item they now require 
without delay or dissembly from Lucien — entend-il? 

The vigor with which Lucien shakes his head at the leader's meaningless sounds can't 
help but be misinterpreted, probably. 

Does this shop have the 585-rpm-drive TP somewhere about here, for running 
Masters? 

Same vigorous negative-looking denial of comprehension. 

Can a mask's drawn smile widen? 

From the front of the shop come whole symphonies of squeaks and low trilled r's and 
the sounds of a densely packed area being swiftly dismantled and searched. A few 
legless thick-armed men climb the shelves by hand and hang up near the drop-ceiling by 
special climbing equipment and suction-cups fitted to their stumps, brown arms busy in 
the upper shelving, dismantling and searching upside-down like obscene industrious 
bugs. The outline of Lucien's quivering mouth is being traced by a mammoth-torso'd 
A.F.R. in a Jesuitical collar who holds Lucien's own trusty broom inverted and leans in his 
chair to caress Lucien's full Gaspe-provincial lips (the lips are quivering) with the 
handle's wicked tip, which is sharply white, whittled free of the sienna glaze of 
broomstick-varnish that patinas the rest of the big stick's length. Lucien's lips are 
quivering not so much from fear — although there is certainly fear — but not from fear 
so much as in an attempt to form words. 207 Words that are not and can never be words 
are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements 



of speech, and there is a childlike pathos to the movements that perhaps the rigid- 
grinned A.F.R. leader can sense, perhaps that is why his sigh is sincere, his complaint 
sincere when he complains that what will follow will be inutile , Lucien's failure to assist 
will be inutile , there will be no point serviced, there are several dozen highly trained and 
motivated wheelchaired personnel here who will find whatever they seek and more, 
anyhow, perhaps it is sincere, the Gallic shrug and fatigue of the voice through the 
leader's mask-hole, as Lucien's leonine head is tilted back by a hand in his hair and his 
mouth opened wide by callused fingers that appear overhead and around the sides of 
his head from behind and jack his writhing mouth open so wide that the tendons in his 
jaws tear audibly and Lucien's first sounds are reduced from howls to a natal gargle as 
the pale wicked tip of the broom he loves is inserted, the wood piney-tasting then white 
tasteless pain as the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared 
A.F.R., thrust farther in rhythmically in strokes that accompany each syllable in the 
wearily repeated 'In-U-Tile' of the technical interviewer, down into Lucien's wide throat 
and lower, small natal cries escaping around the brown-glazed shaft, the strangled 
impeded sounds of absolute aphonia, the landed-fish gasps that accompany 
speechlessness in a dream, the cleric-collared A.F.R. driving the broom home now to 
half its length, up on his stumps to get downward leverage as the fibers that protect the 
esophagal terminus resist and then give with a crunching pop and splat of red that 
bathes Lucien's teeth and tongue and makes of itself in the air a spout, and his gargled 
sounds now sound drowned; and behind fluttering lids the aphrasiac half-cellular 
insurgent who loves only to sweep and dance in a clean pane sees snow on the round 
hills of his native Gaspe, pretty curls of smoke from chimneys, his mother's linen apron, 
her kind red face above his crib, homemade skates and cider-steam, Chic-Choc lakes 
seen stretching away from the Cap-Chat hillside they skied down to Mass, the red face's 
noises he knows from the tone are tender, beyond crib and rimed window Gaspesie lake 
after lake after lake lit up by the near-Arctic sun and stretching out in the southeastern 
distance like chips of broken glass thrown to scatter across the white Chic-Choc country, 
gleaming, and the river Ste.-Anne a ribbon of light, unspeakably pure; and as the culcate 
handle navigates the inguinal canal and sigmoid with a queer deep full hot tickle and 
with a grunt and shove completes its passage and forms an obscene erectile bulge in the 
back of his red sopped Johns, bursting then through the wool and puncturing tile and 
floor at a police-lock's canted angle to hold him upright on his knees, completely 
skewered, and as the attentions of the A.F.R.s in the little room are turned from him to 
the shelves and trunks of the Antitois' sad insurgents' lives, and Lucien finally dies, 
rather a while after he's quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to 
die, as he finally sheds his body's suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly 
whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the 
Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and 
nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues. 



PRE DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF 


TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL 


M. Hugh Steeply spoke quietly, after a prolonged silence of both operatives alone with 
their thoughts, upon this mountain. Steeply faced still out, standing on the 
outcropping's lip, bare arms around him for some warmth, his dress's soiled back to 
Marathe. Around the bonfire, far out below upon the desert floor, rotated a ring of 
smaller and palsied fires, persons carrying torches or fires. 

'Do you ever think of viewing it?' 

Marathe did not reply. It was not impossible that the young persons carrying the 
torches were dancing. 

'Whether or not the A.F.R. ever even recover this alleged Master copy from the 
DuPlessis burglary,' Steeply said quietly; 'still, you guys have a Read-Only copy, at least 
one, you've told us, no?' 

'Yes.' 

'Nobody has this mysterious Master, but we've all got Read-Only's — all the anti- 
O.N.A.N. cells have at least one Read-Only, we're pretty sure.' 

Marathe said, 'M. BrullTme, he tells Fortier he thinks the CPCP of Alberta do not have 
any copy.' 

'Fuck the Albertans,' Steeply said. 'Who's worried about the Albertans? The Albertans' 
idea of a blow to the U.S. plexus is they blow up rangeland in Montana. They're wackos.' 

'I have not been tempted,' Marathe said. 

Steeply's sound appeared as if he did not hear. 'We have more than one. Copies. Sure 
we can assume your boys know this.' 

Marathe dryly laughed. 'Confiscated from razzles of Berkeley, Boston. But who can 
know what is on them? Who can study the Entertainment while detached?' 

Steeply's scratch on the arm had become overnight puffed, and there were cross- 
hatches of his scratching. 'But just between us two, though. Tete to tete. You've never 
been even slightly tempted? I mean personally. You the person. Wife's condition be 
damned. Kids be damned. Just for a second, slip into wherever you guys keep it and load 
it and have a quick look? To see what's all the fuss, the irresistible pull of the thing?' He 
pivoted on one heel and looked, and cocked his head in a way of cynicism that seemed 
to Marathe consummately U.S.A. 

Marathe coughed softly into his fist. His own dead father's Kenbeck pacemaker, it had 
been damaged accidentally by a videophonic pulse of waves. This from a telephone call 
from the telephone company, a video call, advertising the videophony. M. Marathe had 
picked up the ringing telephone; the videophonic pulse, it had come; M. Marathe had 
fallen, still holding a telephone Remy had never been instructed to answer first, to 
check. The advertisement, which was recorded, played its audible portion out upon the 



floor beside his father's ear, audible between Marathe's mother's cries. 

Steeply raised and lowered himself on his shoes' toes. 'Us, Rod the God Tine's got Tom 
Flatto's I/O boys running tests around the clock. 24-dash-7.' 

'Flatto, Thomas M., B.S.S. director of Input/Output testing, resident of Falls Church's 
community, a widower with three children, one child with cystic fibrosis.' 

'Funny as an impacted follicle, Remy. And no doubt the insurgent cells are all each 
doing work of your own, you guys with your own Dr. Brullent or whomever, trying to 
find out what the Entertainment's appeal could be without sacrificing any of your own.' 
Steeply again turned; he did this for emphasis. 'Or maybe you're willingly sacrificing your 
own. Yes? Willing volunteers in chairs. Sacrificing self for the Greater and all that. By 
adult choice and all that. Just for the sake of causing us harm. Wouldn't even want to 
think about how the A.F.R.'s conducting tests of the thing.' 

'C'est per.' 

'But not so much for content,' Steeply said. 'Input/Output's exhaustive testing. Flatto's 
got them working on conditions and environments for possible nonlethal viewing. 
Certain departments in Virginia, the developing theory is that it's holography.' 

'The samizdat.' 

'The filmmaker'd been a cutting-edge optics man. Flolography, diffraction. He'd used 
holography a couple times before, and in the context of a kind of filmed assault on the 
viewer. Fie was of the Hostile School or some such shit.' 

'Also a maker of reflecting panels for thermal weapons, and an important Annulateur, 
also, and amasser of the capital from opticals, before hostility and film,' Marathe said. 

Steeply embraced himself. 'Tom Flatto's personal theory is the appeal's got something 
to do with density. The visual compulsion. Theory's that with a really sophisticated piece 
of holography you'd get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the 
selective realism of the viewer-screen. That the density plus the realism might be too 
much to take. Dick Desai in Data Production wants to go in with ALGOL and see if there 
are Fourier Equations in the root code's ALGOL, which would signify hologrammatical 
activity going on.' 

'M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant.' 

Steeply cocked his head sometimes in a way that was both feminine and birdlike. He 
did this most often during silences. Also he again removed something small from his 
painted lip. Also he spoke with more feminine inflection. Marathe committed all this to 
his memories. 



WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA 


I remember 208 I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father 
came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon 
as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had 
spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with 
its rigid white parted hair, and hadn't yet removed the television makeup that gave his 
real face an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and finished and rinsed my dishes in the 
sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom. My mother and father were 
both in there. The master bedroom's valance curtains and the heavy lightproof curtain 
behind them were all slid back and the Venetian blinds up, and the daylight was very 
bright in the room, the decor of which was white and blue and powder-blue. 

My father was bent over my parents' large bed, which was stripped of bedding all the 
way down to the mattress protector. He was bent over, pushing down on the bed's 
mattress with the heels of his hands. The bed's sheets and pillows and powder-blue 
coverlet were all in a pile on the carpet next to the bed. Then my father handed me his 
tumbler of tomato juice to hold for him and got all the way on top of the bed and knelt 
on it, pressing down vigorously on the mattress with his hands, putting all his weight 
into it. He bore down hard on one area of the mattress, then let up and pivoted slightly 
on his knees and bore down with equal vigor on a different area of the mattress. He did 
this all over the bed, sometimes actually walking around on the mattress on his knees to 
get at different areas of the mattress, then bearing down on them. I remember thinking 
the bearing-down action looked very much like emergency compression of a heart 
patient's chest. I remember my father's tomato juice had grains of pepperish material 
floating on the surface. My mother was standing at the bedroom window, smoking a 
long cigarette and looking at the lawn, which I had watered before I ate lunch. The 
uncovered window faced south. The room blazed with sunlight. 

'Eureka,' my father said, pressing down several times on one particular spot. 

I asked whether I could ask what was going on. 

'Goddamn bed squeaks,' he said. He stayed on his knees over the one particular spot, 
bearing down on it repeatedly. There was now a squeaking sound from the mattress 
when he bore down on the spot. My father looked up and over at my mother next to 
the bedroom window. 'Do you or do you not hear that?' he said, bearing down and 
letting up. My mother tapped her long cigarette into a shallow ashtray she held in her 
other hand. She watched my father press down on the squeaking spot. 

Sweat was running in dark orange lines down my father's face from under his rigid 
white professional wig. My father served for two years as the Man from Glad, 
representing what was then the Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. of Zanesville, Ohio, 
via a California-based advertising agency. The tunic, tight trousers, and boots the agency 
made him wear were also white. 



My father pivoted on his knees and swung his body around and got off the mattress 
and put his hand at the small of his back and straightened up, continuing to look at the 
mattress. 

'This miserable cock-sucking bed your mother felt she needed to hang on to and bring 
with us out here for quote sentimental value has started squeaking,' my father said. His 
saying 'your mother' indicated that he was addressing himself to me. He held his hand 
out for his tumbler of tomato juice without having to look at me. He stared darkly down 
at the bed. 'It's driving us fucking nuts.' 

My mother balanced her cigarette in her shallow ashtray and laid the ashtray on the 
windowsill and bent over from the foot of the bed and bore down on the spot my father 
had isolated, and it squeaked again. 

'And at night this one spot here we've isolated and identified seems to spread and 
metastisate until the whole Goddamn bed's replete with squeaks.' He drank some of his 
tomato juice. 'Areas that gibber and squeak,' my father said, 'until we both feel as if 
we're being eaten by rats.' He felt along the line of his jaw. 'Boiling hordes of gibbering 
squeaking ravenous rapacious rats,' he said, almost trembling with irritation. 

I looked down at the mattress, at my mother's hands, which tended to flake in dry 
climates. She carried a small bottle of moisturizing lotion at all times. 

My father said, 'And I have personally had it with the aggravation.' He blotted his 
forehead on his white sleeve. 

I reminded my father that he'd mentioned needing my help with something. At that 
age I was already taller than both my parents. My mother was taller than my father, 
even in his boots, but much of her height was in her legs. My father's body was denser 
and more substantial. 

My mother came around to my father's side of the bed and picked the bedding up off 
the floor. She started folding the sheets very precisely, using both arms and her chin. 
She stacked the folded bedding neatly on top of her dresser, which I remember was 
white lacquer. 

My father looked at me. 'What we need to do here, Jim, is take the mattress and box 
spring off the bed frame under here,' my father said, 'and expose the frame.' He took 
time out to explain that the bed's bottom mattress was hard-framed and known 
uniformly as a box spring. I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately 
pigeon-toed and then penguin-toed on the bedroom's blue carpet. My father drank 
some of his tomato juice and looked down at the edge of the bed's metal frame and felt 
along the outline of his jaw, where his commercial studio makeup ended abruptly at the 
turtleneck collar of his white commercial tunic. 

'The frame on this bed is old,' he told me. 'It's probably older than you are. Right now 
I'm thinking the thing's bolts have maybe started coming loose, and that's what's 
gibbering and squeaking at night.' He finished his tomato juice and held the glass out for 
me to take and put somewhere. 'So we want to move all this top crap out of the way, 
entirely' — he gestured with one arm — 'entirely out of the way, get it out of the room, 
and expose the frame, and see if we don't maybe just need to tighten up the bolts.' 

I wasn't sure where to put my father's empty glass, which had juice residue and grains 
of pepper along the inside's sides. I poked at the mattress and box spring a little bit with 



my foot. 'Are you sure it isn't just the mattress?' I said. The bed's frame's bolts struck me 
as a rather exotic first-order explanation for the squeaking. 

My father gestured broadly. 'Synchronicity surrounds me. Concord,' he said. 'Because 
that's what your mother thinks it is, also.' My mother was using both hands to take the 
blue pillowcases off all five of their pillows, again using her chin as a clamp. The pillows 
were all the overplump polyester fiberfill kind, because of my father's allergies. 

'Great minds think alike,' my father said. 

Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science, though a great uncle had 
accidentally electrocuted himself with a field series generator he was seeking to patent. 

My mother stacked the pillows on top of the neatly folded bedding on her dresser. 
She had to get up on her tiptoes to put the folded pillowcases on top of the pillows. I 
had started to move to help her, but I couldn't decide where to put the empty tomato 
juice glass. 

'But you just want to hope it isn't the mattress,' father said. 'Or the box spring.' 

My mother sat down on the foot of the bed and got out another long cigarette and lit 
it. She carried a little leatherette snap-case for both her cigarettes and her lighter. 

My father said, 'Because a new frame, even if we can't get the bolts squared away on 
this one and I have to go get a new one. A new frame. It wouldn't be too bad, see. Even 
top-shelf bed frames aren't that expensive. But new mattresses are outrageously 
expensive.' He looked at my mother. 'And I mean fucking outrageous.' He looked down 
at the back of my mother's head. 'And we bought a new box spring for this sad excuse 
for a bed not five years ago.' He was looking down at the back of my mother's head as if 
he wanted to confirm that she was listening. My mother had crossed her legs and was 
looking with a certain concentration either at or out the master bedroom window. Our 
home's whole subdivision was spread along a severe hillside, which meant that the view 
from my parents' bedroom on the first floor was of just sky and sun and a foreshortened 
declivity of lawn. The lawn sloped at an average angle of 55° and had to be mowed 
horizontally. None of the subdivision's lawns had trees yet. 'Of course that was during a 
seldom-discussed point in time when your mother had to assume the burden of 
assuming responsibility for finances in the household,' my father said. He was now 
perspiring very heavily, but still had his white professional toupee on, and still looked at 
my mother. 

My father acted, throughout our time in California, as both symbol and spokesman for 
the Glad F.P.R. Co.'s Individual Sandwich Bag Division. He was the first of two actors to 
portray the Man from Glad. He was inserted several times a month in a mock-up of a car 
interior, where he would be filmed in a tight trans-windshield shot receiving an 
emergency radio summons to some household that was having a portable-food-storage 
problem. He was then inserted opposite an actress in a generic kitchen-interior set, 
where he would explain how a particular species of Glad Sandwich Bag was precisely 
what the doctor ordered for the particular portable-food-storage problem at issue. In 
his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and great evident 
conviction, and earned what I always gathered was an impressive salary, for those 
times, and received, for the first time in his career, fan mail, some of which bordered on 
the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in the living 



room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail long after my 
mother and I had gone to bed. 

I asked whether I could excuse myself for a moment to take my father's empty tomato 
juice glass out to the kitchen sink. I was worried that the residue along the inside sides 
of the tumbler would harden into the kind of precipitate that would be hard to wash off. 

'For Christ's sake Jim just put the thing down,' my father said. 

I put the tumbler down on the bedroom carpet over next to the base of my mother's 
dresser, pressing down to create a kind of circular receptacle for it in the carpet. My 
mother stood up and went back over by the bedroom window with her ashtray. We 
could tell she was getting out of our way. 

My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the 
bedroom door. 

I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress and box 
spring off the suspect bed frame and well out of the way. My father cracked his knuckles 
and replied that I was becoming almost fright-eningly quick and perceptive. He went 
around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, 'I want to 
let's just stack it all out in the hall, to get it the hell out of here and give us some room to 
maneuver.' 

'Right,' I said. 

My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents' bed. My father rubbed his 
hands together and bent and worked his hands between the mattress and box spring 
and began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress 
had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began 
pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The top of his wig disappeared behind the rising 
mattress, and his side rose in an arc to almost the height of the white ceiling, exceeded 
90°, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me. The mattress's overall 
movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember. I spread my arms and 
took the impact of the mattress with my chest and face, supporting the angled mattress 
with my chest, outspread arms, and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up of the 
woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector. 

The mattress, a Simmons Beauty Rest whose tag said that it could not by law be 
removed, now formed the hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs were 
myself and the bed's box spring. I remember visualizing and considering this triangle. My 
legs were trembling under the mattress's canted weight. My father exhorted me to hold 
and support the mattress. The respectively sharp plastic and meaty human smells of the 
mattress and protector were very distinct because my nose was mashed up against 
them. 

My father came around to my side of the bed, and together we pushed the mattress 
back up until it stood up at 90° again. We edged carefully apart and each took one end 
of the upright mattress and began jockeying it off the bed and out the bedroom door 
into the uncarpeted hallway. 

This was a King-Size Simmons Beauty Rest mattress. It was massive but had very little 
structural integrity. It kept curving and curling and wobbling. My father exhorted both 
me and the mattress. It was flaccid and floppy as we tried to jockey it. My father had an 



especially hard time with his half of the mattress's upright weight because of an old 
competitive-tennis injury. 

While we were jockeying it on its side off the bed, part of the mattress on my father's 
end slipped and flopped over and down onto a pair of steel reading lamps, adjustable 
cubes of brushed steel attached by toggle bolts to the white wall over the head of the 
bed. The lamps took a solid hit from the mattress, and one cube was rotated all the way 
around on its toggle so that its open side and bulb now pointed at the ceiling. The joint 
and toggle made a painful squeaking sound as the cube was wrenched around upward. 
This was also when I became aware that even the reading lamps were on in the daylit 
room, because a faint square of direct lamplight, its four sides rendered slightly concave 
by the distortion of projection, appeared on the white ceiling above the skewed cube. 
But the lamps didn't fall off. They remained attached to the wall. 

'God damn it to hell,' my father said as he regained control of his end of the mattress. 

My father also said, 'Fucking son of a...' when the mattress's thickness made it difficult 
for him to squeeze through the doorway still holding his end. 

In time we were able to get my parents' giant mattress out in the narrow hallway that 
ran between the master bedroom and the kitchen. I could hear another terrible squeak 
from the bedroom as my mother tried to realign the reading lamp whose cube had been 
inverted. Drops of sweat were falling from my father's face onto his side of the mattress, 
darkening part of the protector's fabric. My father and I tried to lean the mattress at a 
slight supporting angle against one wall of the hallway, but because the floor of the 
hallway was uncarpeted and didn't provide sufficient resistance, the mattress wouldn't 
stay upright. Its bottom edge slid out from the wall all the way across the width of the 
hallway until it met the baseboard of the opposite wall, and the upright mattress's top 
edge slid down the wall until the whole mattress sagged at an extremely concave 
slumped angle, a dry section of the woodland floral mattress protector stretched drum- 
tight over the slumped crease and the springs possibly damaged by the deforming con¬ 
cavity. 

My father looked at the canted concave mattress sagging across the width of the hall 
and moved one end of it a little with the toe of his boot and looked at me and said, 'Fuck 
it.' 

My bow tie was rumpled and at an angle. 

My father had to walk unsteadily across the mattress in his white boots to get back to 
my side of the mattress and the bedroom behind me. On his way across he stopped and 
felt speculatively at his jaw, his boots sunk deep in woodland floral cotton. He said 'Fuck 
it' again, and I remember not being clear about what he was referring to. Then my 
father turned and started unsteadily back the way he had come across the mattress, 
one hand against the wall for support. He instructed me to wait right there in the 
hallway for one moment while he darted into the kitchen at the other end of the hall on 
a very brief errand. His steadying hand left four faint smeared prints on the wall's white 
paint. 

My parents' bed's box spring, though also King-Size and heavy, had just below its 
synthetic covering a wooden frame that gave the box spring structural integrity, and it 
didn't flop or alter its shape, and after another bit of difficulty for my father — who was 



too thick through the middle, even with the professional girdle beneath his Glad 
costume — after another bit of difficulty for my father squeezing with his end of the box 
spring through the bedroom doorway, we were able to get it into the hall and lean it 
vertically at something just over 70° against the wall, where it stayed upright with no 
problem. 

'That's the way she wants doing, Jim,' my father said, clapping me on the back in 
exactly the ebullient way that had prompted me to have my mother buy an elastic 
athletic cranial strap for my glasses. I had told my mother I needed the strap for tennis 
purposes, and she had not asked any questions. 

My father's hand was still on my back as we returned to the master bedroom. 'Right, 
then!' my father said. His mood was now elevated. There was a brief second of 
confusion at the doorway as each of us tried to step back to let the other through first. 

There was now nothing but the suspect frame left where the bed had been. There was 
something exoskeletal and frail-looking about the bed frame, a plain low-ratio rectangle 
of black steel. At each corner of the rectangle was a caster. The casters' wheels had sunk 
into the pile carpet under the weight of the bed and my parents and were almost 
completely submerged in the carpet's fibers. Each of the frame's sides had a narrow 
steel shelf welded at 90° to its interior's base, so that a single rectangular narrow shelf 
perpendicular to the frame's rectangle ran all around the frame's interior. This shelf was 
obviously there to support the bed's occupants and King-Size box spring and mattress. 

My father seemed frozen in place. I cannot remember what my mother was doing. 
There seemed to be a long silent interval of my father looking closely at the exposed 
frame. The interval had the silence and stillness of dusty rooms immersed in sunlight. I 
briefly imagined every piece of furniture in the bedroom covered with sheets and the 
room unoccupied for years as the sun rose and crossed and fell outside the window, the 
room's daylight becoming staler and staler. I could hear two power lawnmowers of 
slightly different pitch from somewhere down our subdivision's street. The direct light 
through the master bedroom's window swam with rotating columns of raised dust. I 
remember it seemed the ideal moment for a sneeze. 

Dust lay thick on the frame and even hung from the frame's interior support-shelf in 
little gray beards. It was impossible to see any bolts anywhere on the frame. 

My father blotted sweat and wet makeup from his forehead with the back of his 
sleeve, which was now dark orange with makeup. 'Jesus will you look at that mess,' he 
said. He looked at my mother. 'Jesus.' 

The carpeting in my parents' bedroom was deep-pile and a darker blue than the pale 
blue of the rest of the bedroom's color scheme. I remember the carpet as more a royal 
blue, with a saturation level somewhere between moderate and strong. The rectangular 
expanse of royal blue carpet that had been hidden under the bed was itself carpeted 
with a thick layer of clotted dust. The rectangle of dust was gray-white and thick and 
unevenly layered, and the only evidence of the room's carpet below was a faint sick 
bluish cast to the dust-layer. It looked as if dust had not drifted under the bed and 
settled on the carpet inside the frame but rather had somehow taken root and grown 
on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse of spoiled 
food. The layer of dust itself looked a little like spoiled food, bad cottage cheese. It was 



nauseous. Some of the dust-layer's uneven topography was caused by certain lost- and 
litter-type objects that had found their way under the bed — a flyswatter, a roughly 
Variety-sized magazine, some bottletops, three wadded Kleenex, and what was 
probably a sock — and gotten covered and textured in dust. 

There was also a faint odor, sour and fungal, like the smell of an overused bathmat. 

'Jesus, there's even a smell,' my father said. He made a show of inhaling through his 
nose and screwing up his face. 'There's even a fucking smell.' He blotted his forehead 
and felt his jaw and looked hard at my mother. His mood was no longer elevated. My 
father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an 
odor or a certain cast to the light. 

'When was the last time this got cleaned under here?' my father asked my mother. 

My mother didn't say anything. She looked at my father as he moved the steel frame 
around a little with his boot, which raised even more dust into the window's sunlight. 
The bed frame seemed very lightweight, moving back and forth noiselessly on its 
casters' submerged wheels. My father often moved lightweight objects absently around 
with his foot, rather the way other men doodle or examine their cuticles. Rugs, 
magazines, telephone and electrical cords, his own removed shoe. It was one of my 
father's ways of musing or gathering his thoughts or trying to control his mood. 

'Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned. I'm standing 
here prompted to fucking muse out loud,' my father said. 

I looked at my mother to see whether she was going to say anything in reply. 

I said to my father, 'You know, since we're discussing squeaking beds, my bed squeaks, 
too.' 

My father was trying to squat down to see whether he could locate any bolts on the 
frame, saying something to himself under his breath. He put his hands on the frame for 
balance and almost fell forward when the frame rolled under his weight. 

'But I don't think I even really noticed it until we began to discuss it,' I said. I looked at 
my mother. 'I don't think it bothers me,' I said. 'Actually, I think I kind of like it. I think 
I've gradually gotten so used to it that it's become almost comforting. At this juncture,' I 
said. 

My mother looked at me. 

'I'm not complaining about it,' I said. The discussion just made me think of it.' 

'Oh, we hear your bed, don't you worry,' my father said. He was still trying to squat, 
which drew his corset and the hem of his tunic up and allowed the top of his bottom's 
crack to appear above the the waist of his white pants. He shifted slightly to point up at 
the master bedroom's ceiling. 'You so much as turn over in bed up there? We hear it 
down here.' He took one steel side of the rectangle and shook the frame vigorously, 
sending up a shroud of dust. The bed frame seemed to weigh next to nothing under his 
hands. My mother made a mustache of her finger to hold back a sneeze. 

He shook the frame again. 'But it doesn't aggravate us the way this rodential son of a 
whore right here does.' 

I remarked that I didn't think I'd ever once heard their bed squeak before, from 
upstairs. My father twisted his head around to try to look up at me as I stood there 
behind him. But I said I'd definitely heard and could confirm the presence of a squeak 



when he'd pressed on the mattress, and could verify that the squeak was no one's 
imagination. 

My father held a hand up to signal me to please stop talking. He remained in a squat, 
rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, using the rolling frame to keep his balance. The 
flesh of the top of his bottom and crack-area protruded over the waist of his pants. 
There were also deep red folds in the back of his neck, below the blunt cut of the wig, 
because he was looking up and over at my mother, who was resting her tail bone on the 
sill of the window, still holding her shallow ashtray. 

'Maybe you'd like to go get the vacuum,' he said. My mother put the ashtray down on 
the sill and exited the master bedroom, passing between me and the dresser piled with 
bedding. 'If you can ... if you can remember where it is!' my father called after her. 

I could hear my mother trying to get past the King-Size mattress sagging diagonally 
across the hall. 

My father was rocking more violently on the balls of his feet, and now the rocking had 
the sort of rolling, side-to-side quality of a ship in high seas. He came very close to losing 
his balance as he leaned to his right to get a handkerchief from his hip pocket and began 
using it to reach out and flick dust off something at one corner of the bed frame. After a 
moment he pointed down next to a caster. 

'Bolt,' he said, pointing at the side of a caster. 'Right there's a bolt.' I leaned in over 
him. Drops of my father's perspiration made small dark coins in the dust of the frame. 
There was nothing but smooth lightweight black steel surface where he was pointing, 
but just to the left of where he was pointing I could see what might have been a bolt, a 
little stalactite of clotted dust hanging from some slight protrusion. My father's hands 
were broad and his fingers blunt. Another possible bolt lay several inches to the right of 
where he pointed. His finger trembled badly, and I believe the trembling might have 
been from the muscular strain on his bad knees, trying to hold so much new weight in a 
squat for an extended period. I heard the telephone ring twice. There had been an 
extended silence, with my father pointing at neither protrusion and me trying to lean in 
over him. 

Then, still squatting on the balls of his feet, my father placed both hands on the side of 
the frame and leaned out over the side into the rectangle of dust inside the frame and 
had what at first sounded like a bad coughing fit. His hunched back and rising bottom 
kept me from watching him. I remember deciding that the reason the frame was not 
rolling under his hands' pressure was that my father had so much of his weight on it, 
and that maybe my father's nervous system's response to heavy dust was a cough-signal 
instead of a sneeze-signal. It was the wet sound of material hitting the dust inside the 
rectangle, plus the rising odor, that signified to me that, rather than coughing, my father 
had been taken ill. The spasms involved made his back rise and fall and his bottom 
tremble under his white commercial slacks. It was not too uncommon for my father to 
be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax, but now he seemed to have 
been taken really ill. To give him some privacy, I went around the frame to the side of 
the frame closest to the window where there was direct light and less odor and 
examined another of the frame's casters. My father was whispering to himself in brief 
expletive phrases between the spasms of his illness. I squatted easily and rubbed dust 



from a small area of the frame and wiped the dust on the carpet by my feet. There was 
a small carriage-head bolt on either side of the plating that attached the caster to the 
bed frame. I knelt and felt one of the bolts. Its round smooth head made it impossible 
either to tighten or loosen. Putting my cheek to the carpet and examining the bottom of 
the little horizontal shelf welded to the frame's side, I observed that the bolt seemed 
threaded tightly and completely through its hole, and I decided it was doubtful that any 
of the casters' platings' bolts were producing the sounds that reminded my father of 
rodents. 

Just at this time, I remember, there was a loud cracking sound and my area of the 
frame jumped violently as my father's illness caused him to faint and he lost his balance 
and pitched forward and lay prone and asleep over his side of the bed frame, which as I 
rolled away from the frame and rose to my knees I saw was either broken or very badly 
bent. My father lay facedown in the mixture of the rectangle's thick dust and the 
material he'd brought up from his upset stomach. The dust his collapse raised was very 
thick, and as the new dust rose and spread it attenuated the master bedroom's daylight 
as decisively as if a cloud had moved over the sun in the window. My father's 
professional wig had detached and lay scalp-up in the mixture of dust and stomach 
material. The stomach material appeared to be mostly gastric blood until I recalled the 
tomato juice my father had been drinking. He lay face-down, with his bottom high in the 
air, over the side of the bed frame, which his weight had broken in half. This was how I 
accounted for the loud cracking sound. 

I stood out of the way of the dust and the window's dusty light, feeling along the line 
of my jaw and examining my prone father from a distance. I remember that his 
breathing was regular and wet, and that the dust mixture bubbled somewhat. It was 
then that it occurred to me that when I'd been supporting the bed's raised mattress 
with my chest and face preparatory to its removal from the room, the dihedral triangle 
I'd imagined the mattress forming with the box spring and my body had not in fact even 
been a closed figure: the box spring and the floor I had stood on did not constitute a 
continuous plane. 

Then I could hear my mother trying to get the heavy canister vacuum cleaner past the 
angled Simmons Beauty Rest in the hall, and I went to help her. My father's legs were 
stretched out across the clean blue carpet between his side of the frame and my 
mother's white dresser. His feet's boots were at a pigeon-toed angle, and his bottom's 
crack all the way down to the anus itself was now visible because the force of his fall 
had pulled his white slacks down even farther. I stepped carefully between his legs. 

'Excuse me,' I said. 

I was able to help my mother by telling her to detach the vacuum cleaner's 
attachments and hand them one at a time to me over the width of the slumped 
mattress, where I held them. The vacuum cleaner was manufactured by Regina, and its 
canister, which contained the engine, bag, and evacuating fan, was very heavy. I 
reassembled the vacuum and held it while my mother made her way back across the 
mattress, then handed the vacuum cleaner back to her, flattening myself against the 
wall to let her pass by on her way into the master bedroom. 

'Thanks,' my mother said as she passed. 



I stood there by the slumped mattress for several moments of a silence so complete 
that I could hear the street's lawnmowers all the way out in the hall, then heard the 
sound of my mother pulling out the vacuum cleaner's retractable cord and plugging it 
into the same bedside outlet the steel reading lamps were attached to. 

I made my way over the angled mattress and quickly down the hall, made a sharp right 
at the entrance to the kitchen, crossed the foyer to the staircase, and ran up to my 
room, taking several stairs at a time, hurrying to get some distance between myself and 
the vacuum cleaner, because the sound of vacuuming has always frightened me in the 
same irrational way it seemed a bed's squeak frightened my father. 

I ran upstairs and pivoted left at the upstairs landing and went into my room. In my 
room was my bed. It was narrow, a twin bed, with a headboard of wood and frame and 
slats of wood. I didn't know where it had come from, originally. The frame held the 
narrow box spring and mattress much higher off the floor than my parents' bed. It was 
an old-fashioned bed, so high off the floor that you had to put one knee up on the 
mattress and clamber up into it, or else jump. 

That is what I did. For the first time since I had become taller than my parents, I took 
several running strides in from the doorway, past my shelves' collection of prisms and 
lenses and tennis trophies and my scale-model magneto, past my bookcase, the wall's 
still-posters from Powell's Peeping Tom and the closet door and my bedside's high- 
intensity standing lamp, and jumped, doing a full swan dive up onto my bed. I landed 
with my weight on my chest with my arms and legs out from my body on the indigo 
comforter on my bed, squashing my tie and bending my glasses' temples slightly. I was 
trying to make my bed produce a loud squeak, which in the case of my bed I knew was 
caused by any lateral friction between the wooden slats and the frame's interior's shelf¬ 
like slat-support. 

But in the course of the leap and the dive, my overlong arm hit the heavy iron pole of 
the high-intensity standing lamp that stood next to the bed. The lamp teetered violently 
and began to fall over sideways, away from the bed. It fell with a kind of majestic 
slowness, resembling a felled tree. As the lamp fell, its heavy iron pole struck the brass 
knob on the door to my closet, shearing the knob off completely. The round knob and 
half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room's wooden floor with a loud noise and 
began then to roll around in a remarkable way, the sheared end of the hex bolt 
stationary and the round knob, rolling on its circumference, circling it in a spherical 
orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct axes, a non-Euclidian 
figure on a planar surface, i.e., a cycloid on a sphere: 



The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid, 
L'Hopital's solution to Bernoulli's famous Brachistochrone Problem, the curve traced by 
a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a continuous plane. But since 



here, on the bedroom's floor, a circle was rolling around what was itself the 
circumference of a circle, the cycloid's standard parametric equations were no longer 
apposite, those equations' trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first- 
order differential equations. 

Because of the lack of resistance or friction against the bare floor, the knob rolled this 
way for a long time as I watched over the edge of the comforter and mattress, holding 
my glasses in place, completely distracted from the minor-D shriek of the vacuum 
below. It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly 
schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one 
hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of 
annulation. 


The night after the chilly and sort of awkward joint Interdependence Day picnic for 
Enfield's Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Somerville's Phoenix House, 
and Dorchester's grim New Choice juvenile rehab, Ennet House staffer Johnette Foltz 
took Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert along with her to this one NA Beginners' Discussion 
Meeting where the focus was always marijuana: how every addict at the meeting had 
gotten in terrible addictive trouble with it right from the first duBois, or else how they'd 
been strung out on harder drugs and had tried switching to grass to get off the original 
drugs and but then had gotten in even terribler trouble with grass than they'd been in 
with the original hard stuff. This was supposedly the only NA meeting in metro Boston 
explicitly devoted to marijuana. Johnette Foltz said she wanted Erdedy and Gompert to 
see how completely nonunique and unalone they were in terms of the Substance that 
had brought them both down. 

There were about maybe two dozen beginning recovering addicts there in the 
anechoic vestry of an upscale church in what Erdedy figured had to be either west 
Belmont or east Waltham. The chairs were arranged in NA's traditional huge circle, with 
no tables to sit at and everybody balancing ashtrays on their knees and accidentally 
kicking over their cups of coffee. Everybody who raised their hand to share concurred 
on the insidious ways marijuana had ravaged their bodies, minds, and spirits: marijuana 
destroys slowly but thoroughly was the consensus. Ken Erdedy's joggling foot knocked 
over his coffee not once but twice as the NAs took turns concurring on the hideous 
psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in 
marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness 
that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety — the increasing emotional 
abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy — the obsessive 
analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all 
possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the 
couch — and then the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal from delta-9- 
tetrahydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite, the mania and insomnia, the 
chronic fatigue and nightmares, the impotence and cessation of menses and lactation, 
the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and mental confusion and fine- 
motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess production of saliva — several beginners 



still holding institutional drool-cups just under their chins — the generalized anxiety and 
foreboding and dread, and the shame of feeling like neither M.D.s nor the hard-drug 
NAs themselves showed much empathy or compassion for the 'addict' brought down by 
what was supposed to be nature's humblest buzz, the benignest Substance around. 

Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms melancholy or 
anhedonia or depression, much less clinical depression; but this worst of symptoms, this 
logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmentioned, to hang fog-like just over the 
room's heads, to drift between the peristyle columns and over the decorative astrolabes 
and candles on long prickets and medieval knockoffs and framed Knights of Columbus 
charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could bear to look up and name it. Kate 
Gompert kept staring at the floor and making a revolver of her forefinger and thumb 
and shooting herself in the temple and then blowing pretend-cordite off the barrel's tip 
until Johnette Foltz whispered to her to knock it off. 

As was his custom at meetings, Ken Erdedy said nothing and observed everybody else 
very closely, cracking his knuckles and joggling his foot. Since an NA 'Beginner' is 
technically anybody with under a year clean, there were varying degrees of denial and 
distress and general cluelessness in this plush upscale vestry. The meeting had the usual 
broad demographic cross-section, but the bulk of these grass-ravaged people looked to 
him urban and tough and busted-up and dressed without any color-sense at all, people 
you could easily imagine smacking their kid in a supermarket or lurking with a 
homemade sap in the dark of a downtown alley. Same as AA. Motley disrespectability 
was like the room norm, along with glazed eyes and excess spittle. A couple of the 
beginners still had the milky plastic I.D. bracelets from psych wards they'd forgotten to 
cut off, or else hadn't yet gotten up the drive to do it. 

Unlike Boston AA, Boston NA has no mid-meeting raffle-break and goes for just an 
hour. At the close of this Monday Beginners' Meeting everybody got up and held hands 
in a circle and recited the NA-Conference-Approved 'Just For Today,' then they all 
recited the Our Father, not exactly in unison. Kate Gompert later swore she distinctly 
heard the tattered older man beside her say 'And lead us not into Penn Station' during 
the Our Father. 

Then, just as in AA, the NA meeting closed with everybody shouting to the air in front 
of them to Keep Coming Back because It Works. 

But then, kind of horrifically, everyone in the room started milling around wildly and 
hugging each other. It was like somebody'd thrown a switch. There wasn't even very 
much conversation. It was just hugging, as far as Erdedy could see. Rampant, 
indiscriminate hugging, where the point seemed to be to hug as many people as 
possible regardless of whether you'd ever seen them before in your life. People went 
from person to person, arms out and leaning in. Big people stooped and short people 
got up on tiptoe. Jowls ground into other jowls. Both genders hugged both genders. And 
the male-to-male hugs were straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps 
on the back that Erdedy'd always seen as somehow requisite for male-to-male hugs. 
Johnette Foltz was almost a blur. She went from person to person. She was racking up 
serious numbers of hugs. Kate Gompert had her usual lipless expression of morose 
distaste, but even she gave and got some hugs. But Erdedy — who'd never particularly 



liked hugging — moved way back from the throng, over up next to the NA-Conference- 
Approved-Literature table, and stood there by himself with his hands in his pockets, 
pretending to study the coffee urn with great interest. 

But then a tall heavy Afro-American fellow with a gold incisor and perfect vertical 
cylinder of Afro-American hairstyle peeled away from a sort of group-hug nearby, he'd 
spotted Erdedy, and the fellow came over and established himself right in front of 
Erdedy, spreading the arms of his fatigue jacket for a hug, stooping slightly and leaning 
in toward Erdedy's personal trunk-region. 

Erdedy raised his hands in a benign No Thanks and backed up further so that his 
bottom was squashed up against the edge of the Conference-Approved-Literature table. 

'Thanks, but I don't particularly like to hug,' he said. 

The fellow had to sort of pull up out of his pre-hug lean, and stood there awkwardly 
frozen, with his big arms still out, which Erdedy could see must have been awkward and 
embarrassing for the fellow. Erdedy found himself trying to calculate just what remote 
sub-Asian locale would be the maximum possible number of km. away from this exact 
spot and moment as the fellow just stood there, his arms out and the smile draining 
from his face. 

'Say what?' the fellow said. 

Erdedy proffered a hand. 'Ken E., Ennet House, Enfield. How do you do. You are?' 

The fellow slowly let his arms down but just looked at Erdedy's proffered hand. A 
single styptic blink. 'Roy Tony,' he said. 

'Roy, how do you do.' 

'What it is,' Roy said. The big fellow now had his handshake-hand behind his neck and 
was pretending to feel the back of his neck, which Erdedy didn't know was a blatant dis. 

'Well Roy, if I may call you Roy, or Mr. Tony, if you prefer, unless it's a compound first 
name, hyphenated, "Roy-Tony" and then a last name, but well with respect to this 
hugging thing, Roy, it's nothing personal, rest assured.' 

'Assured?' 

Erdedy's best helpless smile and an apologetic shrug of the GoreTex anorak. 'I'm afraid 
I just don't particularly like to hug. Just not a hugger. Never have been. It was something 
of a joke among my fam—' 

Now the ominous finger-pointing of street-aggression, this Roy fellow pointing first at 
Erdedy's chest and then at his own: 'So man what you say you saying I'm a hugger? You 
saying you think I go around like to hug?' 

Both Erdedy's hands were now up palms-out and waggling in a like bonhommic 
gesture of heading off all possible misunderstanding: 'No but see the whole point is that 
I wouldn't presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don't know 
you. I only meant to say it's nothing personal having to do with you as an individual, and 
I'd be more than happy to shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple-handed 
ethnic handshakes if you'll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake, but 
I'm simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.' 

By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had 
Erdedy by his anorak's insulated lapels and was leaning him way back over the edge of 
the Literature table so that Erdedy's waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and 



the fellow's face was right up in Erdedy's face in a show of naked aggression: 

'You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? 
We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done 
motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,' Roy said. 'You little faggot,' Roy added. He 
wedged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding 
Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy's nervous 
system. 'I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the 
fucking can and fucking puked. Puked,' he said. 'Not comfortable? Who the fuck are 
you? Don't even try and tell me I'm coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug 
on your James-River-Traders-wearing-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass 
motherfucking ass.' 

Erdedy observed one of the Afro-American women who was looking on clap her hands 
and shout 'Talk about it!' 

'And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when 
I gone risk sharing my vulnerab/Vity and discomfort with you?' 

Johnette Foltz was sort of pawing at the back of Roy Tony's fatigue jacket, shuddering 
mentally at how the report of an Ennet House resident assaulted at an NA meeting she'd 
personally brought him to would look written up in the Staff Log. 

'Now,' Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a 
stabbing gesture, 'now,' he said, 'you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my 
ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?' 

Johnette Foltz had hold of the Roy fellow's coat now with both hands and was trying 
to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling for purchase on the smooth parquet, saying 'Yo 
Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man, Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother, he's 
just new is all'; but by this time Erdedy had both arms around the guy's neck and was 
hugging him with such vigor Kate Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked like 
Erdedy was trying to climb him. 


'We've lost a couple already,' Steeply admitted. 'During the testing. Not just 
volunteers. Some idiot intern in Data Analysis yielded to temptation and wanted to see 
what all the fuss was for and got hold of Flatto's I/O lab's clearance card and went in and 
viewed.' 

'From among the many Read-Only copies of your stock of the Entertainment.' 

'No great tragic loss in itself — lose some idiot-child intern. C'est la guerre. The real 
loss was that his supervisor tried to go in after him and pull him out. Our head of Data 
Analysis himself.' 

'Hoyne, Henri or pronounce "Henry," middle initial of F., with the wife, with his adult 
diabetes he controls.' 

'Did control. Twenty-year man. Hank. Damn good man. He was a friend. He's in four- 
point restraints now. Nourishment through a tube. No desire or even basic survival-type 
will for anything other than more viewing.' 

'Of it.' 

'I tried to visit.' 



'With your sleeveless skirt and different breasts.' 

'I couldn't even stand to be in the same room, see him like that. Begging for just even 
a few seconds — a trailer, a snatch of soundtrack, anything. His eyes wobbling around 
like some drug-addicted newborn. Break your fucking heart. In the next bed, restrained, 
the idiot intern: this was the sort of undisciplined selfish child you like to talk about, 
Remy. But Hank Hoyne was no child. I watched this man put down all sugar and treats 
when he first got diagnosed. Just put them down and walked away. Not even a whimper 
or backward glance.' 

'A will of steel.' 

'An American adult of exemplary self-control and discretion.' 

'The samizdat is not to be played crazily about with, so. We too have lost persons. It is 
serious.' 

The legs of the constellation of Perseus were amputated by the earth's horizon. 
Perseus, he wore the hat of a jongleur or pantalone. Hercules' head, this head was 
square. It was not long to dawn also because at 32° N Pollux and Castor became visible. 
They were over Marathe's left shoulder, as if giants were looking over his shoulder, one 
of Castor's legs inbent in a feminine manner. 

'But do you ever consider?' Steeply lit another cigarette. 

'Fantasize, you are meaning.' 

'If it's that consuming. If it somehow addresses desires that total,' Steeply said. 'Not 
even sure I can imagine what desires that total and utter even are.' Up and down upon 
the toes. Turning above the waist only to look back at Marathe. 'You ever think of what 
it'd be like, speculate?' 

'Us, we think of what ends the Entertainment may serve. We find its efficacy tempting. 
You and we are tempted in different ways.' Marathe could identify no other Southwest 
U.S.A. constellations except the Big Dipper, which at this latitude appeared attached to 
the Great Bear to form something resembling the 'Big Bucket' or the 'Great Cradle.' The 
chair gave small squeaks when he shifted his weight upon it. 

Steeply said 'Well I can't say I've been tempted in the strictest sense of tempted.' 

'Perhaps we are meaning different things by this.' 

'Frankly, when I think of it I'm as much terrified as I am intrigued. Hank Hoyne is an 
empty shell. The iron will, the analytic savvy. His love of a fine cigar. All gone. His world's 
as if it has collapsed into one small bright point. Inner world. Lost to us. You look in his 
eyes and there's nothing you can recognize in them. Poor Miriam.' Steeply kneaded a 
bare shoulder. 'Willis, on the I/O night-shift, came up with a phrase for their eyes. 
"Empty of intent." This appeared in a memo.' 

Marathe pretended to sniff. 'The temptation of the passive Reward of terminal p, this 
all seems complex to me. Terror seems part of the temptation for you. Us of Quebec's 
cause, we have never felt this temptation for the Entertainment, or knowing. But we 
respect its power. Thus, we do not fool crazily about.' 

It was not that the sky was lightening so much as that the stars' light had paled. There 
became a sullenness about their light. Now, also, strange-looking U.S.A. insects whirred 
actively past from time to time, moving jaggedly and making Marathe think of many 
windblown sparks. 



10 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 

The following things in the room were blue. The blue checks in the blue-and-black- 
checked shag carpet. Two of the room's six institutional-plush chairs, whose legs were 
steel tubes bent into big ellipses, which wobbled, so that while the chairs couldn't really 
be rocked in they could be sort of bobbed in, which Michael Pemulis was doing absently 
as he waited and scanned a printout of Eschaton's highly technical core ESCHAX 
directory, i.e. bobbing in his chair, which produced a kind of rapid rodential squeaking 
that gave Hal Incandenza the howling fantods as he sat there kitty-corner from Pemulis, 
also waiting. The printout kept rotating in Pemulis's hands. Each chair had a 105-watt 
reading lamp attached to the back on a flexible metal stalk that let the reading lamp 
curve out from behind and shine right down on whatever magazine the waiting person 
was looking at, but since the curved lamps induced this unbearable sensation of 
somebody feverish right there reading over your shoulder, the magazines (some of 
whose covers involved the color blue) tended to stay unread, and were fanned neatly 
out on a low ceramic coffeetable. The carpet was a product of something called Antron. 
Hal could see streaks of lividity where somebody'd vacuumed against the grain. 

Though the magazines' coffeetable was nonblue — a wet-nail-polish red with E.T.A. in 
a kind of gray escutcheon — two of the unsettlingly attached lamps that kept its 
magazines unread and neatly fanned were blue, although the two blue lamps were not 
the lamps attached to the two blue chairs. Dr. Charles Tavis liked to say that you could 
tell a lot about an administrator by the decor of his waiting room. The Headmaster's 
waiting room was part of a little hallway in the Comm.-Ad. lobby's southwest corner. 
The premie violets in an asymmetrical sprig in a tennis-ball-shaped vase on the coffee- 
table were arguably in the blue family. And also the overenhanced blue of the 
wallpaper's sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly 
against an overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorienting wallpaper that was by an 
unpleasant coincidence also the wallpaper in the Enfield offices of a Dr. Zegarelli, D.D.S., 
which Hal's just come back from, after a removal: the left side of his face still feels big 
and dead, with this persistent sensation that he's drooling without being able to feel it 
or stop it. No one's sure what C.T.'s choice of this wallpaper is supposed to communi¬ 
cate, especially to parents who come with prospective kids in tow to scout out E.T.A., 
but Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and 
disoriented and sometimes plummeting. 

The sills and crosspieces of the waiting room's two windows have always been dark 
blue. There was a nautical-blue border of braid around the bill of Michael Pemulis's 
jaunty yachting cap. Hal was confident Pemulis would remove the insouciant hat the 
minute they were called in on what was presumably going to be the carpet. 

Also blue: the upper-border slices of sky in the framed informal photos of E.T.A. 
students that hung on the walls; 209 the chassis of Alice Moore's Intel 972 word processor 
w/ modem but no cartridge-capability; also Ms. Moore's fingertips and lips. The E.T.A. 
Headmaster's receptionist and administrative assistant is known to the players as 
Lateral Alice Moore. In her youth Lateral Alice Moore had been a helicopter pilot and 



airborne traffic reporter for a major Boston radio station until a tragic collision with an¬ 
other station's airborne traffic-report helicopter — plus then the cataclysmic fall to the 
rush hour's Jamaica Way six-laner below — had left her with chronic oxygen debt and a 
neurological condition whereby she was able to move only from side to side. So hence 
the sobriquet Lateral Alice Moore. An effective time-killer while sitting there waiting for 
whatever administrator's summoned you is to have Lateral Alice Moore drum rapidly on 
her chest and give imitations of her old Boston rush-hour traffic reports in a stuttered 
helicopterish reporter-voice. Neither Hal, continually checking his chin for drool, nor 
Pemulis, scanning and bobbing, nor Ann Kittenplan nor Trevor Axford — about whom 
there was today not even a hint of the color blue — are in the mood for this right now, 
awaiting what they presume to be some kind of administrative fallout from Sunday's 
horrendous Eschaton fiasco. The presumption is based on who's been summoned here, 
to wait. 

The two different-sized offices that open off the waiting room (through the open and 
only other door of which the dusky blue Mannington shag of the Comm.-Ad. lobby is 
visible) belong to Dr. Charles Tavis and to Mrs. Avril Incandenza. Tavis's office's outer 
door is real oak and has his name and degree and title in (nonblue) letters so big that 
the total I.D. crowds the door's margins. There's also an inner door. 

Avril, whose feelings about enclosure are well known, has no door on her office. Her 
office is bigger than C.T.'s, though, and has a seminar table it's always been obvious he 
covets. Avril's office's blue-and-black-checkered shag is deeper than the waiting room's 
shag, so that the border between the two is like a mowed v. unmowed lawn. Avril serves 
(pro bono) as E.T.A.'s Dean of Academic Affairs and Dean of Females. She's in there 
unenclosed right now with pretty much every E.T.A. female under thirteen except Ann 
Kittenplan, whose tattooed knuckles are bruised and who looks somehow cross-dressed 
in a dress and (nonblue) barrette. Avril has vividly white hair — as of the last few 
months before Himself's felo de se — that looks like it never went through the gray 
stage (it mostly didn't) and legs whose taper you can see T. Axford is appraising with the 
frankness of adolescence as she paces a bit in front of the crowded seminar table, in full 
if kind of oblique-angled view of the people in the waiting room. 210 Though it's not 
technically in the waiting room with Hal, the plastic fine-tip felt pen Avril taps 
professionally against her incisors as she paces and considers is: blue. 

Administrative diddle-checks have been required at all North American tennis 
academies since the infamous case of coach R. Bill ('Touchy') Phiely at California's 
Rolling Hills Academy, whose hair-raising diary and collection of telephotos and tiny 
panties — discovered only after his disappearance into the Humboldt County hill 
country with a thirteen-year-old companion — created what might be conservatively 
termed a climate of concern among the continent's tennis parents. At the Enfield Tennis 
Academy, for the last four years. Dr. Dolores Rusk is supposed to hold a kind of distaff 
community meeting with all female players judged naive and moppetish enough to be 
potential diddlees — the youngest of these is Rhode Island's pint-sized Tina Echt, just 
seven but a true cannibal off the backhand side — to interface in a discreet but 
nurturingly empowering group setting, etc., and nip any potential Phielyisms in the bud. 
Monthly diddle-checks are in Rusk's contract because they're in E.T.A.'s O.N.A.N.T.A. 



accreditation-charter. 

Dean of Females Avril M. Incandenza presides over the diddle-check when Dr. Rusk is 
otherwise engaged, and Rusk is so very rarely legitimately engaged that the fact that it's 
the Moms doing diddle-prevention duty today leads Hal to fear that Rusk is maybe in 
there in the Headmaster's office getting ready to be in on the upcoming disciplinary 
scene: C.T. would have to be really upset to want to have Rusk included; Rusk might be 
there more for C.T. than for any studential psyches. 

Axhandle has his eyes closed and is repeating a mnemonic limerick about Brewster's 
Angle for the Leith-taught Quadrivial colloquium 'Reflections on Refraction.' Michael 
Pemulis is still scanning a serrated scroll of EndStat-axiomatic Pink 2 , which looks to be all 
math and spiky brackets, and bobbing, ignoring Ann Kittenplan's murderous looks and 
tubercular throat-clearings at the squeaking of his bobbing blue chair. You can tell 
Pemulis really is studying because he keeps turning something upside-down and then 
rightside-up. Hal declines to share his Rusk-being-in-there-with-Tavis worries with 
Michael Pemulis, not just because Hal avoids ever mentioning Rusk's name but also 
because Pemulis loathes Rusk with a hard and gemlike flame, and though he'd never 
admit it is already clearly nauseated with worry that he's going to get the lion's share of 
the blame for damage to Lord and Possalthwaite and not only receive corrective on- 

court discipline but maybe get denied a spot on the trip to Tucson's WhataBurger, or 

211 

worse. 

Avril is indirect but syntactically crisp with the couple dozen little girls in there, 
probing. The girls' outfits involve blue at many levels of hue and intensity in varied 
combination. Avril Incandenza's voice is higher on the register than one would expect 
from a woman so imposingly tall. It is high and sort of airy. Oddly insubstantial, is the 
E.T.A. consensus. Orin says one reason Avril dislikes music is that whenever she hums 
along she sounds insane. 

The absence of a door to the Moms's office means you might as well be in there, in 
terms of being able to hear what's going on. She has little sense of spatial privacy or 
boundary, having been so much alone so much when a child. Lateral Alice Moore wears 
a sort of surreal combination of black Lycra Spandex and filmy green tulle. The portable- 
stereo headphones she wears — entering what appear to be Response-macros for 80+ 
received invitations to next week's WhataBurger Invitational — are powder-blue. Her 
typing is clearly in synch with something's backbeat. Her lips and cheek-points are the 
vague robin's-egg of cyanosis. 

Just why Michael Pemulis hates Dr. Rusk is unclear and seems free-floating; Hal gets a 
different answer from Pemulis every time. Hal himself feels uncomfortable around 
Dolores Rusk and avoids her but isn't aware of any particular reason for being 
uncomfortable around her. But Pemulis positively detests Rusk. It was Pemulis who'd 
dickied in at night and hooked a Delco battery up to the inside brass knob of her locked 
office door, at age fifteen. Rusk's office door, the first door over in the other little 
hallway at the lobby's NE corner, next to the shift-nurses' office and infirmary, then 
exiting Rusk's office by a window and thorny hedge, which Pemulis was extremely 
fortunate no one but Hal and Schacht and maybe Mario knew he authored the hot 
knob, because the whole scheme turned quickly disastrous, because it was an elderly 



Brighton-lrish cleaning lady who got to the hot knob first, at like 0500h., and it turned 
out Pemulis had seriously under-calculated the brass-conducted Delco voltage involved, 
and if the cleaning lady hadn't been wearing yellow rubber cleaning-lady gloves she 
would have ended up with way worse than the permanent perm and irreversible 
crossed eyes she regained consciousness with, and the cleaning lady's Ward Boss was 
upper Brighton's infamous F. X. ('Follow That Ambulance') Byrne, rapacious personal- 
injury J.D., and the Academy's Workman's Comp, premiums had skyrocketed, and the 
whole thing was still in litigation. 

Avril had eschewed an office door even before the cleaning-lady kertwang, for simple 
enclosure-reasons. 

Recrossed legs and closer inspection reveal that Trevor Axford's left sock, though not 
his right sock, is blue. 

Sinistral, his right hand missing digits from a fireworks accident three Interdependence 
Days past, Axhandle is several cm. shorter than Hal Incandenza and is a true redheaded 
person, with copper-colored hair and that moist white freckle-chocked skin that even 
through two layers of summer Pledge only reddens and peels, plus there's the matter of 
the enormous and forever chapped lips; and as a tennis player he is like a less effective 
version of John Wayne — he does nothing but blast from the baseline, w/o discernible 
spin. He's a junior from Short Beach CT and under enormous family pressure to continue 
the male Axford tradition of attending Yale and is academically so marginal that he 
knows his only chance to go to Yale is to play tennis for Yale, which would effectively 
blow any chance at a Show-level future, and is high-ranked but has set his competitive 
sights on nothing past a Ride-offer to Yale. Though Ingersoll's informally in Hal's Big 
Buddy contingent, he's technically in Axhandle's, they're both aware; and Hal's a little 
uncomfortable about his relief that none of the real Eschaton casualties were technically 
his Buddies. 212 The only real thing Axford and Hal have in common on the court is a 
curious habit of refusing to ask for help from other courts when their balls go astray. 213 

Pemulis has finally quit with the bobbing and folded the printout scroll of Pink 2 into a 
big ragged square and has sidled over to Lateral Alice Moore's horseshoe-shaped desk 
and is bantering with her very casually, looking all around him as he banters, trying 
subtly to feel her out re whether maybe one of these WhataBurger Jr. Invitational 
invitations stacked cruciform, female athwart male, in Lateral Alice's IN box concerns 
anybody with the male initials M.M.P., by any chance. Pemulis and Moore would be less 
tight if she knew he dickied in at night and used her WATS and modem, though she's 
very laid-back and easygoing and not at all like the little framed thing by her name 
plaque with a scowling woman saying I'VE GOT ONE NERVE LEFT AND YOU'RE GETTING 
ON IT. The little cartoon is just a standard like office-worker gag. She'd summoned them 
out of Sixth Hour with the same ancient intercom-and-mike system Troeltsch et al. get 
to commandeer for Saturdays' WETA (Troeltsch has had to be prohibited from playing 
with her chair), and her transmitted voice had not been ungentle. Hal's face's left side 
feels queerly inflated, but then when he runs his right hand over it it's always 
regulation-size. Administrative assistants worth their health benefits are synaptically 
evolved to the point where they can banter, accept compliments on a Spandex-and-tulle 
ensemble, effortlessly deflect unauthorized info-probes, listen to something bass- 



intensive on personal-stereo headphones, and word-process effortlessly to the 
headphones' backbeat, all simultaneously. Lateral Alice Moore's bluish fingertips make 
her painted nails ten little sunsets. Lateral Alice Moore's desk's chair's wheels fit on a 
track with an electrified third rail, so she can slide from one corner of the horseshoe's 
arc to the other — more or less laterally — at the touch of a cerise desktop button. For 
post-Delco-incident legal reasons, the name-plaque on her reception desk has DANGER: 
THIRD RAIL instead of the name Lateral Alice Moore. 

Hal can hear Avril saying 'Now. If I speak to all of you very gently about being touched 
by a tall person in an uncomfortable way, will you know what I mean? Have any of you 
been kissed or nuzzled or hugged or rubbed or pinched or probed or fondled or in any 
way touched by a tall person in a way that's made you uncomfortable?' Hal can see one 
of his Moms's stockinged legs, terminating in a trim ankle and a very white Reebok, 
extruding from stage-right into the frame of the empty doorway, the Reebok tapping 
patiently, and one arm crossed over Avril's chest, and the other arm's elbow resting on 
that arm and fluttering in and out of view as Avril taps at her teeth with a blue pen. 

'Gramma pinches my cheek,' one girl volunteers. She'd actually raised her hand to be 
called on, her wrist with its touching little (blue) terry wristband. Hal hasn't seen so 
many pigtails and button noses and small berry-shaped mouths convened in one indoor 
place in who knows how long. Very few of the sneakered feet reach all the way to the 
thick shag in there. Much leg-dangling and absent uncomfortable sneaker-swinging. A 
couple fingers in nostrils in absent contemplation. Ann Kittenplan, in her blue chair, is 
coolly appraising the little wash-offable tattoos she applies daily to the knuckles of her 
hands. 

'Not quite what we're trying to speak of together right now. Erica,' from someplace 
above the tapping foot and in-and-out arm. Hal knows the register and inflections of his 
mother's voice so well it almost makes him uncomfortable. His left ankle gives a sick 
squeak when he flexes it. Cords in his left forearm stand out and subside as he squeezes 
his tennis ball. The left side of his face feels like something far away that means him 
harm and is coming gradually closer. He can make out just the whistly fricatives of 
Charles Tavis's distant voice from behind his double office doors; it sounds somehow 
like he's speaking to more than one person in there. Charles Tavis's office's inner door 
also has the I.D. DR. CHARLES TAVIS on it, and below that his E.T.A. motto about the 
man who knows his limitations having none. 

'She does it really hard,' rebuts what must be Erica Siress. 

'I've seen her do it,' what sounds like Jolene Criess confirms. 

Another: 'I hate that.' 

'I hate it when some adult pats my head like I'm a schnauzer.' 

'The next adult that calls me adorable is in for a really unpleasant surprise let me tell 
you.' 

'I hate it when my hair is tousled or smoothed in any way.' 

'Kittenplan's tall. Kittenplan gives Indian rub-burns after lights-out.' 

Avril gives them verbal space, tries gently to steer the topic closer to true Phielyism; 
she's subtle and very good with small children. 

'...that my daddy gives me these small little shoves in the small of the back when he 



wants me to go into rooms. It's like he influences me into rooms from behind. This tiny 
little irritating push, that makes me want to let him have it in the shin. 1 

'Mmmmmm-hmm,' Avril muses. 

It's impossible not to overhear, because things out in the waiting room right now are 
so comparatively silent except for the tinny hiss of Lateral Alice Moore's disengaged 
headphones and the conspiratorial murmur of Michael Pemulis trying to get her to 
drum on her chest and describe 1-93 South's Neponset exit-ramp as one very long thin 
parking lot. Things are so quiet because the anxiety level in Tavis's waiting room is high. 

'You're all in for some serious Pukers is my prediction,' Ann Kittenplan had said to 
Pemulis as they all first answered the intercom's summons, which was also about the 
time that Pemulis started in with the rodential chair-squeaking that made one half of 
Kittenplan's face spasm. 

One of the tricky and sinister things about corrective discipline at a tennis academy is 
that punishments can take the form of what might look like straight-out athletic 
conditioning. Q.v. the drill sergeant telling the recruit to drop and give him fifty, etc. So 
but this is why Gerhardt Schtitt and his prorectors are way more feared than Ogilvie or 
Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf or any of the regular academics. It's not just that 
Schtitt's corporal reputation preceded him here. It's that Schtitt and deLint make out the 
daily schedules for A.M. drills and P.M. matches and resistance-training and condi¬ 
tioning runs. But especially the A.M. drills. Certain drills are well known to be nothing 
more than attitude-adjusters, designed to do nothing but dramatically lower life-quality 
for a few minutes. Too brutal to be assigned on the daily basis that would contribute to 
genuine aerobic conditioning, drills like the disciplinary version of Tap & Whack 214 are 
known to the kids simply as Pukers. Puker-drills are really meant to do nothing but hurt 
you and make you think long and hard before repeating whatever you did to merit 
them; but they're still to all outward appearances exempt from any kind of VIII- 
Amendment protest or sniveling calls home to parents, insidiously, since they can be 
described to parents and police 215 alike as just drills assigned for your overall 
cardiovascular benefit, with all the actual sadism completely sub rosa. 

Kittenplan's prediction that the upperclassmen are going to wear the whole brown 
helmet for the Eschaton free-for-all is hopefully rebuttable by Pemulis's observation 
that Eschaton's extracurricular impulse and structure had been firmly in place before 
any of them'd even enrolled. All Michael Pemulis had done was codify basic principles 
and impose a sort of matrix of decidable strategy. Maybe helped create a mythology 
and established, mostly through personal example, a certain level of expectation. All 
Hal'd done was act as amanuensis on a lousy manual. The l.-Day Combatants had been 
out there of their own volition. Pemulis and Axford'd gotten Hal to write out most of all 
this in maximally rhetorical diction, which Pemulis had then embedded in a Pink 2 
printout so he could carry it around and study it and have it all nailed down before Tavis 
tried any boom-lowering. The strategy is to let Pemulis do all the talking but let Hal 
interject at will, the voice of reason, good-cop/bad. Axford's been instructed to count 
the Antron fibers between his shoes the whole time they're in there. 

Hal has no idea what it might signify that the Headmaster's summons hasn't come for 
almost 48 hours. It might be odd that it hadn't once occurred to him to see Tavis 



personally, or to go to HmH and ask the Moms for intercession or info. It's not like he 
had the urge but resisted it; it hadn't even occurred to him. 

For somebody who not only lives on the same institutional grounds as his family but 
also has his training and education and pretty much his whole overall raison-d'etre 
directly overseen by relatives, Hal devotes an unusually small part of his brain and time 
ever thinking about people in his family qua family-members. Sometimes when he'll be 
chatting with somebody in the endless registration-line for a tournament or at a post¬ 
meet dance or something and somebody'll say something like 'How's Avril getting 
along?' or 'I saw Orin kicking the everliving shit out of the ball on an O.N.A.N.F.L. 
highlights cartridge last week,' there will be this odd tense moment where Hal's mind 
will go utterly blank and his mouth slack and flabby, working soundlessly, as if the 
names were words on the tip of his tongue. Except for Mario, about whom Hal will talk 
your ear off, it's almost like some ponderous creaky machine has to get up and running 
for Hal even to think about members of his immediate family as standing in relation to 
himself. It's a possible reason Hal avoids Dr. Dolores Rusk, who always wants to probe 
him on issues of space and self-definition and something she keeps calling the 'Coatlicue 
Complex.' 216 

Hal's maternal half-uncle Charles Tavis is a little like the late Himself in that Tavis's C.V. 
is a back-and-forth but not indecisive mix of athletics and hard science. A B.A. and 
doctorate in engineering, an M.B.A. in athletics administration — in his professional 
youth Tavis had put them together as a civil engineer, his specialty the accommodation 
of stress through patterned dispersal, i.e. distributing the weight of gargantuan athletic- 
spectatorial crowds. I.e., he'd say, he'd handled large live audiences; he'd been in his 
own small way a minor pioneer in polymer-reinforced cement and mobile fulcra. He'd 
been on design teams for stadia and civic centers and grandstands and micological- 
looking superdomes. He'd admit up-front that he'd been a far better team-player 
engineer than out there up-front stage-center in the architectural limelight. He'd 
apologize profusely when you had no idea what that sentence meant and say maybe the 
obfuscation had been unconsciously deliberate, out of some kind of embarrassment 
over his first and last limelighted architectural supervision, up in Ontario, before the rise 
of O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence, when he'd designed the Toronto Blue Jays' novel and 
much-ballyhooed SkyDome ballpark-and-hotel complex. Because Tavis had been the 
one to take the lion's share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays' spectators in 
the stands, many of them innocent children wearing caps and pounding their little fists 
into the gloves they'd brought with hopes of nothing more exotic than a speared foul 
ball, that spectators at a distressing number of different points all along both foul-lines 
could see right into the windows of guests having various and sometimes exotic sex in 
the hotel bedrooms over the center-field wall. The bulk of the call for Tavis's rolling 
head had come, he'd tell you, when the cameraman in charge of the SkyDome's Instant- 
Replay-Video Scoreboard, disgruntled or professionally suicidal or both, started training 
his camera on the bedroom windows and routing the resultant multi-limbed coital 
images up onto the 75-meter Scoreboard screen, etc. Sometimes in slow motion and 
with multiple replays, etc. Tavis will admit his reluctance to talk about it, still, after all 
this time. He'll confess that his usual former-career-summary is to say just that he'd 



specialized in athletic venues that could safely and comfortably seat enormous numbers 
of live spectators, and that the market for his services had bottomed out as more and 
more events were designed for cartridge-dissemination and private home-viewing, 
which he'll point out is not technically untrue so much as just not entirely open and 
forthcoming. 

Lateral Alice Moore is printing out WhataBurger RSVPs. The Intel 972 is cutting-edge, 
but she clings to a hideous old dot-matrix printer she refuses to replace as long as Dave 
Harde can keep it going. It's the same with the intercom system and its antiquated iron 
stand-up mike that Troeltsch says is an affront to the whole broadcasting profession. 
Lateral Alice has queer eccentric pockets of intransigence and Ludditism, due possibly to 
her helicopter-crash and neurologic deficits. The printer's needly sound fills the waiting 
room. Hal finds he can be confident of his face's symmetry and saliva only when he sits 
there with his right hand over his left cheek. Each line of Alice's printed response sounds 
like some sort of supposedly unrippable fabric getting ripped, over and over, a dental 
and life-denying sound. 

For Hal, the general deal with his maternal uncle is that Tavis is terribly shy around 
people and tries to hide it by being very open and expansive and wordy and bluff, and 
that it's excruciating to be around. Mario's way of looking at it is that Tavis is very open 
and expansive and wordy, but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind of protective 
shield that it betrays a frightened vulnerability almost impossible not to feel for. Either 
way, the unsettling thing about Charles Tavis is that he's possibly the openest man of all 
time. Orin and Marlon Bain's view was always that C.T. was less like a person than like a 
sort of cross-section of a person. Even the Moms Hal could remember relating 
anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she'd taken the child C.T. or been around him 
at Quebecois functions or gatherings involving other kids, the child C.T. had been too 
self-conscious and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, 
talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she'd watch him just kind of drift from 
cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he'd always 
say, loudly, in some lull in the group's conversation, something like 'I'm afraid I'm far too 
self-conscious really to join in here, so I'm just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and 
listen, if that's all right, just so you know,' and so on. 

But so the point is that Tavis is an odd and delicate specimen, both ineffectual and in 
certain ways fearsome as a Headmaster, and being a relative guarantees no special 
predictive insight or quarter, unless certain maternal connections are exploited, the 
thought of doing which literally does not occur to Hal. This odd blankness about his 
family might be one way to manage a life where domestic and vocational authorities 
sort of bleed into each other. Hal squeezes his tennis ball like a madman, sitting there in 
the needly printout-noise, right palm against his left cheek and elbow hiding his mouth, 
wanting very much to go first to the Pump Room and then to brush vigorously with his 
portable collapsible Oral-B. A quick chew of Kodiak is out of the question for several 
reasons. 

The only other time this year that Hal was officially summoned to the Headmaster's 
waiting room had been in late August, right before Convocation and during Orientation 
period, when Y.D.A.U.'s new kids were coming in and wandering around clueless and 



terrified, etc., and Tavis had wanted Hal to take temporary charge of a nine-year-old kid 
coming in from somewhere called Philo IL, who was allegedly blind, the kid, and 
apparently had cranium-issues, from having originally been one of the infantile natives 
of Ticonderoga NNY evacuated too late, and had several eyes in various stages of 
evolutionary development in his head but was legally blind, but still an extremely solid 
player, which is all kind of a long tale in itself, given that his skull was apparently the 
consistency of a Chesapeake crabshell but the head itself so huge it made Booboo look 
microcephalic, and the kid apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the 
other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance with a halo¬ 
shaped metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head; but 
anyway Tex Watson and Thorp had broken C.T. down over the kid's admission and 
tuition-waver, and C.T, now figured the kid would need to say the least some extra help 
getting oriented (literally), and he wanted Hal to be the one to take him in hand (again 
literally). It turned out a couple days later that the kid had some kind of either family or 
cerebro-spinal-fluid crisis at home in rural IL and wasn't matriculating now till the Spring 
term. But back in August Hal had sat in the very chair Trevor Axford is now nodding off 
in, very late in the day, like dusk, having had an informal exhibition match with a visiting 
Latvian Satellite pro go an encouraging three sets that P.M. so that he'd missed Mrs. C.'s 
stuffed peppers at supper, his stomach making those where's-the-food noises from 
around the transverse colon, alone in the blue room, waiting, the chair bobbing 
reflexively, with Lateral Alice Moore gone home to her long apartment with rooms only 
2 m. wide in Newton and an opaque plastic dust-thing wrapped tight over her Intel pro¬ 
cessor and intercom-console and the little red danger-light on her DANGER: THIRD RAIL 
plaque unlit, and the only lights besides the weak dusk outside were the hot 105W of his 
chairback's creepy blue-shaded magazine-lamp, plus the multiple lamps on in Charles 
Tavis's office (Tavis has a phobic thing about overhead lighting) as Tavis was doing a 
late-day Intake interview on impossibly tiny little Tina Echt, who just matriculated this 
fall at age seven. His doors were open because it was a brutal August and F. D. V. Harde 
had somehow rigged Lateral Alice's air-conditioner vent in the waiting room so it really 
put out. Tavis's office's outer door opened out while the inner door opened in, which 
gave his little inter-door vestibule kind of a jaw-like quality, when exposed. 

August Y.D.A.U. had been when Hal's chronic left ankle had been almost the worst it's 
ever been, after an erumpent but grueling summer tour of getting to at least the 
Quarters of just about everything, mostly on hard asphalt, 217 and he could feel his pulse 
in the vessels in the raw ligaments of the ankle as he sat flipping the shiny pages of a 
new World Tennis and watching the little ad-cards fall out and flutter; but he also 
couldn't help exploiting the open-jawed view of a substantial section of Charles Tavis at 
his office desk, looking as usual oddly foreshortened and small and with his hands 
together on the massive desktop across from a partial-profile view of a girl who looked 
like she couldn't be much more than five or six, preparing to receive Intake papers as 
she listened to Tavis. There'd been no Echt parents or guardians anywhere in view. 
Some kids just get dropped off. Sometimes the parents' cars barely even stop, just slow 
down, throw gravel as they accelerate away. Tavis's desk drawers have squeaky casters. 
Jim Struck's folks' Lincoln hadn't even much slowed. Struck had been helped to his feet 



and taken immediately to the locker room to shower the gravel out of his hair. Hal had 
been in charge of his Orientation, too, when Struck transferred, booted out of Palmer 
Academy after his pet tarantula (named Simone — another long story) escaped and 
wouldn't even have dreamed of biting the Headmaster's wife if she hadn't screamed and 
passed out and fallen right on it. Struck explained as Hal helped pick up suitcases 
tumbled all over the drive. 

Like many gifted bureaucrats, Hal's mother's adoptive brother Charles Tavis is 
physically small in a way that seems less endocrine than perspectival. His smallness 
resembles the smallness of something that's farther away from you than it wants to be, 
plus is receding. 218 This weird appearance of recessive drift, together with the 
compulsive hand-movements that followed his quitting smoking some years back, 
helped contribute to the quality of perpetual frenzy about the man, a kind of locational 
panic that it's easy to see explains not only Tavis's compulsive energy — he and Avril, 
pretty much the Dynamic Duo of compulsion, between them, sleep, in their second- 
floor rooms in the Headmaster's House — separate rooms — tend to sleep, between 
them, about as much as any one normal insomniac — but maybe also contributes to the 
pathological openness of his manner, the way he thinks out loud about thinking out 
loud, a manner Ortho Stice can imitate so eerily that he's been prohibited by the male 
18's from doing his Tavis-impression in front of the younger players, for fear that the 
littler kids will find it impossible to take the real Tavis seriously at the times he needs to 
be taken seriously. 

As for the older kids, Stice can make them all double up now merely by shielding his 
eyes with his hand and assuming a horizon-scan expression whenever Tavis heaves into 
view, seeming to recede even as he bears down. 

C.T. as Headmaster always has a number of introductory questions for matriculants, 
and Hal, now, in November, can't remember which one of these Tavis opened with with 
Echt, but he remembers seeing the little girl's sucker-stick sweep the air and a plastic 
Mr. Bouncety-Bounce 219 no-pierce earring swing wildly as she shook her head. Hal'd 
marvelled at her size. How high could somebody this little be ranked, even regionally, in 
12's? 

And then yes the sumptuous squeak of Tavis's big seagrass chair coming back forward 
as his elbows took his weight and he laced his fingers together out across meters of 
polymer-reinforced shale desktop, custom-designed. The Headmaster's smile as he 
leaned back, though hidden from Hal because of the shadow of the office's enormous 
StairBlaster, 220 was nevertheless audible because of the thing with Charles Tavis's teeth, 
about which maybe the less said the better. Looking discreetly in, Hal had felt an 
involuntary rush of affection for C.T. His maternal uncle's hair was straight and very 
precisely combed over, and his little mustache was never quite symmetrical. One eye 
was also set at a slightly different angle than the other, so that besides holding his hand 
up to scan Stice would also cock his head slightly to the side whenever C.T. came near. 
Hal's involuntary grin is lopsided and only half-felt, now, remembering. The Axhandle's 
sitting there slumped, with his fist to his chin, a posture that he thinks makes him look 
meditative but that really makes him look in utero, and Kittenplan is chewing at her 
knuckles' tattoos, which is what she does instead of washing them off. 



Then Ortho Stice had entered the hot waiting room, shirt wet and crew cut matted 
from the courts and toting his Wilsons, and made right for the AC-vent's downdraft 
outside Tavis's little vestibule. Slice's clothes were comped by Fila and when he played 
any sort of match he wore all black, and at E.T.A. and on the tour was known as The 
Darkness. He had a crew cut and the beginnings of jowls. He and Hal exchanged the very 
slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness. 
They had similar games, although most of Stice's touch was at the net. Stice raised one 
hand to his eyes and cocked his head slightly in the direction of the office's lamplight. 

'The little guy going to be a long time in there?' 

'You have to ask?' 

Tavis was saying 'What actually we do for you here is to break you down in very 
carefully selected ways, take you apart as a little girl and put you back together again as 
a tennis player who can take the court against any little girl in North America without 
fear of limitation. With a perspective unmarred by the eyelashes of whatever pockets 
you brought here. A little girl now who can regard the court as a mirror whose reflection 
holds no illusions or fear for you.' 

'Now the thing with the skull,' Stice said. Hal had watched gooseflesh rise on Stice's 
arms and legs as he stood under the cold air and faced up and breathed, hugging his 
gear to his chest. 

'One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull 
very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of 
clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be. I'm doing my best to 
cast all this in terms the you you are right now can be comfortable with, Tina. Though I 
need to tell you I feel uncomfortable adjusting a presentation toward or down toward 
anyone in any way, since I'm terribly vain, both as a man and an educator, about my 
reputation for candor,' Tavis said. The audible smile. 'It is one of my limitations.' 

Stice withdrew without even having to say goodbye to Hal. They were at complete 
ease with one another. It had been a bit different the year before, when Hal was still in 
Boys' 16's. Hal heard Stice say something to somebody out in the lobby. Part of C.T.'s 
impression of distance just past the eye's focal length was the fact that the two sides of 
his face didn't quite go together. It wasn't as drastic as a stroke-victim's face or a 
deformity; the subtlety of it was part of it, the essential vagueness about himself that 
Tavis fought by sort of peeling his skull back and exposing his brain to you without any 
sort of warning or invitation; it was part of the man's preoccupied frenzy. 

Between Ortho Stice's exit and the Moms's entry Hal had been flexing the ankle and 
watching the swelling shift slightly under the multiple socks. He stood and put his 
weight on the ankle experimentally a couple times and then sat back down and flexed it, 
watching the swelling very intently. The way he knew suddenly that he was going to go 
down and get high in secret in the Pump Room before showering was that it hadn't 
occurred to him to ask The Darkness about making some sort of arrangements to eat 
together, since Stice had missed supper too. His viscera were putting out the sound of 
one of those teakettles that doesn't have a whistle and so just rumbles as it boils. A 
competitive athlete cannot skip meals without terrific metabolic distress. 

After a little while Avril Incandenza, E.T.A.'s Dean of Academic Affairs, had lowered her 



head under the waiting room's jamb and come in, looking fresh and totally untouched 
by the heat. She had one of the Orientation packets in its customary red-and-gray 
binder. 

The Moms always had this way of establishing herself in the exact center of any room 
she was in, so that from any angle she was somehow in the line of all sight. It was part of 
her, and so to that extent dear to Hal, but it was noticeable and kind of unsettling. His 
brother Orin, during a late-night round of Family Trivia, had once described Avril as The 
Black Hole of Human Attention. Hal had been pacing, rising up on the toes of the left 
foot, trying to gauge the exact level of physical discomfort he was feeling. That's when 
she'd come in. Hal and the Moms always greeted each other kind of extravagantly. 
When Avril entered a room, any sort of pacing reduced to orbiting, and Hal's pacing 
became vaguely circular around the waiting room's perimeter as Avril rested her 
tailbone on the receptionist's desk and crossed her ankles and produced her cigarette 
case. Her manner always became very casual and almost sort of male when she and Hal 
were alone in a room. 

She watched him walk. 'The ankle?' 

He hated himself for exaggerating the limp even slightly. 'Tender. Sore at the very 
worst. More like tender.' 

'No, now, now no need to cry," C.T. was exclaiming as he knelt at the side of the chair 
from which little legs dangled and were spasming around. 'I didn't mean literally break, 
as in break open your bead, Tina. Please let me acknowledge that this is totally my fault 
my dear for presenting what we'll be up to here in just exactly the wrong sort of light.' 

Avril had casually produced a 100-mm. rodney from the flat brass case and tamped it 
on an unlined knuckle. Hal produced no lighter. Neither of them had looked toward 
Tavis's office's maw. Avril's smock-type dress was blue cotton, with a kind of scalloped 
white doily around the shoulders and white stockings and painfully white Reebok cross¬ 
trainers. 

'I am horrified that I've made you cry like this.' Tavis's voice had assumed that stressed 
character of issuing from the end of a long corridor. 'Just please know that a totally 
unthreatening lap is available if you want a lap, is all I can think of to say.' 

Avril always smoked with her smoking-arm up and elbow resting in the crook of the 
other arm. She would frequently hold a rodney just this same way without lighting it or 
even putting it in her mouth. She permitted herself to smoke only in her E.T.A. office 
and HmH study and one or two other venues outfitted with air-filtration equipment. Her 
posture, that night, with her coccyx against something and looking down the length of 
her legs, was awfully close to the way Himself used to stand around. She indicated C.T.'s 
door with her head. 

'I gather he's been in there a while.' 

Hal despised even the very slight suggestion of whine that came in: 'I've been waiting 
here coming up on an hour.' And that he liked it a little that she looked pained for him 
as her tiny eyebrows (unplucked, just naturally tiny and arched) went up. 

'You've had nothing to eat, then, yet?' 

'I was summoned." 

Tavis's voice in there: Til invite you right here and now to sit in my lap and let me 



make such soothing sounds as There There There.' 

'Want my Mommy and Daddy.' 

Avril said, 'That's the old turn making those sounds then, and not the air conditioner?' 
with that smile that was also a kind of wince. 

'Couldn't even start to describe the sounds coming from down there, like that 
whistleless kettle Himself used to leave on when —' 

An apple appeared from a deep pocket in her smock. 'Happen to have a spare Granny 
Smith here, to tack body to soul while we wait.' 

He smiled tiredly at the big green apple. 'Moms, that's your apple. That's all you're 
going to eat between 12 and 23, I happen to know.' 

Avril made a distended gesture. 'Stuffed. Huge lunch with a set of parents not three 
hours ago. I've been staggering around since.' Looking at the apple like she had no idea 
where it'd even come from. Til probably pitch this out.' 

'You will not.' 

'Please,' rising from the desk's edge without seeming to use muscles, apple held out 
like something distasteful, cigarette down at her side where it would be putting a hole in 
the smock if lit. 'You'd be doing us both a favor.' 

'This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.' 

Orin and Hal's term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes 
you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what 
the consequences will be for her. It's like to report any sort of need or problem is to 
mug her. Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: 'Please, I'm not using 
this oxygen anyway.' 'What, this old limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.' 'But 
it's a gorgeous bowel movement, Mario — the living room rug needed something, I 
didn't know what til right this very moment.' The special fantodish chill of feeling both 
complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted, taking the apple, 
pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin believed 
she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her 
feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. 
to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot. 

The Moms held the red binder out to Hal without moving. 'Have you seen Alice's new 
packets?' The apple was good-sour but perfumy from the pocket of the Moms's smock, 
and it stimulated a torrent of saliva. The binder had different little informal and action 
photos from the waiting-room walls, and offprints of clippings, and three rings for the 
packet of guidelines and Honor-Code pledges, all done up by Moore in a Gothic ital. 

Hal looked up from the binder, indicating C.T.'s office with his head. 'You're taking the 
girl around yourself?' 

'We're encouragingly short-staffed. Thierry and Donni won their qualifying round at 
Hartford, so they're staying over.' She leaned way forward and looked in at C.T. so he 
could see she was out here. She smiled. 

Hal followed her look. 'The girl's name's Tina something and she'll come up to about 
your knee.' 

'Echt,' Avril said, looking at something on a printout. 

Hal looked at her while he chewed. 'You don't like her already?' 



'Tina Echt. Pawtucket. Father apparently some sort of unleavened baker, mother a 
public relations person for the Red Sox A.A.A. baseball there.' 

Hal had to wipe his chin as he smiled. 'Triple-A. Not A.A.A.' 

Avril was leaning forward at the waist with the binder to her breast the way females 
hold flat things, still trying to catch the Headmaster's eye. 

Hal said 'Troeltsch finally has some competition in the repulsive-last-name 
department.' 

'Lord she is a small one isn't she.' 

'I can't see her being more than maybe five.' 

'Oh golly let's see: age seven, high I.Q., somewhat impoverished-looking M.M.P.I., 
played out of Providence Racquet and Bath in East Providence. Ranked thirty-first in 
Eastern 12's as of June.' 

'She can't be much taller than her damn stick out there, when she plays. Schtitt's going 
to keep her here what, twelve years?' 

'The girl's father has been calling about admission for her for over two years, Charles 
said.' 

'He was doing that thing about taking skulls apart and she yelled bloody murder.' 

Avril's laugh's onset was high-pitched and alarming and distinctive, so now at least C.T. 
would for sure know the Moms was out here waiting and would wind things up and 
maybe get to Hal so Hal could go get high in secret. 'Well good for her,' Avril said. 

The orbit took him around Lateral Alice Moore's desk in a kind of thick ellipse. Every 
time his left foot came down he either dipped down or raised up briefly to tip-toe, 
flexing the ankle. 'Ten years here and she'll lose her mind. If she starts at seven she'll 
either be ready for the Show at fourteen or by fourteen she'll start getting that burned- 
out look that makes you want to wave your hand in front of her face.' 

There was the sound of Tavis's squeaky right Nunn Bush pacing faster, which meant 
real conclusion. 'I'm going to predict it's probably hard to see yourself as a great athlete 
at this stage, Tina, not being able to see over the net yet, but possibly even harder to 
see yourself as providing entertainment, engaging people's attention. As a high-velocity 
object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own limitations in the face 
of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself represents.' 

The apple generated tremendous amounts of saliva. 'He'll put her in the Show before 
menses, there'll be another enormous fuss and high-rental cartridges of a girl no larger 
than her racquet beating up on hairy Slavic lesbians, and then by fourteen she'll be like 
old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill.' Some old military joke about apples kept 
running through. Eat the Apple, Fuck the Core. Hal couldn't remember what it was 
supposed to signify. 

The Moms was snapping her fingers silently and working her forehead. 'There's some 
term for coals reduced to residue after all day in a grill. I'm trying to think.' 

Hal hates this. 'Clinkers,' he said instantly. 'From klinker low German and klinckaerd 
old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to substantive around 1769: a hard mass formed 
by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.' He hated it that 
she could even dream he'd be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping, 
and then that he's always so pleased to play along. Is it showing off if you hate it? 



'Clinker.' 

'A grill wouldn't have clinkers. Charcoal's refined to burn right down to dust. Clinkers 
are sort of metallic, I think. See for example the ring-dash-sound etymology.' 

'I like to suspect this is why so many of our older players like to project me into this 
carnival-barker persona with tiny balance sheets revolving in my eyes, that I'm up-front 
with every incoming addition to our family that this is where the resources come from 
for professional tennis, and for the North American junior development system for 
gifted children who want to scale the heights to professionalism or to a competitive 
college career, and so ultimately for an Academy like this one's considerable operating 
expenses, and for scholarships like the partial one we're so happy to be able to offer 
your parents for you.' 

'So then perhaps you'd care to join us for dinner. We'll also have Ms. Echt if she can 
stay up that long.' 

The core made a very-muffled-cymbal sound in the bottom of Lateral Alice's 
wastebasket. 'I can't get out of dawns. Wayne and I are supposed to play Slobodan 221 
and Hartigan at some corporate-spectacle thing at Auburndale right after lunch.' 

'Have you had Barry speak to Gerhardt about the ankle not getting better?' 

'The clay'll be good to it. Schtitt knows all about the ankle.' 

'Well best of British luck to you both.' Avril's purse looked more like soft luggage than 
like a purse. 'May I lend you the key to the kitchen, then.' 

It's always the Moms's left shoulder Hal looks over, whenever he orbits, and his plans 
emerged between Avril's invitations to accept some sort of politeness-act. 'The Darkness 
and I were going to blast down the hill and grab something if and when I ever get out of 
here.' 

'Oh.' 

Then he wondered with dread what Stice might have said to her on her way in, re 
supper. 'Maybe Pemulis too, I think Pemulis said.' 

'Well do not, under any circumstances, enjoy yourself.' 

Echt and Tavis were both standing, now, in there. Their handshake looked, for the first 
split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going 5/eg Heil. Hal 
thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind. Even the meat of the Granny Smith 
smelled like perfume. 

Three months later, earlier today, before being again summoned, at the dentist's, the 
dentist's office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory 
equivalent of fluorescent light. Hal had felt the cold stab in the gum and then the slow 
radial freeze, his face ballooning to become one of the frozen cumuli against the 
aftershave-blue of the dental wallpaper's sky. Zegarelli D.D.S. had dry dark green eyes 
that bulged above his mint-blue mask, as in like olives where eyes should be, as he 
leaned in to proceed, his dental overhead light's corona giving him one of those 
malperspectived medieval halos that seem to stand on end. Even masked, Zegarelli's 
breath is infamous — E.T.A.s forced for the first time by their E.T.A. Group Plan to 
recline below Zegarelli are counselled on how to respire, to inhale when Zegarelli 
inhales and exhale right back out with him, to avoid doubling the amount of suffering 
Hal's already gone through, just today. 



Charles Tavis is not a buffoon. The thing that's keeping things so tensely quiet out here 
amid all this waiting-room blue is that there are historically at least two Charles Tavises, 
the three older boys know. The openly cross-sectional and free-associating and arms- 
waving-on-the-perspectival-horizon dithering hand-wringing Total-Worry persona is 
really Tavis's version of social composure, his way of trying to get along with you. But 
just ask Michael Pemulis, whose sneakers have been on Tavis's carpet so often they've 
left an unvacuumable impression in the checked Antron: when Tavis loses his 
composure, when the integrity or smooth function of the Academy or his unquestioned 
place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened, Hal's openly adjustable uncle becomes 
a different man, one not to be fucked with. It's not necessarily pejorative to compare a 
cornered bureaucrat to a cornered rat. The danger-sign to watch out for is if Tavis 
suddenly gets very quiet and very still. Because then he seems, perspectivally, to grow. 
He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper. Almost looming 
over you from across the huge desk. If shit meets administrative fan, kids coming out of 
his mandible-doored office come out pale and rubbing their eyes, not from tears but 
from this depth-perspective skewing that C.T. suddenly effects, when there's shit. 

Another alert is when Lateral Alice Moore gets formally buzzed to bring you and the 
others in, instead of the office doors ever opening from inside, and when she gets up 
and edges over to show you in like you're some sort of hat-holding salesman, without 
once meeting your eye, as if there's shame. One big family. 

The diddle-check seems like it's degenerated into the girls all getting very excited and 
exchanging data on what kinds of animals members of their own biologic families either 
imitate or physically resemble, and Avril's out of sight and silent and apparently letting 
them go with it for a while and vent stress. Hal keeps checking for jaw-drool with the 
back of his hand. Pemulis, in a Cyrillic-lettered T-shirt, takes off the hat and looks around 
himself and makes reflexive tie-straightening movements, taking one last look at his 
lines on the printout while Axford stands there needing three tries to work the outside 
door's knob. Ann Kittenplan, on the other hand, wears an expression of almost regal 
calm, and precedes them through the inner door like someone stepping down off a dais. 

And it also seems somehow sinister that she's apparently been in here all this time, 
this Clenette person, one of the nine-month temps from down the hill, pretty-eyed and 
so black she's got a bluish cast, with hair ironed straight and then pinned up and the 
standard E.T.A.-custodial teal-blue zip-upable jumpsuit, emptying Tavis's personal brass 
wastebaskets into her big cart with its gray canvas sides. The way she stares at a point 
just to the side of Hal's own stare as she and her cart wait at C.T.'s inner door for Hal 
and the others to be ushered sideways through by Lateral Alice Moore. The cart, like 
poor Otis Lord's own game-master's cart, has a crazy wheel, and clatters a bit even 
buried in shag, trying to maneuver around Moore as she reverses back along the 
vestibule's wall. Neither Schtitt nor deLint is in here, but from the hiss of Pemulis's 
inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in the room even before he takes his eyes 
from a C.T. who's sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagrass swivel-chair and 
almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle: 
Tavis's window-lit shadow now reaches all the way past the StairBlaster to the red-and- 
gray-fabric ottoman along the east wall, in which sits sure enough Rusk, her hose 



laddered and face betraying nothing; and then next to her is poor old Otis P. Lord, the 
Hitachi monitor still over his head like the sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, 
slumped and with his sneakers pointing at each other in the blue and black shag, hands 
in his lap, two crude eye-holes cut into the black plastic casing of the monitor's base. 
Lord not meeting Pemulis's eye, and wicked hanging shards of glass from the screen he 
fell through pointing — some nearly touching, even — his slim neck and throat, so he 
has to hold his head very still, despite the heavings of his shallow chest, with the day- 
shift E.T.A. nurse standing behind him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the 
monitor very carefully in place, the incline producing cleavage which Hal would gladly 
choose to be the sort of person not to note. Lord's eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully 
through the holes, and he can be heard sniffing moistly in there, complexly muffled; and 
Pemulis is just finishing moving his feet precisely into their familiar impressions in the 
office carpet when C.T., seeming direly to rise from his chair without getting up, quietly 
asks the room's last occupant — the scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an 
O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, severely underdue at E.T.A., seated back in the shadow of the open 
inner door in the room's southeast corner, so he's hidden right behind them from the 
start and there's the opportunity for this stagy incriminating-type whirl-and-kertwang- 
face from Axford and Hal as they hear Charles Tavis addressing the urine expert behind 
them, asking him very quietly please to close both doors. 


PRE DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING 
NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL 


'You can't say it's only a U.S. thing,' Steeply said again. 'I went through school when 
multiculturalism was inescapable. We read about the Japanese and Indonesians, for 
example, having a mythic figure. I forget its name. Oriental myth. It's a woman covered 
with long blond hair. Entirely. Her whole body with blond down all over it.' 

'This type of passive temptation, part of it seems to include a felt lack. A perceived 
deprivation. Orientals are not bodily a hairy culture.' 

'These multicultural Oriental myths always had young Oriental men happening upon 
her by some body of water combing her body-hair and singing. And they have sex with 
her. Apparently she's simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist. Even the 
young Oriental men who know of the myths can't resist, according to the myths.' 

'And are rendered paralyzed with stasis by this intimate act,' Marathe said. When now 
he dreamt of his father, it was of the two skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe, at a 



St. Remi-d'Amherst outdoor rink, M. Marathe's breath visible and his pacemaker a boxy 
bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan. 

'Killed outright, usually. The pleasure's too intense. No mortal can stand it. Kills them. 
M-o-r-t-s.' 

Marathe sniffed. 

'The analogous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them, 
they go ahead anyway.' 

Marathe coughed. 

Some of the insects flying had multiple pairs of wings and were bio-luminescent. They 
seemed very intent, flying past the outcropping and darting jaggedly off on a course, on 
their way to something urgent. The sound of them, the insects, made Marathe think of 
playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs. Both men were 
silent. This is the time of false dawns. Venus moved east away from them. The softest 
light imaginable seeped into the desert and spread into the strange tan vistas around 
them, something heating just below the ring of night. His blanket of the lap was covered 
in burrs and small spiked seeds of some species. The U.S.A. desert began to rustle with 
life of which most remained hidden. In the American sky, the stars fluttering like banked 
flames above a low-resolution seepage of glow. But none of the pinkening of genuine 
dawn. 

Both the U.S.A. Office of Unspecified Services and les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents 
looked forward to these meetings of Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little. It 
was their sixth or seventh. Meeting. Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with 
Marathe's betrayal, despite language. 222 The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a 
triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the 
meetings with B.S.S. According to Steeply, Steeply's B.S.S. superiors did not know that 
Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steeply held this 
fact back from his superiors. It satisfied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing 
back from one's superiors, Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about 
this. Marathe did not know. M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal 
choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more 
than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Quebec, making 
Marathe no better than M. Rodney 'the God' Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would 
understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye, killing her 
and Marathe both. 

The real Marathe gestured outward at the glowing but unpink east. 'A false dawn.' 

'No,' Steeply said, 'but your own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.' 

'L'Odalisque de Sainte Therese.' Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct 
Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation and the syntax as well Marathe could never 
determine for sure either was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit 
Marathe. 

Steeply said 'The multicultural myth being that the Odalisk's so beautiful that mortal 
Quebecois eyes can't take it. Whoever looks at her turns into a diamond or gem.' 

'In most versions an opal.' 

'A Medusa in reverse, one might say.' 



Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed. 223 

Marathe said 'The Greeks, they did not fear beauty. They feared ugliness. Hence I 
think beauty and pleasure, these were not fatal temptations for the Greek type.' 

'Or like a combination of Medusa and Circe, your Odalisk' said Steeply. He was 
smoking either his last or one of his purse's pack's last cigarettes — the American's habit 
to throw the butts off the outcropping had prevented Marathe from counting the 
consumed butts. Marathe knew that Steeply knew that filters of cigarettes did not 
biodegrade for the environment. The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the 
other. 

A hidden bird twittered. 

'The Greek mythic personality, it had also pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl.' 

'And haven't we come a long way,' Steeply said ironically. 

'This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type's 
temptation, I think.' 

'Whereas your type's a man of only actions, ends,' Steeply said, with Marathe could 
not tell whether irony or maybe not. 

The desert floor was brightening by imperceptible degrees, its surface the color of 
overtanned hide. The saguaro cactus reptile-hued. Potentially young forms in down 
sleeping bags of coffinous shape were now discernible around the black remains of the 
night's bonfire. The air smelled of green wood. A tasteless odor of dust. The distant 
construction site's payloaders were urine-colored and appeared frozen in the middle of 
various actions. It was still chill. Marathe's teeth had a palpable film on them, of perhaps 
a paste of dust, especially the front teeth. No sun's top arc was appearing, and Marathe 
could cast no shadow yet on the shale behind them. 

Remy Marathe's resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the 
heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains, and then only in the stump of the left. All 
A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms. Marathe was left-handed. Steeply 
manipulated his cigarette with his left hand and used his right arm to cradle the left 
elbow. But Marathe knew quite well that Steeply was right-handed. The little wens of 
his field-persona's electrolysis were now brightly pink against the pallor of Steeply's 
face, which appeared both puffy and drawn. 

The cloudless sky above the east's Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink 
of an unhealed burn. The whole imperceptibly lightening scene of the vistas had a 
stillness about it that suggested photography. Marathe had long ago placed his watch in 
his windbreaker's pocket, to keep from continually checking. Steeply enjoyed imagining 
that his interface dictated its own period and time; Marathe had chosen to indulge this. 

Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the 
purpose of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a silence. 'You could seat yourself briefly, 
if you have fatigue. The shoes' straps ..." He gestured slightly. 

Steeply made a show of looking down and prodding at the tan stone's dust with the 
toes of his shoe. 'It looks like there might be things.' 

'I must soon leave.' Marathe's hand was imprinted with the texture of the Sterling's 
pebbled grip. Tt has been good to be in the air for a night. Soon I must leave,' 

'Crawling around. The skirt, it makes one sensitive about simply plopping down 



wherever you wish. Possibility of things... crawling up. 1 He looked up at Marathe. He 
appeared sad. 'I'd never realized.' 


0450H., 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE D.A.R.H., 
ENFIELD MA 


'Didn't know whether to shit or shout Dixie after it went off. And the look on his face.' 

'One of the times for me was I'm in some bar in Lowell with some guys I'm crewing 
around with and we were there with some other guys, just fucking Lowell knuckleheads, 
your young drunks that are just getting to be your young working-type drunks that stop 
off after work for just a couple and don't make it home til closing. Just putting away 
boilermakers and playing darts and this and that. And this one guy on the crew starts 
making moves on this one guy's girl, this real ordinary-looking guy's in there with his girl 
and one of our guys starts saying this and that to her, trying to pick her up, and her date 
got pissed off, you know, who can blame him, and there was words exchanged and so 
on and so forth, and we was all there with this first guy, in our like group, he was the 
one talking the shit to this guy's girl but he was our boy, we're all in the crew, so we all 
crew up on this girl's date and push him around somewhat, you know how it is, say he's 
talking shit to our boy, he gets a little bit of a beating, dope-slaps, nothing like extreme 
or blood, and we kick his ass around a little bit and toss him out of this bar and get this 
girl to drink boilermakers with us and the one guy that was making the moves on her in 
the first place gets her to start playing strip-darts, like taking off bits of clothes for points 
in darts, which the keep isn't too like thrilled but these boys are his customers, it's like 
family. We're all real drunk and playing strip-darts.' 

'I get the picture. Sounds like a real nice picture.' 

'Except when I got a little smarter later I learned you never in a neighborhood bar fu— 
you don't ever mess with a local guy with a girl and make him look small in front of the 
girl and then stay there where it happened if he leaves, because it's this kind of guy 
always comes back.' 

'You learned to leave.' 

'Because this guy like a half-hour later on he comes back packing. Packing means 
there's a Item involved, now, see.' 



'Item?' 

'A gun. This wasn't a big one. I'm remembering a .25 somewhat, in that range, but in 
he comes and comes straight over to the dart game and the girl that's down to her slip 
and pulls it out and without saying nothing up and comes right over and shoots our boy, 
that'd taken his girl and made him look small, shoots him right in the head, right in the 
back of the head.' 

'Boy was crazy as a shithouse rat.' 

'Well Joelle he'd got made small in front of his girl, and we stayed, and he came back 
and plugged him in the back of the head.' 

'And killed him dead.' 

'Not right away he didn't die. The negativest part for me is what we do. All us guys 
with the guy that was shot. We are all very fucked up by this point in time. I remember it 
not seeming real. The keep's busy calling the Finest, the guy drops the Item and the 
keep grabbed him and covered him with the bar piece and called the Finest and kept the 
guy back behind the bar, I think mostly now to keep us from eliminating his map right 
there, out of payback. We're all blotto-zombie drunk by this juncture. The girl, there was 
blood all down the side of her slip. And here our boy's shot in the head, the guy'd shot 
him right through the back of the head from the side, and blood's all over. You always 
maybe think of individuals bleeding in this one way, like steady. But your serious 
bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn't know. It like shoots out and dies down and 
shoots out.' 

'Don't have to tell me.' 

'Well I don't know you, Joelle, am I right? I don't know what you seen or know.' 

'I saw an old boy cut his hand off with a chainsaw cutting back brush back of the 
Cumberland when I was fishing with my Daddy. Like to have bled to death right there. 
My Daddy had to use his belt. Before he got it tied off the blood came like that, with the 
pulse. My Daddy got him to the hospital in his car, like to saved his life. He'd had some 
training. He could save lives like that.' 

'I tell you, what still gets me is we was so drunk we didn't even somehow take it 
seriously, because everything seemed like a movie when I got real drunk. I still wish 
we'd thought to take him to the hospital right away. We could of piled him in. He wasn't 
dead yet even though he didn't look good. We didn't even lay him down, we got this 
idea, one of the guys started walking him around. We all walked him around in circles 
like some kind of O.D., thought if we could keep him walking til the wagon came he'd be 
OK. By the end we was dragging him, I think then he was dead. Blood all over 
everybody. The gun wasn't more than an old .25. People was yelling at us to pile him in 
and take him to the hospital, but we'd got this walking-him-around idea into our heads, 
to hold him up and walk him in circles, the girl's screaming and trying to put her 
stockings on and we're yelling to the guy that'd shot him how we were going to off with 
his map and so on and so forth, till the keep called an ambulance and they came and he 
was dead as a stick.' 

'Gately that's really bad.' 

'Why are you even up, don't have to work.' 

'I like it when it snows real early like this. This is the best window. But you learned a 



lesson. 1 

'His name was Chuck or Chick. The one that got shot that time.' 

'Did you hear that McDade person at supper? You know how some folks have one of 
their legs shorter than the other?' 

'I don't listen to those guys' crap.' 

'It was down at the far end of the table at supper. He was telling Ken and me how he 
had a counselor when he was in Juvenile in Jamaica Plain, he had this counselor he said 
she had this condition where each leg was shorter than the other.' 

'I don't think I follow you, Joelle.' 

'Each of the woman's legs was shorter than the other.' 

'How can a leg that's shorter than the other leg have the other leg shorter than it?' 

'He was having us on. He said the point was an AA point, that it defied sense and 
explaining and you just had to accept it on faith. That creepy Randy guy with the white 
wig was backing him up with a very straight face. McDade said she walked like a 
metronome. He was making fun of us, but I still thought it was funny.' 

'Maybe tell me about this veil of yours, then, Joelle, if we're talking about defied 
sense.' 

'Waaaay out to one side. Then waaaay out to the other side.' 

'Really. Let's really interface if you're in here. How come with the veil?' 

'Bridal thing.' 

l l 

'Aspiring Muslim.' 

'I didn't mean to pry in. You can just tell me if you don't want to talk about the veil.' 

'I'm also in another fellowship, with almost four years in.' 

'U.H.I.D.' 

'It's the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. The veil is a sort of 
fellowship caparison.' 

'What's it compared to?' 

'We all wear one. Almost all of us, with some time in.' 

'But if you don't mind, how come you're in it? U.H.I.D.? How're you supposed to be 
deformed? It's nothing that sticks way out, if I can say it. Are you, like, missing 
something?' 

'There's a brief ceremony. It's a bit like giving out chips over at the Better Late Than 
Never meeting, for Varying Lengths. The new U.H.I.D.s stand and receive the veil and 
don the veil and stand there and recite that the veil they've donned is a Type and a 
Symbol, and that they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always — a day at a 
time — both in light and darkness, both in solitude and before others' gaze, and as with 
strangers so with familiar friends, even Daddies. That no mortal eye will see it 
withdrawn. That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all sight. 
Unquote.' 

l l 

'I've also got a membership card that spells out everything you could ever want to 
know, and more.' 

'Except I've asked Pat and Tommy S. and still the thing I don't get is why join a 



fellowship just to hide? I can see if somebody is like — you know, hideously — and 
they've been hiding away in the dark all their life, and they want to Come In and join a 
fellowship where everybody's equal and everybody can Identify because they all spent 
their whole life hiding also, and you join a fellowship so you can step out of the dark and 
into the group and get support and finally show yourself minus eyes or with three ti — 
arms or whatever and be accepted by people that know just what it's like, and like in AA 
they say they'll love you till you can like love yourself and accept yourself, so you don't 
care what people see or think anymore, and you can finally step out of the cage and quit 
hiding.' 

That's AA?' 

'Kind of, a little bit, I think.' 

'Well Mr. Gately what people don't get about being hideously or improbably deformed 
is that the urge to hide is offset by a gigantic sense of shame about your urge to hide. 
You're at a graduate wine-tasting party and improbably deformed and you're the object 
of stares that the people try to conceal because they're ashamed of wanting to stare, 
and you want nothing more than to hide from the covert stares, to erase your 
difference, to crawl under the tablecloth or put your face under your arm, or you pray 
for a power failure and for this kind of utter liberating equalizing darkness to descend so 
you can be reduced to nothing but a voice among other voices, invisible, equal, no 
different, hidden.' 

'Is this like this thing they talked about about people hating their faces on 
videophones?' 

'But Don you're still a human being, you still want to live, you crave connection and 
society, you know intellectually that you're no less worthy of connection and society 
than anyone else simply because of how you appear, you know that hiding yourself 
away out of fear of gazes is really giving in to a shame that is not required and that will 
keep you from the kind of life you deserve as much as the next girl, you know that you 
can't help how you look but that you are supposed to be able to help how much you 
care about how you look. You're supposed to be strong enough to exert some control 
over how much you want to hide, and you're so desperate to feel some kind of control 
that you settle for the appearance of control.' 

'Your voice gets different when you talk about this shit.' 

'What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to 
appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to 
others. You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd's visual 
meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious 
and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial struggles of 
people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that 
you're hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity. You 
take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance.' 

'Use less words.' 

'In other words you hide your hiding. And you do this out of shame, Don: you're 
ashamed of the fact that you want to hide from sight. You're ashamed of your 
uncontrolled craving for shadow. U.H.I.D.'s First Step is admission of powerlessness over 



the need to hide. U.H.I.D. allows members to be open about their essential need for 
concealment. In other words we don the veil. We don the veil and wear the veil proudly 
and stand very straight and walk briskly wherever we wish, veiled and hidden, and but 
now completely up-front and unashamed about the fact that how we appear to others 
affects us deeply, about the fact that we want to be shielded from all sight. U.H.I.D. 
supports us in our decision to hide openly.' 

'You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking. Sometimes it's like you 
don't want me to follow.' 

'Well I've got a brand-new life, just out of the wrapper, which you all say'll take some 
time to fit.' 

'So they teach you how to accept your nonacceptance, the Union, you're saying.' 

'You followed very well. You didn't need fewer words at all. If you don't mind my 
saying so, my sense is that you think you're not bright but you're not.' 

'Not bright?' 

'I put that poorly. You're not not bright. As in you're incorrect in thinking you have 
nothing upstairs.' 

'It's a self-esteem issue, then, you're seeing in me after like three days here, then. I 
feel low esteem about how I think I'm not bright enough for some people.' 

'Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would say, to illustrate the U.H.I.D. take versus an apparently 
more AA take. U.H.I.D.'d say it's fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you're not 
as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin 
to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact 
that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own 
dullness and acting as if it didn't bother you at all, pretending you didn't care whether 
others perceived you as unbright or not.' 

'This makes the front of my head hurt, trying to follow this.' 

'Well you've been up all night.' 

'Then now I have to go to my other fucking job.' 

'You're way brighter than you think, Don G., although I doubt anything anyone else 
says can get in there into the gnawed ragged place where you're afraid you're slow and 
dull.' 

'And what makes you think I think I'm not bright, unless it's you're saying it's obvious 
to anybody I'm not bright?' 

'I didn't mean to pry. Just tell me if you don't want to speak to someone you barely 
know about it.' 

'Now you're being sarcastic on what I said before.' 

l l 

'I got kicked off of football my tenth-grade year for flunking English.' 

'You played American football?' 

'I was good til I got kicked off. They gave me a tutor and I still flunked.' 

'I used to twirl a baton at halftimes. I went to a special camp six summers running.' 

# f 

'But a lot of the forms of self-hatred there is no veil for. U.H.I.D.'s taught a lot of us to 
be grateful that there's at least a veil for our form.' 'So the veil's a way to not hide it.' 



'To hide openly, is more like it. 1 

'I'm already seeing it's very different from the drug-recovery agenda, the AA and NA 
program.' 

'Can I ask how you're deformed?' 

'The best is when the sun's coming up right through the snow and everything looks so 
white.' 

l l 

'I almost forgot why I came on in, that that Kate girl said Ken E. like to get killed by 
some son of a bitch last night at that Waltham NA thing and they want somebody to tell 
Johnette not to make them go back again if they don't want.' 

'One is Kate and Ken can talk for themselves with Johnette and I don't need to pry in 
and you sure don't need to pry in and rescue nobody else. Two is you're all of a sudden 
talking different again, and when you were talking about the veil you didn't sound like 
you to me. And three is don't think I can't see you're coming out sideways all over the 
place about when I asked can I ask what deformity you're not hiding the fact that you're 
hiding under that thing. The Staff part of me wants to say if you don't want to answer it 
just say so, but don't try and go around the side and think you can distract me into 
forgetting I asked it.' 

'The U.H.I.D. in me would say you're trapped in shame about the shame, in response, 
and that the shame-circle keeps you from really being present for your Staff job, Don. 
You're more bugged by the possibility that I'm treating you as unbright and distractable 
than you are about a resident's inability to come right out and openly exercise her right 
to refuse to answer an incredibly private and drug-unrelated question.' 

'And now she's back to talking like a fucking English teacher again. But ignore that. 
That's not the point. Look at how you're trying to get our dialogue all distracted up in 
shame and me again instead of saying Yes or No to me asking Will you tell me what 
you're missing behind that veil.' 

'Oh you're good at hiding Mr. G. you're good. The minute we start to poke at any 
inadequacies you're ashamed of, see, you drop behind your own protective mask of 
House Staff and start probing areas that you now know I can't bring myself to be open 
about — since you got me to tell you all about U.H.I.D.'s philosophy of hiding — so that 
your own sense of inadequacy gets either buried or used as a backlight to illuminate my 
own inability to be open and straightforward. The best defense is a good offense isn't it 
Mr. Football Player.' 

'Aspirin-time, now, with all the words. You win. Go watch the snow come down 
someplace else.' 

'The thing is, Mr. Staff, I've already just completely opened up about my shame and 
my inability to be open and straightforward about this. You're exposing something I've 
already held up to view. It's your shame about being ashamed of what you're afraid 
might be seen as a lack of brightness that's getting to stay buried under this dead horse 
of my deformity that you're trying to whip.' 

'And then meantime you still didn't say a straight-on Yes or No to Can I ask what's up 
behind there, are you cross-eyed or have a like beard, or do you have like really bad skin 
under there even though your skin everyplace that isn't hidden looks —' 



'Looks what? My unhidden skin is what?' 

'See, this is you keep trying to sidetrack instead of just saying No to Can I ask. Just say 
No. Try it. It's OK. Nothing bad'll happen. Just try it straight out.' 

'Perfect. You were going to say every visible expanse of my skin is just drop-dead 
creamy perfect.' 

'Jesus, why am I even here? Why don't you just interface with yourself if you think you 
know all my issues and shames and everything I'm going to say? Why not take the 
suggestion to say No? Why come in here? Did I come to you, to talk? Was I just sitting in 
here trying to keep awake and do the Log and getting ready to go mop shit with a shoe- 
freak and did or didn't you waltz on in and sit down and come to me?' 

'Don, I'm perfect. I'm so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their 
fucking mind. Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else and don't want to 
look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if 
they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. 
Everything. Like I'm the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with 
perfection.' 

'Now with the sarcasm.' 

'I am so beautiful I am deformed.' 

'Now with the nonrespectful acting-out of treating me like I'm stupid for trying to get 
her to walk through her fear to give a straight-out No, which she isn't willing.' 

'I am deformed with beauty.' 

'You want to see my professional Staff face here's my Staff face. I nod and smile, I 
treat you like somebody I have to humor by nodding and smiling, and behind the face 
I'm going with my finger around and around my temple like What a fucking yutz, like 
Where's the net.' 

'Believe what you want. I'm powerless over what you believe, I know.' 

'See the professional Staffer writing in the Meds Log: "Six extra-strong-kind aspirin for 
Staff after sarcasm and sideways refusal to walk through fears and sarcastic acting out 
by newcomer who thinks she knows everybody else's issues.' 

'What position did you play?' 

'...that the Staffer wonders how come she's even here in treatment then, if she knows 
so much.' 


It is starting to get quietly around Ennet House that Randy Lenz has found his own 
dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues that beset the 
drug addict in his first few months of abstinence. 

The nightly AA or NA meetings get out at 2130h. or 2200h., and curfew isn't until 
2330, and every Ennet resident mostly carpools back to the House with whatever 
residents have cars, or some of them go out in cars for massive doses of ice cream and 
coffee. 

Lenz is one of the ones with a car, a heavily modified old Duster, white with what look 
like 12-gauge blasts of rust over the wheelwells, with oversized rear tires and an engine 
so bored-out for heavy-breathing speed it's a small miracle he still has a license. 



Lenz sets loafer one outside Ennet House only after sunset, and then only in his white 
toupee and mustache and billowing tail-collared topcoat, and goes only to the required 
nightly meetings; and the thing is that he'll never drive his own car to the meetings. He 
always thumbs along with somebody else and adds to the crowd in their car. And then 
he always has to sit in the northernmost seat in the car, for some reason, using a 
compass and napkin to plot out what the night's major direction of travel'll be and then 
figuring out what seat he'll have to be in to stay maximally north. Both Gately and 
Johnette Foltz have had to make a nightly routine of telling the other residents that Lenz 
is teaching them valuable patience and tolerance. 

But then after the meeting lets out, Lenz never thumbs back with anybody. He always 
walks back to the House after meetings. He says it's that he needs the air, what with 
being shut up in the crowded House all day and avoiding doors and windows, hiding 
from both sides of the Justice System. 

And then one Wednesday after the Brookline Young People's AA up Beacon by 
Chestnut Hill it takes him right up to 2329 to get home, almost two hours, even though 
it's like a half-hour walk and even Burt Smith did it in September in under an hour; and 
Lenz gets back just at curfew and without saying a word to anybody books right up to his 
and Glynn's and Day's room. Polo topcoat flapping and powdered wig shedding powder, 
and sweating, and making an unacceptable classy-shoed racket running up the men's 
side's carpetless stairs, which Gately didn't have time to go up and address because of 
having to deal with Bruce Green and Amy J. separately both missing curfew. 

Lenz abroad in the urban night, solo, on almost a nightly basis, sometimes carrying a 
book. 

Residents who seem to make it a point to go off alone a lot are red-flagged at 
Thursday's All-Staff Meeting in Pat's office as clear relapse-risks. But they've pulled spot- 
urines on Lenz five times, and the three times the lab didn't fuck up the E.M.l.T. test 
Lenz's urine's come back clean. Gately's basically decided to just let Lenz be. Some 
newcomers' Higher Power is like Nature, the sky, the stars, the cold-penny tang of the 
autumn air, who knows. 

So Lenz abroad in the night, unaccompanied and disguised, apparently strolling. He's 
mastered the streets' cockeyed grid around Enfield-Brighton-Allston. South Cambridge 
and East Newton and North Brookline and the hideous Spur. He takes side-streets home 
from meetings, mostly. Low-rent dumpster-strewn residential streets and Projects' 
driveways that become alleys, gritty passages behind stores and dumpsters and 
warehouses and loading docks and Empire Waste Displacement's mongo hangars, etc. 
His loafers have a wicked shine and make an elegant dancerly click as he walks along 
with his hands in his pockets and open coat flared wide, scanning. He scans for several 
nights before he even becomes aware of why or what he might be scanning for. 224 He 
moves nightly through urban-animal territory. Liberated housecats and hard-core strays 
ooze in and out of shadows, rustle in dumpsters, fuck and fight with hellish noises all 
around him as he walks, senses very sharp in the downscale night. You got your rats, 
your mice, your stray dogs with tongues hanging and countable ribs. Maybe the odd 
feral hamster and/or raccoon. Everything slinky and furtive after sunset. Also non-stray 
dogs that clank their chains or bay or lunge, when he goes by yards with dogs. He 



prefers to move north but will move east or west on the streets' good sides. His shoes' 
fine click precedes him by several hundred meters on cement of varying texture. 

Sometimes near drainage pipes he sees serious rats, or sometimes near cat-free 
dumpsters. The first conscious thing he did was a rat that this one time he came on 
some rats in a wide W-E alley by the loading dock out behind the Svelte Nail Co. just east 
of Watertown on N. Harvard St. What night was that. It'd been coming back from East 
Watertown, which meant More Will Be Revealed NA with Glynn and Diehl instead of St. 
E.'s Better Late Than Never AA with the rest of the House's herd, so a Monday. So on a 
Monday he'd been strolling through this one alley, his steps echoing trebled back off the 
cement sides of the docks and the north left wall he hugged, scanning without knowing 
what he was scanning for. Up ahead there was the Stegosaurus-shape of a Svelte Co. 
dumpster as versus your lower slimmer E.W.D.-type dumpster. There were dry skulky 
sounds issuing from the dumpster's shadow. He hadn't consciously picked anything up. 
The alley's surface was coming apart and Lenz barely broke his dancerly stride picking a 
kilo-sized chunk of tar-shot concrete. It was rats. Two big rats were going at a half-eaten 
wiener in a mustardy paper tray from a Lunchwagon in a recess between the north wall 
and the dumpster's barge-hitch. Their hideous pink tails were poking out into the alley's 
dim light. They didn't move as Randy Lenz came up behind them on the toes of his 
loafers. Their tails were meaty and bald and like twitched back and forth, twitching in 
and out of the dim yellow light. The big flat-top chunk came down on most of one rat 
and a bit of the other rat. There'd been godawful twittering squeaks, but the major hit 
on the one rat also made a very solid and significant noise, some aural combination of a 
tomato thrown at a wall and a pocketwatch getting clocked with a hammer. Material 
came out of the rat's anus. The rat lay on its side in a very bad medical way, its tail 
twitching and anus material and there were little beads of blood on its whiskers that 
looked black, the beads, in the sodium security-lights along the Svelte Nail Co. roof. Its 
side heaved; its back legs were moving like it was running, but this rat wasn't going 
anywhere. The other rat had vanished under the dumpster, dragging its rear region. 
There were more chunks of dismantled street lying all over. When Lenz brought another 
down on the head of the rat he consciously discovered what he liked to say at the 
moment of issue-resolution was: 'There.' 

Demapping rats became Lenz's way of resolving internal-type issues for the first 
couple weeks of it, walking home in the verminal dark. 

Don Gately, House chef and shopper, buys these huge econo-size boxes of Hefty 225 
bags that get stored under the kitchen sink for whoever's got Trash for their weekly 
chore. Ennet House generates serious waste. 

So after vermin started to get a little ho-hum and insignificant, Lenz starts cabbaging a 
Hefty bag out from under the sink and taking it with him to meetings and walking back 
home with it. He keeps a trashbag neatly folded in an inside pocket of his topcoat, a 
billowing top-collared Lauren-Polo model he loves and uses a daily lint-roller on. He also 
takes along a little of the House's Food-Bank tunafish in a Ziploc baggie in another 
pocket, which your average drug addict has expertise in rolling baggies into a cylinder so 
they're secure and odor-free. 

The Ennet House residents call Hefty bags 'Irish Luggage' — even McDade — it's a 



street-term. 

Randy Lenz found that if he could get an urban cat up close enough with some 
outstretched tuna he could pop the Hefty bag over it and scoop up from the bottom so 
the cat was in the air in the bottom of the bag, and then he could tie the bag shut with 
the complimentary wire twist-tie that comes with each bag. He could put the closed bag 
down next to the vicinity's northernmost wall or fence or dumpster and light a gasper 
and hunker down up next to the wall to watch the wide variety of changing shapes the 
bag would assume as the agitated cat got lower on air. The shapes got more and more 
violent and twisted and mid-air with the passage of a minute. After it stopped assuming 
shapes Lenz would dab his butt with a spitty finger to save the rest for later and get up 
and untie the twist-tie and look inside the bag and go: 'There.' The 'There' turned out to 
be crucial for the sense of brisance and closure and resolving issues of impotent rage 
and powerless fear that like accrued in Lenz all day being trapped in the northeastern 
portions of a squalid halfway house all day fearing for his life, Lenz felt. 

There evolved for Lenz a certain sportsman's hierarchy of types of cats and 
neighborhoods of types of your abroad cats; and he becomes a connoisseur of cats the 
same way a deep-sea sportsman knows the fish-species that fight most fiercely and 
excitatingly for their marine lives. The best and most fiercely alive cats could usually 
claw their way out of a Hefty bag, though, which created this conundrum where the 
ones most worth watching assuming bagged shapes were the ones Lenz risked maybe 
not getting his issues resolved on. Watching a spike-furred hissing cat run twisting away 
still half wrapped in a plastic bag made Lenz admire the cat's fighting spirit but still feel 
unresolved. 

So the next stage is Lenz gives Ms. Charlotte Treat or Ms. Hester Thrale some of his 
own $ when they go down to the Palace Spa or Father/Son to buy smokes or LifeSavers 
and has them start to get him special Hefty Steel-Sak 226 trashbags, fiber-reinforced for 
your especially sharp or uncooperative waste needs, described by Ken E. as 'Irish 
Guccis,' extra resilient and a businesslike gunmetal-gray in tone. Lenz has such a panoply 
of strange compulsive habits that a request for SteelSaks barely raises a brow on 
anybody. 

And then he doubles them, the special reinforced bags, and employs industrial-growth 
pipe-cleaners as twist-ties, and then now the grittiest most salutary cats make the 
doubled bags assume all manners of wickedly abstract twisting shapes, even sometimes 
moving the closed bags a couple dozen m. down the alley in a haphazard hopping-like 
fashion, until finally the cat runs out of gas and resolves itself and Lenz's issues into one 
nightly shape. 

Lenz's interval of choice for this is the interval 2216h. to 2226h. He doesn't consciously 
know why this interval. Anchovies turn out to be even more effective than tuna. A 
Program of Attraction, he recalls coolly, strolling along. His northern routes back to the 
House are restricted by the priority to keep Brighton Best Savings Bank's rooftop digital 
Time and Temperature display in view as much as possible. B.B.S.B. displays both EST 
and Greenwich Mean, which Lenz approves of. The liquid-crystal data sort of melts 
upward into view on the screen and then disappears from the bottom up and is 
replaced by new data. Mr. Doony R. Glynn said at the House's Community Meeting 



Monday once that one time in B.S. 1989 A.D. after he'd done a reckless amount of a 
hallucinogen he'd refer to only as 'The Madame' he'd gone around for several 
subsequent weeks under a Boston sky that instead of a kindly curved blue dome with 
your clouds and your stars and sun was a flat square coldly Euclidian grid with black axes 
and a thread-fine reseau of lines creating grid-type coordinates, the whole grid the same 
color as a D.E.C. HD viewer-screen when the viewer's off, that sort of dead deepwater 
gray-green, with the DOW Ticker running up one side of the grid and the NIKEI Index 
running down the other, and the Time and Celsius Temp to like serious decimal points 
flashing along the bottom axis of the sky's screen, and whenever he'd go to a real clock 
or get a Herald and check the like DOW the skygrid would turn out to have been totally 
accurate; and that several unbroken weeks of this sky overhead had sent Glynn off first 
to his mother's Stoneham apartment's fold-out couch and then into Waltham's 
Metropolitan State Hospital for a month of Haldol 227 and tapioca, to get out from under 
the empty-grid accurate sky, and says it makes his ass wet to this day to even think 
about the grid-interval; but Lenz had thought it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital 
timepiece. And also between 2216 and 2226 the ATHSCME giant fans off up at the 
Sunstrand Plaza within earshot were typically shut off for daily de-linting, and it was 
quiet except for the big Ssshhh of a whole urban city's vehicular traffic, and maybe the 
odd E.W.D. airborne deliverer catapulted up off Concavityward, its little string of lights 
arcing northeast; and of course also sirens, both the Eurotrochaic sirens of ambulances 
and the regular U.S.-sounding sirens of the city's very Finest, Protecting and Serving, 
keeping the citizenry at bay; and the winsome thing about sirens in the urban night is 
that unless they're right up close where the lights bathe you in red-blue-red they always 
sound like they're terribly achingly far away, and receding, calling to you across an 
expanding gap. Either that or they're on your ass. No middle distance with sirens, Lenz 
reflects, walking along and scanning. 

Glynn hadn't come right out and said Euclidian, but Lenz had gotten the picture all 
right. Glynn had thin hair and an invariant three-day growth of gray stubble and 
diverticulitis that made him stoop somewhat over, and remaining physique-type issues 
from a load of bricks falling on his head from a Workers Comp scam gone rye that 
included crossed eyes that Lenz overheard the veiled girl Joe L. tell Clenette Henderson 
and Didi Neaves the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week 
and see both Sundays. 

Lenz has gotten high on organic cocaine two or three, maybe half a dozen times tops, 
secretly, since he came into Ennet House in the summer, just enough times to keep him 
from going totally out of his fucking mind, utilizing lines from the private emergency 
stash he kept in a kind of rectangular bunker razor-bladed out of three hundred or so 
pages of Bill James's gargantuan Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford 
Lectures on Natural Religion. Such totally occasional Substance-ingestions in a rundown 
sloppy-clocked House where he's cooped up and under terrible stress all day every day, 
hiding from threats from two different legal directions, with, upstairs at all times, calling 
to him, a 20-gram stash from the under-reported South End two-way attempted scam 
whose very bad luck had forced him into hiding in squalor and rooming with the likes of 
fucking Geoffrey D. — cocaine-ingestion this occasional and last-resort is such a marked 



reduction of Use & Abuse for Lenz that it's a bonerfied miracle and clearly constitutes as 
much miraculous sobriety as total abstinence would be for another person without 
Lenz's unique sensitivities and psychological makeup and fucking intolerable daily 
stresses and difficulty unwinding, and he accepts his monthly chips with a clear 
conscience and a head unmuddled by doubting: he knows he's sober. He's smart about 
it: he's never ingested cocaine on his solo walks home from meetings, which is where 
the Staff'd expect him to ingest if he was going to ingest. And never in Ennet House 
itself, and only once in the forbidden #7 across the roadlet. And anybody with half a clue 
can beat an E.M.l.T. urine-screen: a cup of lemon juice or vinegar down the hatch'll turn 
the lab's reading into gibberish; a trace of powdered bleach on the fingertips and let the 
stream play warmly over the fingertips on its way into the cup while you banter with 
Don G. A Texas catheter's a pain to get piss for and put on, plus the obscene size of the 
thing's receptacle for his Unit gives Lenz inadequacy-issues, and he's only used it twice, 
both times when Johnette F. took the urine and he could embarrass her into turning 
away. Lenz owns a Texas Cathy from his last halfway house in Quincy, in what Lenz 
recalls as the Year of the Maytag Quietmaster. 

And then it turned out, when a cat aggrieved Lenz by scratching his wrist in a 
particularly hostile fashion on the way into the receptacle, that doubled Hefty SteelSaks 
were such quality-reinforced products they could hold something razor-clawed and 
frantically in-motion and still survive a direct swung hit against a NO PARKING sign or a 
telephone pole without splitting open, even when what was inside split nicely open; and 
so that technique got substituted around United Nations Day, because even though it 
was too quick and less meditative it allowed Randy Lenz to take a more active role in the 
process, and the feeling of (temporary, nightly) issues-resolution was more definitive 
when Lenz could swing a twisting ten-kilo burden hard against a pole and go: 'There,' 
and hear a sound. On banner nights the doubled bag would continue for a brief period 
of time to undergo a subtle flux of smaller, more subtle and connoisseur-oriented 
shapes, even after the melony sound of hard impact, along with further smaller sounds. 

Then it was discovered that resolving them directly inside the yards and porches of the 
people that owned them provided more adrenal excitation and thus more sense of what 
Bill James one time called a Catharsis of resolving, which Lenz felt he could agree. A 
small can of oil in its own little baggie, for squeaky gates. But because SteelSak 
trashbags — and then also tunafish mixed with anchovies and Raid ant poison from 
behind the Ennet residents' fridge — caused too much resultant noise to allow for 
lighting a gasper and hunkering down to meditatively watch, Lenz developed the habit 
of setting the resolution in motion and then booking on out of the yard into the urban 
night, his Polo topcoat billowing, hurdling fences and running over the hoods of cars and 
etc. For a period during the two-week interval of give-them-poison-tuna-and-run Lenz 
had brief recourse to a small Caldor-brand squeeze-bottle of kerosene, plus of course 
his lighter; but a Wednesday night on which the alight cat ran (as alight cats will, like 
hell) but ran after Lenz, seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on 
his tail and not only making an unacceptable attention-calling racket but also illuminat¬ 
ing Lenz to the scopophobic view of passing homes until it finally decided to drop to the 
ground and expire and smolder thereupon — Lenz considered this his only really close 



call, and took an enormous and partly non-north route home, with every siren sounding 
up-close and on his personal ass, and barely got in by 2330h., and ran right up to the 3- 
Man room. This was the night Lenz had to have another recourse to the hollowed-out 
cavity in his Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion after 
just beating curfew home, which who wouldn't need a bit of an unwinder after a 
stressful close-call-type situation with a flaming cat chasing you and screaming in a way 
that made porch lights go on all up and down Sumner Blake Rd.; except but instead of 
an unwinder the couple or few lines of uncut Bing proved to be on this occasion an un- 
unwinder — which happens, sometimes, depending on one's like spiritual condition 
when ingesting it through a rolled dollar bill off the back of the John in the men's can — 
and Lenz barely made it through switching his car's parking spot at 2350h. before the 
verbal torrent started, and after lights-out had only gotten up to age eight in the oral 
autobiography that followed in the 3-Man when Geoff D. threatened to go get Don G. 
and have Lenz forcibly stifled, and Lenz was scared to go downstairs to find somebody 
to listen and so for the rest of the night he had to lie there in the dark, mute, with his 
mouth twisting and writhing — it always twisted and writhed on the times the Bing 
proved to be a rev-upper instead of a rough-edge-smoother — and pretending to be 
asleep, with phosphenes like leaping flaming shapes dancing behind his quivering lids, 
listening to Day's moist gurgles and Glynn's apnea and thinking that each siren abroad 
out there in the urban city was meant for him and coming closer, with Day's illuminated 
watchface in his fucking tableside drawer instead of out where anybody with some 
stress and anxiety could check the time from time to time. 

So after the incident with the flaming cat from hell and before Halloween Lenz had 
moved on and up to the Browning X444 Serrated he even had a shoulder-holster for, 
from his previous life Out There. The Browning X444 has a 25-cm. overall length, with a 
burl-walnut handle with a brass butt-cap and a point Lenz'd sharpened the clip out of 
when he got it and a single-edge Bowie-style blade with ,1-mm. serrations that Lenz 
owns a hone for and tests by dry-shaving a little patch of his tan forearm, which he 
loves. 

The Browning X444, combined with blocks of Don Gately's highly portable cornflake- 
garnish meatloaf, were for canines, which your urban canines tended to be nonferal and 
could be found within the confinement of their pet-owners' fenced yards on a regularer 
basis than the urban-cat species, and who are less suspicious of food and, though more 
of a personal-injury risk to approach, do not scratch the hand that feeds them. 

For when the dense square of meatloaf is taken out and unwrapped from the Ziploc 
and proffered from the edgelet of yard out past the fence by the sidewalk, the dog at 
issue invariably stops with the barking and/or lunging and its nose flares and it becomes 
totally uncynical and friendly and comes to the end of its chain or the fence Lenz stands 
behind and makes interested noises and if Lenz holds the meat-item just up out of reach 
the dog if its rope or chain will permit it it'll go up on the hind legs and sort of play the 
fence with its front paws, jumping eagerly, as Lenz dangles the meat. 

Day had had some Recovery-Issue paperback he was reading that Lenz had a look at 
one P.M. in their room when Day was downstairs with Ewell and Erdedy telling each 
other their windbagathon stories, lying on Day's mattress with his shoes on and trying to 



fart into the mattress as much as possible: some line in the book had arrested Lenz's 
attention: something about the more basically Powerless an individual feels, the more 
the likelihood for the propensity for violent acting-out — and Lenz found the obser¬ 
vation to be sound. 

The only serious challenge to using the Browning X444 is that Lenz has to make sure to 
get around behind the dog before he cuts the dog's throat, because the bleeding is far- 
reaching in its intensity, and Lenz is now on his second R. Lauren topcoat and third pair 
of dark wool slacks. 

Then once near Halloween in an alley behind Blanchard's Liquors off Allston's Union 
Square Lenz comes across a street drunk in a chewed-looking old topcoat in the 
deserted alley taking a public leak against the side of a dumpster, and Lenz envisualizes 
the old guy both cut and on fire and dancing jaggedly around hitting at himself while 
Lenz goes 'There/ but that's as close as Lenz comes to that kind of level of resolution; 
and it's maybe to his credit that he's a little off his psychic feed for a few days after that 
close call, and inactive with pets circa 2216h. 

Lenz has nothing much against his newer fellow resident Bruce Green, and when one 
Sunday night after the White Flag Green asks can he walk along with Lenz on the walk 
back after the Our Father Lenz says Whatever and lets Green walk with him, and is 
inactive during this night's 2216 interval as well. Except after a couple nights of Green 
strolling home along with him, first from the White Flag and then from St. Columbkill's 
on Tuesday and a double 1900-2200 shot of St. E.'s Sharing and Caring NA and then BYP 
on Wed., Green following him around like a terrier from mtg. to mtg. and then home, it 
begins to like emerge on Lenz that Bruce G. is starting to treat this walking-through-the- 
urban-P.M.-with-Randy-Lenz thing as like a regular fucking thing, and Lenz starts to 
Jones about it, the unresolved Powerless Rage issues that the thing is now he's gotten 
so he's used to resolving them on a more or less nightly basis, so that being unable to be 
freely alone to be active with the Browning X444 or even a SteelSak during the 2216- 
2226h. interval causes this pressure to build up like almost a Withdrawal-grade 
pressure. But on the other side of the hand, walking with Green has its positive aspects 
as well. Like that Green doesn't complain about lengthy detours to keep a mainly 
north/northeastern orientation to the walks when possible. And Lenz enjoys a 
sympathetic and listening ear to have around; he has numerous aspects and 
experiences to mull over and issues to organize and mull, and (like many people 
hardwired for organic stimulants) talking is sort of Lenz's way of thinking. And but most 
of the ears of the other residents at Ennet House are not only unsympathetic but are 
attached to great gaping flapping oral mouths which keep horning into the conversation 
with the mouths' own opinions and issues and aspects — most of the residents are the 
worst listeners Lenz has ever seen. Bruce Green, on the hand's positive side, hardly says 
anything. Bruce Green is quiet the way certain stand-up type guys you want to have 
there with you beside you if a beef starts going down are quiet, like self-contained. Yet 
Green is not so quiet and unresponding that it's like with some silent people where you 
start to wonder if he's listening with a sympathizing ear or if he's really drifting around 
in his own self-oriented thoughts and not even listening to Lenz, etc., treating Lenz like a 
radio you can tune in or out. Lenz has a keen antenna for people like this and their stock 



is low on his personal exchange. Bruce Green inserts low affirmatives and 'No shit's and 
'Fucking-A's, etc., at just the right places to communicate his attentions to Lenz. Which 
Lenz admires. 

So it's not like Lenz just wants to blow Green off and tell him to go peddle his papers 
and let him the fuck alone after Meetings so he can solo. It would have to be handled in 
a more diplomatic fashion. Plus Lenz finds himself nervous at the prospect of offending 
Green. It's not like he's scared of Green in terms of physically. And it's not like he's 
concerned Green would be the Ewell- or Day-type you have to stressfully worry about 
maybe going and ratting out on Lenz's place of whereabouts to the Finest and 
everything like that. Green has a strong air of non-rat about him which Lenz admires. So 
it's not like he's frightened to blow Green off; it's more like very tense and tightly 
wound. 

Plus it agitates Lenz that he has the feeling that it really wouldn't be any big deal to 
Green that much one way or the other, and that Lenz feels like he's spending all this 
stress tensely worrying about his side of something that Green would barely think about 
for more than a couple seconds, and it enrages Lenz that he can know in his head that 
the tense worry about how to diplomatize Green into leaving him alone is unnecessary 
and a waste of time and tension and yet still not be able to stop worrying about it, 
which all only increases the sense of Powerlessness that Lenz is impotent to resolve with 
his Browning and meatloaf as long as Green continues to walk home with him. 

And the schizoid cats with clotted fur that lurk around Ennet House cringing and 
neurotic and afraid of their own shadow are too risky, for the female residents are 
always formulating attachments to them. And Pat M.'s Golden Retrievers would be 
tattlemount to legal suicide. On a Saturday c. 2221h., Lenz found a miniature bird that 
had fallen out of some nest and was sitting bald and pencil-necked on the lawn of Unit 
#3 flapping ineffectually, and went in with Green and ducked Green and went back 
outside to #3's lawn and put the thing in a pocket and went in and put it down the 
garbage disposal in the kitchen sink of the kitchen, but still felt largely impotent and 
unresolved. 

Except for Pat Montesian's bay-windowed front office and the House Manager's 
phone-booth-sized back office and the two live-in Staff bedrooms down in the 
basement, none of the doors inside Ennet House have locks, for predictable reasons. 



EARLY NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


The only bona fide blackmailable thing about Rodney Tine, Chief, U.S. Office of 
Unspecified Services: his special metric ruler. In a locked drawer of his bathroom 
cabinets at home on Connecticut Ave. NW in the District is kept a special metric ruler, 
and Tine measures his penis every A.M., like clockwork; has since twelve; still does. Plus 
a special telescoping travelling model of the ruler he travels with, for on-the-road-A.M.- 
penis-measurement. President Gentle has no N.S.A. 228 as such. Tine's in metro Boston 
because of the N.S. implications of what they'd first come to Unspecified Services about 
two summers past, both the head of D.E.A. and the Chair of the Academy of Digital Arts 
and Sciences, now both here standing on one foot and then the other and twidgelling 
the brims of their hats. This unwatchable underground Entertainment-cartridge that at 
first seemed to be just popping haphazardly up in random locales: a film with certain 
he's given to understand from briefings quote 'qualities' such that whoever saw it 
wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, and then again, and so on. It had 
popped up in Berkeley NCA, in the home of a film-scholar and his male companion, 
neither of whom had appeared for appointments for days; and now lost to meaningful 
human activity henceforward, by all appearances, were the scholar and companion, the 
two cops dispatched to the Berkeley home, the six cops dispatched after the two cops 
never followed up their Code-Five, the watch sergeant and partner dispatched after 
them — seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in all, until the 
lethality of whatever they'd caught sight of presented itself with enough clarity for 
somebody to think to go around back and kill the Berkeley home's power. The 
Entertainment had popped up in New Iberia LA. Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds of the 
attendees of an avant-garde film festival in Arizona State U.'s Entertainment Studies 
amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building's whole grid. J. Gentle 
had been apprised about the thing only after it had popped up and taken out a 
diplomatically immune Near Eastern medical attache and a dozen incidentals here in 
Boston MA late last spring. These persons now all in wards. Docile and continent but 
blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed. Tine had toured a ward. The 
persons' lives' meanings had collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity or 
connection could hold their attention. Possessed of roughly the mental/ spiritual 
energies of a moth, now, according to a diagnostician out of C.D.C. The Berkeley 
cartridge had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron-microscopy toss of 
which had revealed flannel fibers. The D.E.A. had lost four field researchers and a 
consultant before they'd bowed to the intractable problems involved in trying to have 
somebody view the confiscated Tempe cartridge and articulate the thing's lethal 
charms. The strongest possible language had been necessary to restrain a certain 



Famous Crooner from attempting a personal review of the thing's qualities. Neither 
C.D.C. nor the entertainment pros wanted any part of any controlled-viewing tests. 
Three members of the Academy of D.A.S. had received unlabelled copies in the mail, 
and the one who'd actually sat down to have a look now needed a receptacle under his 
chin at all times. Reports of the thing popping up yet again in metro Boston MA remain 
unsubstantiated. Tine's been dispatched here in part to coordinate substantiation. 
There's also the special pocket-Franklin-Planner-sized chart he charts the daily A.M. 
penis-measurement in, daily, though to the uninitiated the little leather notebook could 
look like almost anything statistical at all. By now several U.S.O. test-subjects, volunteers 
from the federal and military penal systems, have been lost in attempts to produce a 
description of the cartridge's contents. The Tempe and New Iberia cartridges are in 
custody, vaulted. A sociopathic and mentally retarded Lance Corporal at Leavenworth, 
strapped down with electrode appliques and headset-recorder, was able to report that 
the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled 
woman going through a large building's revolving doors and catching a glimpse of 
someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil 
billow, before the subject's mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point 
where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn't divert his attention 
from the Entertainment. Tine's staff had sifted through dozens of entries before decid¬ 
ing that the intelligence community's terse little name for the allegedly enslaving 
Entertainment would be 'the samizdat.' P.E.T.s on sacrificed subjects revealed 
unexceptional wave-activity, with not near enough alpha to indicate hypnosis or 
induced dopamine-surges. Attempts to trace the matrix of the samizdat without viewing 
it — from induction on postal codes, e-microscopies on the brown padded mailers, 
immolation and chromatography on the unlabelled cartridge-cases, extensive and 
maddening interviews of those civilians exposed — place the likely dissemination-point 
someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford 
and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest. The U.S.'s Canadian Problem is U.S.O.U.S. 
Anti-Anti-O.N.A.N. Activities' Agency's 229 special province. So to speak. The possibility of 
Canadian involvement in the lethally compelling Entertainment's dissemination is what 
has brought to metro Boston Rodney Tine, his retinue, and his ruler. 



LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND 
ADULT UNDERGARMENT 


For reasons that Pemulis couldn't for the life of him. Ortho Stice seemed to be in there 
in Dr. Dolores Rusk's office, interfacing with Dr. Rusk well after regular hours. Pemulis 
paused at the door on his way by. 

'— nical assessment, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that 
your presenting maladjustment. Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you're 
suffering from counterphobia.' 

'Fear of linoleum?' It was unmistakably the flat twang of The Darkness in there 
through the door's wood. 

'On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience 
magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects' relation to your 
narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency 
or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with 
absence of control.' 

'Over linoleum?' 

'My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance an 
analytic model, the types of traumas counterphobic reactions cover are almost always 
pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects' cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For example small 
children's dolls and Action-Figurines.' 

'I don't play with no goddamn Action-Figurines.' 

'GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father, the 
"military" man, with "Gl" representing at once the "General Issue" of a "weapon" the 
Oedipal child both covets and fears and a well-known medical acronym for the gastro¬ 
intestinal tract, with all the attendant anal anxieties that require repression in the 
Oedipal phase's desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote "win" the 
mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and 
phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of sexual function and 
availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal mother as image.' 

'So you're saying I'm overestimating objects?' 

'I'm saying there's a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment- 
issues who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of 
indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.' 

'I ain't omnipotent and I don't want to X no Goddamn Barbiedoll.' Then Dark's voice 
went way up and cracked as he said something about his bed. 

Dr. Rusk's office door had a nonconducting rubberized sheath on the knob, and Dr. 
Rusk's name and degrees and title, and a needlepoint sampler with a little heart inside a 
big heart and a cursive exhortation to Champion An Inner Child Today, which the little 



kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting. Pemulis, pausing by habit first at the silent 
locked infirmary door and then Rusk's bottom-crack-lit door on his way across the 
Comm.-Ad. lobby, was wearing the most insolent ensemble he could throw together. He 
wore maroon paratrooper's pants with green stovepipe stripes down the sides. The 
pants' cuffs were tucked into fuchsia socks above ancient and radically uncool Clark's 
Wallabies with dirty soles of eraserish gum. He wore an orange fake-silk turtleneck 
under an English-cut sportcoat in a purple-and-tan windowpane check. He wore naval 
shoulder-braid at the level of ensign. He wore his yachting cap, but with the bill bent up 
at a bumpkinish angle. He looked less insolent than just extremely poorly dressed, 
really. Dr. Rusk's door was cool against his ear. Jim Troeltsch had been coming down B's 
hall just as Pemulis was leaving and said Pemulis looked like a hangover. Through the 
door. Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name his 
anger Horace after his old man's late pointer that had got into some coyote bait when 
The Darkness was nine and was much missed by the whole Stice brood, back in Kansas. 
The old Wallabies were from Pemulis's older brother's incomplete public-school career 
and had boogerish little greebles of dirty gum all around the soles' perimeter. The socks 
belonged to Jennie Bash and she made it explicit she wanted them back laundered. The 
sportcoat's checked arms were several cm. too short and exposed ribbed cuffs of shiny 
orange acetate esters. 

The Community & Administration Bldg.'s downstairs was real quiet. It was like 2100h., 
supposedly mandatory Study Period, and Harde's crew had gone home but the custodial 
graveyard shift hadn't come on yet. Pemulis moved noiselessly NE-SW across the lobby's 
shag. Except for lines of lamplight from under a couple doors the E.T.A. lobby was pitch- 
black, and the outer Academy doors locked. There was an odd vehicular shape near the 
north wall's trophy case that Pemulis didn't pause to investigate. He lifted up slightly to 
keep the little SW hall's door from squeaking as he opened it and entered the 
administrative reception area, snapping his fingers softly to himself. A loose music 
played in his head. Tavis's reception area was empty and dim, the wallpaper's clouds 
now stormy-dark. It wasn't totally quiet. Light came from Mrs. Inc's doorway and from 
the crack under Tavis's inner door. Lateral Alice Moore had gone home. Pemulis 
activated her Third Rail and played with her chair as he made a very quick survey of the 
material on her desk. Activating the P.A. mike was out of all question. Two of her five 
drawers were still locked. Pemulis scanned behind him and popped another breath mint 
and sat quietly for a moment as Moore's chair slid back and forth along the rail, his 
fingers in a steeple under his nose, considering. 

Light shone from the crack of Tavis's inner door because the outer door stood open. 
Pemulis didn't even have to put any kind of ear to the wood of the inside door. He could 
hear the hiss and high-speed grind of Tavis's StairBlaster, and Tavis's breathless 
recessive voice. You could tell there was nobody else in there. You could tell Tavis had 
no shirt on and an E.T.A. towel around his neck and his hair a sweaty curtain down one 
side of his little head as he ran to keep up with what reminded everybody of a 
Satanishly-possessed Filene's escalator. He was exhorting himself in a kind of fast 
rhythmic chant that sounded to Pemulis like either Total worry total worry' or 'No don't 



worry no don't worry 1 and c. Pemulis could envision Tavis's round belly and little titties 
of fat bouncing with the action of the StairBlaster. You could hear the sudden muffling 
when he probably brought the towel up to dab at his slanted mustache. Tavis's 
doorknob had no insulating rubber sheath, Pemulis noticed. 

Pemulis's ensemble's belt was a plastic thing with chintzy fake-Navajo beading, 
purchased by little Chip Sweeny at one of last fall's WhataBurger's souvenir stands and 
subsequently transferred to Pemulis during a Big Buddy tennis-as-game-of-chance 
exercise. The beading-patterns were in Gila-monster orange and black, the orange a 
different shade than Pemulis's turtleneck. 

He could never resist biting down once a mint'd melted to a certain size and texture. 

The doorless Dean of Academic Affairs's office was a blazing rectangle of light. The 
light didn't spill very far into the reception area, however. At close-range, sounds issued 
from the office, but not exactly words. Pemulis checked his fly and snapped his fingers 
under his own nose and assumed a businesslike stride and rapped firmly on the doorless 
jamb without breaking stride. The heavier blue shag of the office itself slowed him down 
a bit. He stopped once he was all the way in. 18-A John Wayne and Hal's Mumsly- 
Wumsly were both in the front of the office. They were about maybe two meters apart. 
The room was lit overhead and by four standing lamps. The seminar table and chairs 
cast a complicated shadow. Two homemade pompoms of shredded paper and what 
looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis racquets were on the seminar 
table, which was otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light 
shoulderpads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else. He 
was down in the classic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc's incredibly tall and well- 
preserved mother Dr. Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and-white cheerleader's 
outfit and had one of deLint's big brass whistles hanging around her neck. She was 
blowing on the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no 
whistling sound resulted. She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing 
near-splits on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while 
Wayne produced the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made 
rather a show of pushing the bumpkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, 
blinking. Mrs. Inc was the only one looking at him. 

'I probably won't even waste everybody's time asking if I'm interrupting,' Pemulis said. 

Mrs. Inc seemed frozen in place. Her one hand was still up in the air, fine fingers 
splayed. Wayne craned his neck to look over at Pemulis from under his helmet without 
changing his three-point stance. The football-noises trailed off. Wayne's got a narrow 
nose and close-set witchy eyes. He wore a plastic mouthguard. The musculature of his 
legs and buttocks was clearly outlined as he squatted forward with his weight on his 
knuckles. There was way less time passing in the office than there seemed to be. 

'Hoping for a second of your time,' Pemulis told Mrs. Inc. He was standing schoolboy- 
straight, hands clasped demurely over his fly, which on Pemulis this posture did look 
insolent. 

Wayne straightened up and moved toward his clothing with no little dignity. His 
sweats were neatly folded on the Dean's desk at the rear of the office. The mouthguard 
was attached to the facemask and hung from it when removed. The chin strap had 



several snaps Wayne had to undo. 

'Nice-looking helmet,' Pemulis told him. 

Wayne, pulling hard on his sweatpants' cuffs to fit them over a shoe, didn't reply. He 
was so fit that his supporter's straps didn't even dent his buttocks. 

Mrs. Incandenza removed the mute whistle. She was still split down on the floor. 
Pemulis made rather a show of not looking south of her face. She pursed her lips to 
chuff hair out of her eyes. 

'I predict this'll take about two minutes at most,' Pemulis said, smiling. 


WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


Lenz wears a worsted topcoat and dark slacks and Brazilian loafers with a high- 
wattage shine and a disguise that makes him look like Andy Warhol with a tan. Bruce 
Green wears a cheesy off-the-rack leather jacket of stiff cheap leather that makes the 
jacket creak when he breathes. 

'This is when you man this is when you find out your like what like true character, is 
when it's pointed right at you and some bugeyed fucking spic's not five mitts 230 away 
pointing it, and I strangely I get real calm see and said I said Pepito I said I Pepito man 
you go on and do what you need to do man go on and shoot but man you better I mean 
fucking better kill me with the first shot man or you won't get another one I said. Not 
even bullshitting man I'm serious it's like I found right then I meant it. You know what 
I'm saying?' Green lights both their smokes. Lenz exhales with that hiss of people in a 
rush to drive their point home. 'You know what I'm saying?' 

'I don't know.' 

It's an urban November P.M.: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy grass, brittle 
bushes, gap-toothed trees. The rising moon looks like it doesn't feel very well. The click 
of Lenz's loafers and the crunchy thud of Green's old asphalt-spreader's boots with the 
thick black soles. Green's little noises of attention and assent. He says he's been broken 
by life, is all he'll personally say. Green. Life has kicked his ass, and he's regrouping. Lenz 
likes him, and there's always this slight hangnail of fear, like clinging, whenever he likes 
somebody. It's like something terrible could happen at any time. Less fear than a kind of 
tension in the region of stomach and ass, an all-body wince. Deciding to go ahead and 
think somebody's a stand-up guy: it's like you drop something, you give up all of your 
power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it to hit the ground: all you 



can do is brace and wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody. There would be no 
way to say any of this out loud to Green. As it gets past 2200h. and the meatloaf in his 
pocket's baggie's gotten dark and hard from disuse the pressure to exploit the c. 2216 
interval for resolution builds to a terrible pitch, but Lenz still can't yet quite get it up to 
ask Green to walk back some other way at least once in a while. How does he do it and 
still have Green know he thinks he's OK? But you don't come right out there and let 
somebody hear you say you think they're OK. When it's a girl you're just trying to X it's a 
different thing, straightforwarder; but like for instance where do you look with your 
eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say? You can't look 
right at them, because then what if their eyes look at you as your eyes look at them and 
you lock eyes as you're saying it, and then there'd be some awful like voltage or energy 
there, hanging between you. But you can't look away like you're nervous, like some 
nervous kid asking for a date or something. You can't go around giving that kind of thing 
of yourself away. Plus the knowing that the whole fucking thing's not worth this kind of 
wince and stress: the whole thing's enraging. The afternoon of tonight earlier at circa 
1610h. Lenz'd sprayed RIJID-brand male hairspray in the face of a one-eyed Ennet House 
stray cat that had wandered by mischance into the men's head upstairs, but the result: 
unsatisfying. The cat had just run away downstairs, clunking into the bannister only 
once. Lenz then got diarrhea, which always disgusts him, and he had to stay in the head 
and open the little warped frosted-glass window and run the shower on C until the 
smell's evidence cleared, with fucking Glynn pounding on the door and attracting 
attention howling about who's flailing the whale in there all this time is it by any chance 
Lenz. But then how would he be supposed to act henceforward toward Green if he 
blows him off and says to let him walk solo home? How would he be supposed to act if 
it'd seemed like he'd like spurned Green? What does he henceforward say if he and 
Green pass each other in the aisle at Saturday Night Lively or both reach for the same 
sandwich at the raffle-break at White Flag, or get caught standing there half-naked in 
towels in the hall waiting for somebody to get out of the shower? What if he like spurns 
Green and Green ends up in the 3-Man room while Lenz is still in there and they have to 
room together and interface constantly? And if Lenz tries to temper the spurning by 
telling Green he likes him, where the fuck is he supposed to look when he says it? If 
trying to X a female species Lenz would have nullo problemo with where to look. He'd 
have no problem with looking deep into some bitch's eyes and looking so sincere it's like 
he's dying inside him. Or if like assuring a bad-complected Brazilian he hadn't stepped 
on a half-kilo three separate times with Inositol. 231 Or if high: zero problem. If he got 
high, he'd have no problem telling somebody he liked him even if he really did. For it'd 
give his spirits a voltage that'd more than overweigh whatever upsetting voltage might 
hang in the air between somebody. A few lineskers and there'd be no stress-issues 
about telling Bruce G. with all due respects to screw, go peddle his papers, go play in the 
freeway, go play with a chain saw, go find a short pier, that no disrespect but Lenz 
needed to fly solo in the urban night. So after the incident with the cat and diarrhea and 
some hard words with D. R. Glynn, who was slumped holding his abdomen down against 
the south wall of the upstairs hall, Lenz decides enough is enough and goes and gets a 
little square of foil off the industrial roll Don G. keeps under the Ennet sink and goes and 



takes a half-gram, maybe a gram at most out of the emergency stash out of the vault- 
thing he's razored out of the Principles of Natural Lectures. Far from your scenario of 
relapsing, the Bing is medicinal support for assertively sharing his need for aloneness 
with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way 
of spiritual growth — Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth 
itself. 

So then like strategically, at the Brookline Young People's Mtg. over on Beacon near 
the Newton line on a Wednesday, at the raffle-break, at 2109h., Lenz moistens his half¬ 
gasper and puts it carefully back in the pack and yawns and stretches and does a quick 
pulse-check and gets up and saunters casually into the Handicapped head with the 
lockable door and the big sort of crib built around the shitter itself for crippled lowering 
onto the toilet and does like maybe two, maybe three generous lines of Bing off the top 
of the toilet-tank and wipes the tank-top off both before and after with wet paper 
towels, ironically rolling up the same crisp buck he'd brought for the meeting's 
collection and utilizing it and cleaning it thoroughly with his finger and rubbing his gums 
with the finger and then putting his head way back in the mirror to check the kidney¬ 
shaped nostrils of his fine aqualine nose for clinging evidence in the trim hair up there 
and tasting the bitter drip in the back of his frozen throat and taking the clean rolled 
buck and back-rolling it and smoothing it out and hammering it with his fist on the lip of 
the sink and folding it neatly into half of half its original Treasury Dept, size so that all 
evidence anybody ever even had a passing thought of rolling the buck into a hard tight 
tube is, like, anileated. Then sauntered back out like butter wouldn't soften anywhere 
on his body, knowing just where to look at all times and casually hefting his balls before 
he sat back down. 

And then aside from the every so often hemispasm of the mouth and right eye he 
hides via the old sunglasses and pretend-cough tactic the second half of the mtg.'s 
endless oratory goes fine, he supposes, even though he did smoke almost a whole 
expensive pack of gaspers in 34 minutes, and the holier-than-you Young-People AAs 
over in what were supposed to be the Nonsmoking rows of chairs against the east wall 
to his right shot him over some negative-type looks when perchance he happened to 
find he had one going in the little tin ashtray and two at once going in his mouth, but 
Lenz was able to play the whole thing off with insousistent aplomb, sitting there in his 
aviator sunglasses with his legs crossed and his topcoated arms resting out along the 
backs of the empty chairs on either side. 

The night-noises of the metro night: harbor-wind skirling on angled cement, the shush 
and sheen of overpass traffic, TPs' laughter in interior rooms, the yowl of unresolved 
cat-life. Horns blatting off in the harbor. Receding sirens. Confused inland gulls' cries. 
Broken glass from far away. Car horns in gridlock, arguments in languages, more broken 
glass, running shoes, a woman's either laugh or scream from who can tell how far, 
coming off the grid. Dogs defending whatever dog-yards they pass by, the sounds of 
chains and risen hackles. The podiatric click and thud, the visible breath, gravel's crunch, 
creak of Green's leather, the snick of a million urban lighters, the gauzy far-off humming 
ATHSCMEs pointing out true plumb north, the clunk and tinkle of stuff going into 
dumpsters and rustle of stuff in dumpsters settling and skirl of wind on the sharp edges 



of dumpsters and unmistakable clanks and tinkles of dumpster-divers and can-miners 
going after dumpsters' cans and bottles, the district Redemption Center down in West 
Brighton and actually even boldly sharing a storefront with Liquor World liquor store, so 
the can-miners can do like one-stop redeeming and shopping. Which Lenz finds 
repellent to the maximus, and shares the feelings with Green. Lenz observes to Green 
how myriadly ironic are the devices by which the Famous Crooner's promise to Clean Up 
Our Urban Cities has come to be kept. The noises parallaxing in from out over the city's 
winking grid, at night. The wooly haze of monoxides. You got your faint cuntstink of the 
wind off the Bay. Planes' little crucifi of landing lights well ahead of their own noise. 
Crows in trees. You got your standard crepuscular rustles. Ground floors' lit windows 
laying little rugs of light out into their lawns. Porch lights that go on automatically when 
you stroll by. A threnody of sirens somewhere north of the Charles. Bare trees creaking 
in the wind. The State Bird of Massachusetts, he shares to Green, is the police siren. To 
Project and to Swerve. The cries and screams from out across who knows how many 
blocks, who knows the screams' intent. Sometimes the end of the scream is at the 
sound of the start of the scream, he opines. The visible breath and the rainbowed rings 
of streetlights and headlights through that breath. Unless the screams are really 
laughing. Lenz's own mother's laugh had sounded like she was being eaten alive. 

Except — after the maybe five total lines hoovered in a totally purposive medicinal 
nonrecreational spirit — except then instead of assuring Green he's a blue-chip 
commodity on Lenz's Exchange but to please screw and let Lenz stroll home solo with 
his meatloaf and agenda, it eventuates that Lenz has again miscalculated the effect the 
Bing's hydrolysis 232 will have, he always like previsions the effect as cool nonchalant 
verbal sangfroid, but instead Lenz on the way home finds himself under huge hydrolystic 
compulsion to have Green right there by his side — or basically anyone who can't get 
away or won't go away — right there with him, and to share with Green or any 
compliant ear pretty much every experience and thought he's ever had, to give each 
datum of the case of R. Lenz shape and visible breath as his whole life (and then some) 
tear-asses across his mind's arctic horizon, trailing phosphenes. 

He tells Green that his phobic fear of timepieces stems from his stepfather, an Amtrak 
train conductor with deeply unresolved issues which he used to make Lenz wind his 
pocketwatch and polish his fob daily with a chamois cloth and nightly make sure his 
watch's displayed time was correct to the second or else he'd lay into the pint-sized 
Randy with a rolled-up copy of Track and Flange, a slick and wicked-heavy coffee-table¬ 
sized trade periodical. 

Lenz tells Green how spectacularly obese his own late mother had been, using his 
arms to dramatically illustrate the dimensions involved. 

He breathes between about every third or fourth fact, ergo about once a block. 

Lenz tells Green the plots of several books he's read, confabulating them. 

Lenz doesn't notice the way Green's face sort of crumples blankly when Lenz mentions 
the issue of late mothers. 

Lenz euphorically tells Green how he once got the tip of his left finger cut off in a 
minibike chain once and how but within days of intensive concentration the finger had 
grown back and regenerated itself like a lizard's tail, confounding doctoral authorities. 



Lenz says that was the incident in youth after which he got in touch with his own 
unusual life-force and energois de vivre and knew and accepted that he was somehow 
not like the run of common men, and began to accept his uniqueness and all that it 
entailed. 

Lenz clues Green in on it's a myth the Nile crocodile is the most dreaded species of 
crocodile, that the dreaded Estuarial crocodile of saltwater habits is a billion times more 
dreaded by those in the know. 

Lenz theorizes that his compulsive need to know the time with microspic precision is 
also a function of his stepfather's dysfunctional abuse regarding the pocketwatch and 
Track and Flange. This segues into an analysis of the term dysfunction and its revelance 
to the distinctions between, say, psychology and natural religion. 

Lenz tells how once in the Back Bay on Boylston outside Bonwit's a pushy prosthesis- 
vendor gave him a hard time about a glass-eye item of jewelry and got his issues' juices 
flowing and then down the prosthesis-vendor line another vendor simply would not 
take No of any sort about a bottle of A.D.A.-Approved Xero-Lube Saliva Substitute with a 
confabulated celeb-endorsement from J. Gentle F. Crooner on it and Lenz utilized akido 
to break the man's nose with one blow and then drive the bone's shards and fragments 
up into the vendor's brain with the followup heel of his hand, a maneuver known by a 
secret ancient Chinese term meaning The Old One-Two, eliminating the saliva guy's map 
on the spot, so that Lenz had learned about the lethality of his whatever-was-beyond- 
black belt in akido and his hands' deadliness as weapons when his issues were provoked 
and tells Green how he'd taken a solemn vow right there, running like hell down 
Boylston for the Auditorium T-Stop to evade prosecution, vowed never to use his 
lethally adept akido skills except in the most compulsory situation of defending the 
innocent and/or weak. 

Lenz tells Green how once he was at a Halloween party where a hydrocephalic woman 
wore a necklace made of dead gulls. 

Lenz shares about this recurving dream where he's seated under a tropical ceiling fan 
in a cane chair wearing an L.L. Bean safari hat and holding a wickerware valise in his lap, 
and that's all, and that's the recurving dream. 

On the 400 block of W. Beacon, around 2202h., Lenz demonstrates for Bruce Green 
the secret akido 1-2 with which he'd demapped the saliva-monger, breaking the move 
down into slo-mo constituent movements so that Green's untrained eye could follow. 
He says there's another recurving nightmare about a clock with hands frozen eternally 
at 1830 that's so trouser-foulingly scary he won't even burden Green's fragile 
psychology with the explicits of it. 

Green, lighting both their smokes, says he either doesn't remember his dreams or 
doesn't dream. 

Lenz adjusts his white toupee and mustache in a darkened InterLace outlet's window, 
does the odd bit of t'ai-chi stretching, and blows his nose into W. Beacon's cluttered 
gutter Euro-style, one nostril at a time, arching to keep his coatfront well back from 
what he expels. 

Green's one of these muscle-shirt types that carries his next gasper tucked up over his 
ear, which the use of RIJID or other brands of quality hair-fixative makes impossible for 



the reason that residues of spray on the cigarette cause it to burst unexpectedly into 
flame at points along its length. Lenz regales how at that Halloween Party with the 
necklace of birds there'd been allegedly a Concavity-refugee infant there, at the party, 
at the home of a South Boston orthodontist that dealt Lidocaine to Bing-retailers on the 
prescriptional dicky, 233 a normal-size and unferal infant but totally without a skull, lying 
in a kind of raised platform or dais by the fireplace with its shapeless and deskulled 
head-region supported and, like (shuddering), contained in a sort of lidless plastic box, 
and its eyes were sunk way down in its face, which was the consistency of like 
quicksand, the face, and its nose concave and its mouth hanging out over either side of 
the boneless face, and the total head had like conformed to the inside of the containing 
box it was contained in, the head, and appeared roughly square in overall outline, the 
head, and the woman with the lei of gull-heads and other persons in costumes had 
ingested hallucinogens and drank mescal and ate the little worms in the mescal and had 
performed circled rituals around the box and platform around 2355h., worshipping the 
infant, or as they termed it simply The Infant, as if there were only One. 

Green lets Lenz know the time at roughly two-minute intervals, maybe once a block, 
from his cheap but digital watch, when the critical B.B.S.B. liquid-crystal sign is obscured 
by the urban night's strolling skyline. 

Lenz's labial writhing occurs worst on diphthongs involving o-sounds. 

Lenz clues Green in that AA/NA works all right but there's no fucking question it's a 
cult, he and Green've apparently got themselves to the point where the only way out of 
the addictive tailspin is to enlist in a fucking cult and let them try and brainwash your 
ass, and that the first person tries to lay a saffron robe or tambourine on Lenz is going to 
be one very sorry cableyarrow indeed, is all. 

Lenz claims to remember some experiences which he says happened to him in vitro. 

Lenz says the Ennet graduates who often come back and take up living-room space 
sitting around comparing horror stories about former religious cults they'd tried joining 
as part of their struggle to try to quit with the drugs and alcohol are not w/o a certain 
naive charm but are basically naive. Lenz details that robes and mass weddings and 
head-shaving and pamphleteering in airports and selling flowers on median strips and 
signing away inheritances and never sleeping and marrying whoever they tell you and 
then never seeing who you marry are small potatoes in terms of bizarre-cult criterion. 
Lenz tells Green he knows individuals who've heard shit that would blow Green's mind 
out his ear-sockets. 


At lunchtime, Hal Incandenza was lying on his bunk in bright sunlight through the 
window with his hands laced over his chest, and Jim Troeltsch poked his head in and 
asked Hal what he was doing, and Hal told him photosynthesizing and then didn't say 
anything else until Troeltsch went away. 

Then, 41 breaths later, Michael Pemulis stuck his head in where Troeltsch's had been. 

'Did you eat yet?' 

Hal made his stomach bulge up and patted it, still looking at the ceiling. 'The beast has 
killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the Baobob tree.' 



'Gotcha.' 

'Surveying his loyal pride.' 

7 gotcha.' 

Over 200 breaths later, John ('N.R.') Wayne opened up the ajar door a little more and 
put his whole head in and stayed like that, with just his head in. He didn't say anything 
and Hal didn't say anything, and they stayed like that for a while, and then Wayne's 
head smoothly withdrew. 


Under a streetlamp on Faneuil St. off W. Beacon, Randy Lenz shares a vulnerable 
personal thing and tilts his head back to show Bruce Green where his septum used to 
be. 

Randy Lenz reguiles Bruce Green about certain real-estate cults in S. Cal. and the West 
Coast. Of Delawareans that still believed Virtual-Reality pornography even though it'd 
been found to cause bleeding from the eye-corners and real-world permanent 
impotence was still the key to Shrangi-la and believed that some sort of perfect piece of 
digito-holographic porn was circulating somewhere in the form of a bootleg Write- 
Protect-notched software diskette and devoted their cultic lives to snuffling around 
trying to get hold of the virtual kamasupra diskette and getting together in dim 
Wilmington-area venues and talking very obliquely about rumors of where and just 
what the software was and how their snufflings for it were going, and watching Virtual 
fuckfilms and mopping the corner of their eyes, etc. Or of something called Stelliform 
Cultism that Bruce Green isn't even near ready to hear about, Lenz opines. Or like e.g. of 
a suicidal Nuck cult of Nucks that worshipped a form of Russian Roulette that involved 
jumping in front of trains and seeing which Nuck could come the closest to the train's 
front without getting demapped. 

What sounds like Lenz chewing gum is really Lenz trying to talk and grind his teeth 
together at the same time. 

Lenz recalls orally that his stepfather's blue-vested gut had preceded the conductor 
into rooms by several seconds, fob glinting above the watch-pocket's sinister slit. How 
Lenz's mother back in Fall River had made it a point of utilizing Greyhound for voyages 
and sojourns, basically to piss her stephusband off. 

Lenz discusses how a serious disadvantage to dealing Bing retail is the way 
customers'll show up pounding on your door at 0300 sporting lint in the terms of 
resources and putting their arms around your shins and ankles and begging for just a 
half-gram or tenth of a gram and offering to give Lenz their kids, like Lenz wants to 
fucking deal with anybody's kids, which these scenes were always constant drags on his 
spirits. 

Green, who's hoovered his share, says cocaine always seemed like it grabbed you by 
the throat and just didn't let go, and he could relate to why the Boston AAs call Bing the 
'Express Elevator To AA.' 

In a dumpster-lined easement between Faneuil St. and Brighton Ave., Brighton, right 
after Green almost steps in what he's pretty sure is human vomit, Lenz proves logically 
why it's all too likely that Ennet House resident Geoffrey D. is a closet poofta. 



Lenz reports how he's been approached in the past to male-model and act, but that 
the male-model and acting profession is pretty much crawling with your closet pooftas, 
and it's no kind of work for a man that's confronted the ins and outs of his own 
character. 

Lenz speculates openly on how there are purportaged to be whole packs and herds of 
feral animals operating in locust-like fashion in the rhythmic lushness of parts of the 
Great Concavity to the due northeast, descended reputedly from domestic pets and 
abandoned during the relocational transition to an O.N.A.N.ite map, and how teams of 
pro researchers and amateur explorers and intrepid hearts and cultists have ventured 
northeast of Checkpoints along the Lucited ATHSCMulated walls and never returned, 
vanishing in toto from the short-wave E.M. bands, as in like dropping off the radar. 

Green turns out to have no conceptions or views on the issues of fauna of the 
Concavity at all. He literally says he's never given it one thought one way or the other. 

Whole NNE cults and stelliform subcults Lenz reports as existing around belief systems 
about the metaphysics of the Concavity and annular fusion and B.S.-1950s-B-cartridge- 
type-radiation-affected fauna and overfertiliza-tion and verdant forests with periodic 
oasises of purportaged desert and whatever east of the former Montpelier VT area of 
where the annulated Shawshine River feeds the Charles and tints it the exact same tint 
of blue as the blue on boxes of Hefty SteelSaks and the ideas of ravacious herds of feral 
domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned 
homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model 
repair and impressive equity, allegedly, and the idea of infants the size of prehistoric 
beasts roaming the overfertilized east Concavity quadrants, leaving enormous scat-piles 
and keening for the abortive parents who'd left or lost them in the general geopolitical 
shuffle of mass migration and really fast packing, or, as some of your more Limbaugh- 
era-type cultists sharingly believe, originating from abortions hastily disposed of in 
barrels in ditches that got breached and mixed ghastly contents with other barrels that 
reanimated the abortive fed and brought them to a kind of repelsive oversized B- 
cartridge life thundering around due north of where yrstruly and Green strolled through 
the urban grid. Of one local underground stelliform offshoot from the Bob Hope¬ 
worshipping Rastafarians who smoked enormous doobsters and wove their negroid hair 
into clusters of wet cigars like the Rastafarians but instead of Rastafarians these post- 
Rastas worshipped the Infant and every New Year donned tie-dyed parkas and 
cardboard snowshoes and ventured northward, trailing smoke, past the walls and fans 
of Checkpoint Pongo into the former areas of VT and NH, seeking The Infant they called 
it, as if there were only One, and toting paraphernalia for performing a cultish ritual 
referred to in oblique tones only as Propitiating The Infant, whole posses of these 
stelliform pot-head reggae-swaying Infant-cultists disappearing forever off the human 
race's radar every winter, never heard or smelled again, regarded by fellow cultists as 
martyrs and/or lambs, possibly too addled by blimp-sized doobsters to find their way 
back out of the Concavity and freezing to death, or en-swarmed by herds of feral pets, 
or shot by property-value-conscious insects, or ... (face plum-colored, finally breathing) 
worse. 

Lenz shudders just at the thought of the raging Powerlessness he'd feel, he shares, lost 



and disorientated, wandering in circles in blinding white frozen points due north of all 
domesticated men, forget the time not even knowing what fucking date it was, his 
breath an ice-beard, with just his tinder and wits and character to live by, armed just 
with a Browning blade. 

Green opines that if Boston AA is a cult that like brainwashes you, he guesses he'd got 
himself to the point where his brain needed a good brisk washing, which Lenz knows is 
not an original view, being exactly what big blockheaded Don Gately repeats about once 
a diem. 


SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE 
MOMENTS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL 
RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE 
YOUNG PEOPLE'S AA MTNG. UP TO ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER 
Y.D.A.U. 

'I don't know why all this shit about wanting to hear about the football all the time. 
And I'm not going to make my goddamn muscle. It's stupid.' 

'Okey-doke.' 

'It's inappropriate, since you like words like that.' 

'But this Sharing and Caring Commitment guy, the Chair, the Sudbury Half-Measures 
Avail Us Nothing Group, he had a power about him. The Chair, he said he used to be a 
nuclear auditor. For the Defense industry. This man who was very quiet and broken- 
seeming and fatherly and strange. There was this kind of broken authority about him.' 

'I know what you mean. I can I.D.' 

'...that seemed fatherly somehow.' 

'The sponsor type. My sponsor's like that, Joelle, in White Flag.' 

'Can I ask? Is your own personal Daddy still alive?' 

'I dunno.' 

'Oh. Oh. My mother's dead. Worm-farming. My own personal Daddy's still sucking air, 
though. That's how he puts it — still sucking air. In Kentucky.' 

f l 

'My mother's a worm-farmer from way back, though.' 

'But so what about this Half Measures guy hit you so hard?' 

'Harrd. Harrrrrd. Sound it out.' 

'Real funny.' 

'Don well it started out as that he spoke about himself like he used to be somebody 
else. Like a whole different person. He said he used to wear a four-piece suit and the 
fourth piece was him.' 

'An Allston Group guy says that all the time, that joke.' 

'He had on a real nice white thick-weave cotton shirt opened at the throat and wheat- 
colored pants and loafers without socks, which I'm up here ten years Don and I still can't 
follow this thing up here about y'all all wearing nice shoes and then wrecking them by 
wearing them without socks.' 

'Joelle, you're maybe about the last person to be taking somebody's inventory about 



weird ways they dress, under there, maybe.' 

'Kiss my rosy red ass, maybe.' 

'Remind me to Log how it's real positive to see you coming out of this shell of yours.' 

'Well and I got reservations on this Don but Diehl and Ken are telling me to come in to 
you with this issue of what's like occurring out there which Erdedy says it's a Staff-type 
issue and duh-duh duh-duh.' 

'Had a little coffee tonight have we Foss?' 

'Well Don and like you know and duh-duh.' 

'Take a second. Inhale and blow out. I'm not going anywheres.' 

'Well Don I hate a cheese-nibbler much as the next man but Geoff D. and Nell G. are 
out in the living room going around to all the new people asking them to think about if 
their Higher Power is omnipotent enough to make a suitcase that's too heavy for him to 
lift. They're doing it to everybody that's new. And that skittery kid Dingley —' 

'Tingley. The new kid.' 

'Well Don he's sitting in the linen closet with his legs sticking out of the linen closet 
with his eyes bugging out with like smoke coming out his ears and duh-duh duh-duh 
going like He Can but He Can't but He Can, respecting the suitcase and duh-duh, and 
Diehl says it's a matter for Staff, it's a negative thing Day's doing and Erdedy says I'm 
Senior Res. and to go to Staff with it and eat cheese.' 

'Shit.' 

'Diehl said a case this negative and duh-duh, no way it's like ratting.' 

'No, I appreciate. It ain't ratting.' 

'Plus I brought in this really good like tollhouse-butterscotch cookie thing Hanley made 
a plate of, which Erdedy said it's not like kissing ass so much as commonplace decency.' 

'Erdedy's a community pillar. I got to stay in here with the phone. Maybe you could 
tell Geoff and Nell to like waltz on in if they can take time out from torturing the new 
people.' 

Til probably leave out the torturing part if it's OK with you, Don.' 

'Which by the way here I am looking at this cookie still in your hand, notice.' 

'Jesus, the cookie. Jesus.' 

'Try and relax a little, kid.' 

'I got to stay down with the phones till 2200. Try a plunger and let me know and I can 
call Services.' 

'I'm thinking it'd be doing a favor if Staff clued in anybody new that comes in on the 
fact that the H-faucet in the shower that its H really stands for Holy Cow That's Cold.' 

'Are you saying in a sideways way there's some trouble with the water-temp in the 
head, McDade?' 

'Don, I'm saying just what I came in here to say. And can I say by the way nice shirt. My 
dad used to bowl, too, when he still had a thumb.' 

'I don't care what the sick bastard told you, Yolanda. Getting on your knees in the A.M. 
to Ask For Help does not mean getting on your knees in the A.M. while this sick yutz 
stands in front of you and unzips his fly and you Ask For Help into his fly. I'm praying this 
is not a male resident said this. This is the sort of thing why same-sex sponsors only are 
a suggestion. Is that there's some sick bastards around the rooms, you get me? Any AA 



tells a new female in the Program to use his Unit for her Higher Power, I'd give that guy 
a wide detour. You get what I'm saying?' 

'And I didn't even tell you yet how he suggested I should thank the Higher Power at 
night.' 

'I'd cross a broad street to avoid an AA like this guy, Yolanda.' 

'And how he said how I always have to be on the south of him, like stay on his south 
side, and I have to buy a digital watch.' 

'Holy Christ this is Lenz. Is this Lenz you're telling me about?' 

'I ain't use no names in here. All I say he seemed real friendly and fly at first, and 
helpful, when I first came, this dude I ain't say no name.' 

'You have trouble with the part of the Second Step that's about insanity and you've 
been using Randy Lenz for a sponsor?' 

'This is a nomonous Program, you know what I'm saying?' 

'Jesus, kid.' 


Orin ('0.') Incandenza stands embracing a putatively Swiss hand-model in a rented 
room. They embrace. Their faces become sexual faces. It seems clear evidence of a kind 
of benign fate or world-spirit that this incredible specimen had appeared at Sky Harbor 
Int. Airp. just as Orin stood with his fine forehead against the glass of the Gate 
overlooking the tarmac after actually volunteering to drive Helen Steeply all the night¬ 
marish way down I-17/-10 to the ghastly glittering unnavigable airport and the Subject 
seemed, in the car, not only not especially grateful, and hadn't let him so much as place 
a friendly and supportive palm on her incredible quadricep during the ride, but had 
been irritatingly all-business and had continued to pursue lines of family-linen inquiry 
he'd all but begged her to quit subjecting him to the inappropriateness of 234 — that, as 
he stood there after having received little other than a cool smile and a promise to try to 
say hello to Hallie, with his forehead against the glass of the Weston back door — or 
rather the Delta gate window — this incredible specimen had — unbidden, 
unStrategized — come up to him and started a lush foreign-accented conversation and 
revealed professionally lovely hands as she rooted in her tripolymer bag to ask him to 
autograph for her toddler-age son a Cardinal-souvenir football she had right there (!) in 
her bag, along with her Swiss passport — as if the universe were reaching out a hand to 
pluck him from the rim of the abyss of despair that any real sort of rejection or 
frustration of his need for some Subject he'd picked out always threatened him with, as 
if he'd been teetering with his arms windmilling at a great height without even idiotic 
red wings strapped to his back and the universe were sending this lovely steadying left 
hand to pull him gently back and embrace him and not so much console him as remind 
him of who and what he was about, standing there embracing a Subject with a sexual 
face for his sexual face, no longer speaking, the football and pen on the neatly made 
bed, the two of them embracing between the bed and the mirror with the woman 
facing the bed so that Orin can see past her head the large hanging mirror and the small 
framed photos of her Swiss family arrayed along the wood-grain dresser below the 
window, 235 the tubby-faced man and Swiss-looking kids all smiling trustingly into a 



nothing somewhere up and to their right. 

They have shifted into a sexual mode. Her lids flutter; his close. There's a concentrated 
tactile languor. She is left-handed. It is not about consolation. They start the thing with 
each other's buttons. It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or 
instincts or the split-second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or 
about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never 
love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an 
immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, 
a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to 
be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her as if from someone or 
something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and 
all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender, that he is both offense and defense 
and she neither, nothing but this one second's love of her, o/-her, spinning as it arcs his 
way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that 
for one second she loves him too much to stand it, that she must (she feels) have him, 
must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone: that 
her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, 
betrayals, the deaths of pets — that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all 
but his name: 0., 0. That he is the One. 

(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend 
to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, now, special and 
only, the One would be not he or she but what was between them, the obliterating 
trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered, and will never 
again.) 

And about contempt, it is about a kind of hatred, too, along with the hope and need. 
Because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her 
a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out disguised as a contempt he disguises 
in the tender attention with which he does the thing with her buttons, touches the 
blouse as if it too were part of her, and him. As if it could feel. They have stripped each 
other neatly. Her mouth is glued to his mouth; she is his breath, his eyes shut against 
the sight of hers. They are stripped in the mirror and she, in a kind of virtuoso jitterbug 
that is 100% New World, uses O.'s uneven shoulders as support to leap and circle his 
neck with her legs, and she arches her back and is supported, her weight, by just one 
hand at the small of her back as he bears her to bed as would a waiter a tray. 


' Hoorn pf.' 

'Herrmmp.' 

'Well in excess of a thousand pardons for my collision.' 

'Arslanian? Is that you?' 

'It is I, Idris Arslanian. Who is this other?' 

'It's Ted Schacht, Id. Why the blindfold?' 

'Where have I come, please. I became disoriented upon a set of stairs. I became 
panicked. I nearly removed my blindfold. Where are we? I detect many odors.' 



'You're just off the weight room, in the little hall off the tunnel that isn't the little hall 
that goes to the sauna. Why the blindfold, though?' 

'And the origin of this sound of hysterical weeping and moans, this is —?' 

'It's Anton Doucette in there. He's in there clinically depressed. Lyle's trying to buck 
him up. Some of the crueler guys are in there watching like it's entertainment. I got 
disgusted. Somebody in pain isn't entertainment. I did my sets, now I'm a vapor-trail.' 

'You exude vapor?' 

'Always nice running into you. Id.' 

'Await. Please conduct me upstairs or into the locker for a lavatory visit. The blindfold I 
am wearing is experimental on the part of Thorp. You are told of the visually challenged 
player who will matriculate?' 

The blind kid? From like Nowheresburg, Iowa? Dempster?' 

'Dymphna.' 

'He's not coming in til next term. He delayed, Inc said they said. Dural edema or 
something.' 

'Though age only nine, he is in his Midwest region's ranking of Twelve and Belows 
highly ranked. Coach Thorp tells this.' 

'Well, I'd say for a blind, soft-skulled kid he's real high-ranked. Id, yeah.' 

'But Dymphna. I hear Thorp tell that the highness of the ranking may be due to the 
blindness itself. Thorp and Texas Watson were who scouted this player.' 

'I wouldn't mention the name Watson near that weight room in there if I were you.' 

'Thorp tells that his excellence of play is scouted by them to be his anticipation. As in 
the player Dymphna arrives at the necessary location well before the opponent player's 
ball, through anticipation.' 

'I know what anticipation is. Id.' 

'Thorp tells to me that this excellence in anticipation in the blind is because of hearing 
and sounds, because sounds are merely... here. Please read the comment I have 
carefully notated upon this folded piece of paper.' 

' "Sound Merely 'Variations In Intensity' — Throp." Throp?' 

'It was meaning Thorp, in excitement. He tells that one may, perforce, judge the 
opponent player's VAPS 236 in more detail by the ear than the eye. This is experimental 
theory of Thorp. This is explaining why the highly ranked Dymphna appears to always 
have floated by magic to the necessary spot where a ball is soon to land. Thorp tells this 
in a convincing manner.' 

'Perforce?' 

That this blind person is able to judge the necessary spot of landing by the intensity of 
the sound of the ball against the opponent player's string.' 

'Instead of watching the contact and then imaginatively extending the beginning of its 
flight, like those of us hobbled by sight.' 

'I, Idris Arslanian, am compelled with Thorp's telling.' 

'Which helps explain the blindfold.' 

'I therefore experiment with volunteer blindness. Training the ear in degrees of 
intensity in play. Today versus Whale I was wearing the blindfold to play.' 

'How'd it go?' 



'Not as well as hoped. I frequently faced the wrong direction for play. I frequently 
judged by the intensity of balls struck on adjacent courts and ran onto adjacent courts, 
intruding on play.' 

'We sort of wondered what all the ruckus was down there at the 14's end.' 

'Thorp tells that training the ear is a process of time, in encouragement.' 

'Well, later. Id.' 

'Stop. Wait before leaving. Please conduct me to a lavatory. Ted Schacht? Are you as 
yet there?' 

l l 

'Are you as yet there? I very —' 

'Whuffff watch where you're going kid for Christ's sake.' 

'Who is this please.' 

'Troeltsch, James L., slightly doubled over.' 

'It is I, Idris Arslanian, wearing a rayon handkerchief as a blindfold over my features. I 
am disoriented and wishing badly for a lavatory. Wondering also what is ensuing inside 
the weight room, where Schacht alleges you are all watching Doucette weep in clinical 
depression.' 

'Kertwannnggg! Just kidding, Ars. It's really Mike Pemulis.' 

Then you, Mike Pemulis, may even now be questioning why is this blindfold upon Idris 
Arslanian.' 

'What blindfold? Ars, no, you're wearing a fucking blindfold too?' 

'You, Mike Pemulis, are also wearing a blindfold?' 

'Just kertwanging on you, brother.' 

'I became disoriented on a stairway, then conversed with Ted Schacht. I am suspecting 
I do not trust your sense of laughter enough to conduct me back upstairs.' 

'You should feel your way in and just for one second see the amount of high-stress 
sweat Lyle's taking off Anton ("The Booger") Doucette in there, Ars.' 

'Doucette is the two-hand player whose mole appears to be material from a nostril, 
clinically depressing Doucette at its appearance.' 

'Rog on the mole. Except that's not what's depressing the Booger this time. This one 
we decided we'd describe him as more like anxiously depressed than depressed.' 

'One can be depressed of different types?' 

'Boy are you young, Ars. The Booger's got himself convinced he's going to get the 
academic Boot. He's been on proby this whole year, since apparently some trouble last 
year with Thorp's cubular trig —' 

'I am sympathizing with this in toto.' 

'— and but except now he claims he's close to flunking in Watson's laughable Energy 
survey class, which would obviously mean the old Boot at term's end, if he really does 
flunk. He's thought himself into a brainlock of anxiety. He's in there clutching his skull 
with Lyle and Mario, and some of the like less kind guys in there have a pool going on 
whether Lyle can pull him back from the brink.' 

'Texas Watson the prorector, teaching of energy in models of resource-scarcity and 
resource-plenty.' 

'Ars, I'm nodding in confirmation. Fossil fuels all the way up to annular fusion/fission 



cycles, DT-lithiumization, so on and so forth. All on a real superficial-type level, since 
Watson's basically got like a little liquid-filled nubbin at the top of his spine where his 
brain ought to be. 1 

'Texas Watson does not overwhelm with brightness, it is true.' 

'But Doucette's got himself convinced he's got this insurmagulate conceptual block 
that keeps him from grasping annulation, even superficially.' 

'After we converse you will conduct me to micturate, please.' 

'It's the same sort of block some people get with the Mean-Value Theorem. Or in 
Optics when we get to color fields. At a certain level of abstraction it's like the brain 
recoils.' 

'Causing pain of impact within the skull, resulting in clutching the head.' 

'Watson's gone the extra click with him. Watson's good-hearted if nothing else. He's 
tried flash-cards, mnemonic rhymes, even claymation filmstrips from over at Rindge- 
Latin Remedial.' 

'You are saying without avail.' 

'I'm saying apparently the Boogster just sits there in class, eyes bugging out, stomach 
in fucking knots, dope-slapped by anxiety. I'm saying frozen.' 

'You are saying recoiling.' 

'The right side of his face frozen in this anxiety-tic. Envisioning any possible tennis 
career as with these little wings on it, flying off. Talking all kinds of crazy self-injuring 
anxious-depression talk. It all started with him and Mario and me in the sauna, him 
breaking down, me and Mario trying to talk him out of the crazy washed-up-at-fifteen- 
type depressed talk, Mario exploiting a previous like therapeutic bond with the kid from 
about the mole, then with me putting DT-annulation in broad-stroke terms a freaking 
invertebrate could have understood for Christ's sake. Just about passing out from the 
sauna all through this. Finally taking him in to Lyle even with the 18's still doing circuits 
in there. Lyle's working with the Booger now. Between the anxiety and the marathon 
sauna-time it's a real feeding frenzy for old Lyle let me tell you.' 

'I too confess experiences of anxiety for annulation with Tex Watson, though I am 
Trivially thirteen and not yet required to grapple in hard science.' 

'Mario in the sauna kept telling Doucette to just imagine somebody doing somersaults 
with one hand nailed to the ground, which what the fuck is that, and lo and surprise 
didn't help the Booger a whole lot.' 

'Did not part the veil of Maya.' 

'Didn't do jack.' 

'Annular energy cycles are intensively abstract, my home nation believes.' 

'But my whole message to Boog was that DT-cycles aren't all that fucking hard if you 
don't paralyze your brain with career-with-wings brain-cartoons. The extra-hot 
breedering and lithiumization stuff gets hairy, but the whole fusion/fission waste- 
annulation thing in toto you can imagine as nothing but a huge right triangle.' 

'You are presaging to give the thumbnail lecture.' 

'Commit this one simple model to your little Pakistani RAM-cells, and you'll tapdance 
right through Watson's kiddie-physics and up into Optics, which is where the abstracto- 
conceptual fur really flies, kid, let me tell you.' 



'I am one of the seldom of my home nation whose talents are weak in science, 
unhappily.' 

'This is why God also gave you quick hands and a wicked lob off the backhand, though. 
Just picture a kind of massive pseudocartographic right triangle. 237 You've got your 
central, impregnately-guarded O.N.A.N.- Sunstrand waste-intensive fusion facility up in 
what used to be Montpelier in what used to be Vermont, in the Concavity. From 
Montpelier the process's waste's piped to two sites, one of which is that blue glow at 
night up by the Methuen Fan-Complex, just south of the Concavity, right flush up 
against the Wall and Checkpoint Pongo —' 

'Which our tall and sleep-depriving fans in our area point at to blow away from the 
south.' 

'— Roger that, where the toxo-fusion's waste's plutonium fluoride's refined into 
plutonium-239 and uranium-238 and fissioned in a standard if somewhat hot and risky 
breeder-system, much of the output of which is waste U-239, which gets piped or 
catapulted or long-shiny-trucked way up to what used to be Loring A.F.B. — Air Force 
Base near what used to be Presque Isle Maine — where it's allowed to decay naturally 
into neptunium-239 and then plutonium-239 and then added to the UF 4 fractional 
waste also piped up from Montpelier, then fissioned in a purposely ugly way in such a 
way as to create like hellacious amounts of highly poisonous radioactive wastes, which 
are mixed with heavy water and specially heated-zirconium-piped through special 
heavily guarded heated zirconium pipes back down to Montpelier as raw materiel for 
the massive poisons needed for toxic lithiumization and waste-intenseness and annular 
fusion.' 

'My head is spinning on its axis.' 

'Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste-creation and - 
utilization. See? And when are we going to get you out on the old Eschaton map for a 
little geopolitical sparring, Ars, what with those hands and wicked lob? Incidentally, the 
arrhythmic meaty whacking sound is Booger hitting himself in the thigh and chest in 
there, which self-abuse is a textbook symptom of an anxiously depressed episode.' 

'With this I can create sympathy. For, confusingly to me, fusion produces no waste. 
This we are taught in the science of my home nation. This is the very essence of the 
promise of the attraction of fusion for a densely populous and waste-impacted nation 
such as mine, we are taught fusion to be self-sufficient and wasteless perpetuation. 
Alas, my need to visit the lavatory is becoming distended.' 

'But except no, although this was the very roadblock that'd stymified annulation, and 
what had to be overcome, and was overcome, though in a way so unintuitive and 
abstracto-conceptual that this is where your Third World educational system's real sadly 
in need of like a massive up-to-date-textbook airlift or something. It's also at just this 
point in the fusion-wastelessness problem where our own glorious optical Founder, Inc's 
ex-Da, Mrs. Inc's poor cue —' 

'I know who you refer.' 

'The man himself, at just this point, makes his final lasting contribution to state science 
after he quit designing neutron-diffusion reflectors for Defense. You've seen the 
coprolite placque in Tavis's office. This is from the A.E.C., for the Incster's Da's, like. 



lasting contribution to the energy of waste.' 

'The purpose for which I was upon the stairs and became disoriented was to visit a 
lavatory. This was long ago.' 

'Hold your water one second is all this'll take. You wouldn't even fucking be here 
without Inc's Da, you know. What the guy did was he helped design these special 
holographic conversions so the team that worked on annulation could study the 
behavior of subatomics in highly poisonous environments. Without getting poisoned 
themselves.' 

'They thus are studying holographic conversions of the poisons instead of the poisons.' 

'Men's Sanity in Corporate Sterno, Ars. Like an optical glove-box. The ultimate 
prophylactic.' 

'Please conduct me.' 

'Like but for instance did your nation know that the whole annular theory behind a 
type of fusion that can produce waste that's fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for 
the fusion: the whole theory behind the physics of it comes out of medicine?' 

'This means what? A bottle of medicine?' 

'The study of medicine, Ars. Your part of the world takes annular medicine for granted 
now, but the whole idea of treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer 
was anathematic just a couple decades back.' 

'Anathematic?' 

'As in like radical, fringe. Wacko. Laughed out of town on a rail by quote mainstream 
established science. Whose idea of treatment was to like poison the whole body and see 
what was left. Though annular chemotherapy did start out kind of wacko. You can see 
these early microphotos Schacht's got that poster of that he won't take down even after 
you're sick of it, the early microphotos of cancer cells getting force-fed micromassive 
quantities of overdone beef and diet soda, forced to chain-smoke microsized Marlboros 
near tiny little cellular phones — l238 

'I am standing first upon one foot then upon another foot.' 

'— except and corollarying out of the micromedical model was this equally radical idea 
that maybe you could achieve a high-waste annulating fusion by bombarding highly 
toxic radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even more toxic than the 
radioactive particles. A fusion that feeds on poisons and produces relatively stable 
plutonium fluoride and uranium tetrafluoride. All you turn out to need is access to 
mind-staggering volumes of toxic material.' 

'Therefore placing the natural fusion site in the Great Concavity.' 

'Roger and Jawohl. Here things get abstractly furry and I'll just skim through the fact 
that the only kertwang in the whole process environmentally is that the resultant fusion 
turns out so greedily efficient that it sucks every last toxin and poison out of the 
surrounding ecosystem, all inhibitors to organic growth for hundreds of radial clicks in 
every direction.' 

'Hence the eastern Concavity of anxiety and myth.' 

'You end up with a surrounding environment so fertilely lush it's practically unlivable.' 

'A rain forest on sterebolic anoids.' 

'Close enough.' 



'Therefore rapacial feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile 
giganticism and the unmacheteable regions of forests of the mythic eastern Concavity.' 

'Yes Ars and you find you need to keep steadily dumping in toxins to keep the 
uninhibited ecosystem from spreading and overrunning more ecologically stable areas, 
exhausting the atmosphere's poisons so that everything hyperventilates. And thus and 
such. So this is why E.W.D.'s major catapulting is from the metro area due north.' 

'Into the eastern Concavity, keeping it at bay.' 

'See how it all comes together?' 

'Mr. Thorp will evince keen disappointment if I resort to remove my blindfold to locate 
a lavatory.' 

'Ars, I hear you. I hear fine. You don't need to go on and on. The thing to keep in mind 
for if you have to take Watson is the cyclic effects of the waste-delivery and fusion. 
Major catapulting is on what days?' 

'The dates which are in each month prime numbers, until midnight.' 

'Which eradicates the overgrowth until the toxins are fused and utilized. The satellite 
scenario is that the eastern part of Grid 3 goes from overgrown to wasteland to 
overgrown several times a month. With the first week of the month being especially 
barren and the last week being like nothing on earth.' 

'As if time itself were vastly sped up. As if nature itself had desperately to visit the 
lavatory.' 

'Accelerated phenomena, which is actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down 
of time. The mnemonic rhyme Watson tried to get the Boog to remember here is 
"Wasteland to lush: time's in no rush." 

'Decelerated time, I have got you.' 

'And this is what the Boog's saying is eating him alive the worst, conceptually. He says 
he's toast if he can't wrap his head around the concept of time in flux, conceptually. It 
jacklights him for the whole annular model overall. Granted, it's abstract. But you should 
see him. One half of the face is like spasming around while the half with the mole just 
like hangs there staring like a bunny you're about to run over. Lyle's trying to walk him 
real slowly through the most basic kiddie-physical principles of the relativity of time in 
extreme organic environments. In between Booger's trips back to the sauna. The irony 
for the Boogerman is you don't really even have to know that much about the temporal- 
flux stuff, since Watson's forehead gets all mottled and pruny-looking when he thinks 
about it himself.' 

'Do not please necessitate begging from me, Idris Arslanian.' 

'The eastern Concavity of course being a whole different kettle of colored horses from 
what Inc calls the barren Eliotical wastes of the western Concavity, let me tell you.' 

'I will let you tell me anything as long as it is told to me over the porcelain of a 
lavatory.' 

'Interesting step you're doing there. Id, I have to say.' 

'I beg without frequency. My home culture views begging as low-caste.' 

'Hmm. Ars, I'm standing here thinking we could work something out, maybe.' 

'I commit no illegal or degrading acts. But I will, if forced, beg.' 

'Forget that. I'm just thinking. You're Muslimic, isn't that right?' 



'Devoutly. I pray five times daily in the prescribed fashion. I eschew representational 
art and carnality in all its four-thousand-four-hundred-and-four forms and guises.' 

'Body a temple and suchlike? 

'I eschew. Neither stimulants nor depressing compounds pass my lips, as is prescribed 
in the holy teachings of my faith.' 

'I'm wondering if you had any specific plans for this urine you're so anxious to get rid 
of, Ars, then.' 

'I am not following.' 

'What say we hash it all out over some porcelain, then, brother.' 

'Mike Pemulis, you are in motion a prince and in repose a sage.' 

'Brother, it'll be a cold day in a warm climate when this kid right here's in repose.' 


It was strange upon strange; it was almost as if the legless and pathologically shy 
punting-groupies were somehow afraid of Moment's Junoesque Ms. Steeply — Orin had 
seen his last wheelchair the day before she came up, and now (he realized, driving) it 
was only hours after she'd left that they were now back, with their shy ruses. The 
Excitement-Hope-Acquisition-Contempt cycle of seduction always left Orin stunned and 
wrung out and not at his quickest on the uptake. It was only after he'd cleaned up and 
dressed and exchanged the standard compliments and assurances, taken the elevator's 
glass pod down the tall hotel's round glass core into the lobby, gone out through the 
pressurized revolving door into the scalp-crackling gust of Phoenix heat, waited for the 
car's directional AC to render the steering wheel touchable, and then injected himself 
into the teeming arteries of Rt. 85 and Bell Rd. west, back out toward Sun City, 
ruminating as he drove, that it kertwanged on him that the handicapped man at the 
hotel room's door had had a wheelchair, that it was the first wheelchair he'd seen since 
Hal'd hit him with his theory, and that the legless surveyer had had (stranger) the same 
Swiss accent as the hand-model. 


En route, R. Lenz's mouth writhes and he scratches at the little rhynophemic rash and 
sniffs terribly and complains of terrible late-autumn leaf-mold allergies, forgetting that 
Bruce Green knows all too well what coke-hydrolysis's symptoms are from having done 
so many lines himself, back when life with M. Bonk was one big party. 

Lenz details how the vegetarian new Joel girl's veil is because of this condition people 
get where she's got only one eye that's right in the middle of her forehead, from birth, 
like a seahorse, and asks Green not even to think of asking how he knows this fact. 

While Green acts as lookout while Lenz relieves himself against a Market St. dumpster, 
Lenz swears Green to secrecy about how poor old scarred-up diseased Charlotte Treat 
had sworn him to secrecy about her secret dream in sobriety was to someday get her 
G.E.D. and become a dental hygienist specializing in educating youngsters pathologically 
frightened of dental anesthesia, because her dream was to help youngsters, and but 
how she feared her Virus has placed her secret dream forever out of reach. 239 

All the way up the Spur's Harvard St. toward Union Square, in a barely NW vector. 



Lenz consumes several minutes and less than twenty breaths sharing with Green some 
painful Family-Of-Origin Issues about how Lenz's mother Mrs. Lenz, a thrice-divorcee 
and Data Processor, was so unspeakably obese she had to make her own mumus out of 
brocade drapes and cotton tablecloths and never once did come to Parents' Day at 
Bishop Anthony McDiardama Elementary School in Fall River MA because of the parents 
had to sit in the youngsters' little liftable-desktop desks during the Parents' Day 
presentations and skits, and the one time Mrs. L. hove her way down to B.A.M.E.S. for 
Parents' Day and tried to seat herself at little Randall L.'s desk between Mrs. Lamb and 
Mrs. Leroux she broke the desk into kindling and needed four stocky cranberry-farmer 
dads and a textbook-dolly to arise back up from the classroom floor, and never went 
back, fabricating thin excuses of busyness with Data Processing and basic disinterest in 
Randy L.'s schoolwork. Lenz shares how then in adolescence (his), his mother died be¬ 
cause one day she was riding a Greyhound bus from Fall River MA north to Quincy MA 
to visit her son in a Commonwealth Youth Corrections facility Lenz was doing research 
for a possible screenplay in, and during the voyage on the bus she had to go potty, and 
she was in the bus's tiny potty in the rear of the bus going about her private business of 
going potty, as she later testified, and even though it was the height of winter she had 
the little window of the potty wide open, for reasons Lenz predicts Green doesn't want 
to hear about, on the northbound bus, and how this was one of the last years of 
Unsubsidized ordinational year-dating, and the final fiscal year that actual maintenance- 
work had ever been done on the infernous six-lane commuter-ravaged Commonwealth 
Route 24 from Fall River to Boston's South Shore by the pre-O.N.A.N.ite Governor 
Claprood's Commonwealth Highway Authority, and the Greyhound bus encountered a 
poorly marked UNDER CONSTRUCTION area where 24 was all stripped down to the 
dimpled-iron sheeting below and was tooth-rattlingly striated and chuckholed and torn 
up and just in general basically a mess, and the poorly marked and unflag-manned 
debris plus the excessive speed of the northbound bus made it jounce godawfully, the 
bus, and swerve violently to and forth, fighting to maintain control of what there was of 
the road, and passengers were hurled violently from their seats while, meanwhile, back 
in the closet-sized rear potty, Mrs. Lenz, right in the process of going potty, was hurled 
from the toilet by the first swerve and proceeded to do some high-velocity and human- 
waste-flinging pinballing back and forth against the potty's plastic walls; and when the 
bus finally regained total control and resumed course Mrs. Lenz had, freakishly enough, 
ended up her human pinballing with her bare and unspeakably huge backside wedged 
tight in the open window of the potty, so forcefully ensconced into the recesstacle that 
she was unable to extricate, and the bus continued on its northward sojourn the rest of 
the way up 24 with Mrs. Lenz's bare backside protruding from the ensconcing window, 
prompting car horns and derisive oratory from other vehicles; and Mrs. Lenz's plaintiff 
shouts for Help were unavailed by the passengers that were arising back up off the floor 
and rubbing their sore noggins and hearing Mrs. Lenz's mortified screams from behind 
the potty's locked reinforced plastic door, but were unable to excretate her because the 
potty's door locked from the interior by sliding across a deadbolt that made the door's 
outside say OCCUPIED/OCCUPADO/OCCUPE, and the door was locked, and Mrs. Lenz 
was wedged beyond the reach of arm-length and couldn't reach the deadbolt no matter 



how plaintiffly she reached out her mammoth fat-wattled arm; and, like fully 88% of all 
clinically obese Americans, Mrs. Lenz was diagnosed clinically claustrophobic and took 
prescription medication for anxiety and ensconcement-phobias, and she ended up 
successfully filing a Seven-Figure suit against Greyhound Lines and the almost-defunct 
Commonwealth Highway Authority for psychiatric trauma, public mortification, and 
second-degree frostbite, and received such a morbidly obese settlement from the 
Dukakis-appointed 18th-Circus Civil Court that when the check arrived, in an extra-long- 
size envelope to accommodate all the zeroes, Mrs. L. lost all will to Data Process or cook 
or clean, or nurture, or finally even move, simply reclining in a custom-designed 1.5- 
meter-wide recliner watching InterLace Gothic Romances and consuming mammoth vol¬ 
umes of high-lipid pastry brought on gold trays by a pastry chef she'd had put at her 
individual 24-hour disposal and outfitted with a cellular beeper, until four months after 
the huge settlement she ruptured and died, her mouth so crammed with peach cobbler 
the paramedics were hapless to administer C.P.R., which Lenz says he knows, by the way 
- C.P.R. 

By the time they hit the Spur, their northwest tacking has wheeled broadly right to 
become more truly north. Their route down here is a Mondrian of alleys narrowed to 
near-defiles from all the dumpsters. Lenz goes first, blaze-trailing. Lenz gives these sort 
of smoky looks to every female that passes within eyeshot. Their vector is now mostly 
N/NW. They stroll through the rich smell of dryer-exhaust from the backside of a 
laundromat off Dustin and Comm. The city of metro Boston MA at night. The ding and 
trundle of the B and C Greenie trains heading up Comm. Ave.'s hill, west. Street-drunks 
sitting with their backs to sooted walls, seeming to study their laps, even the mist of 
their breath discolored. The complex hiss of bus-brakes. The jagged shadows distending 
with headlights' passage. Latin music drifting through the Spur's Projects, twined around 
some 5/4 'shine stuff from a boombox over off Feeny Park, and in between these a 
haunting plasm of Hawaiian-type music that sounds at once top-volume and far far 
away. The zithery drifting Polynesian strains make Bruce Green's face spread in a flat 
mask of psychic pain he doesn't even feel is there, and then the music's gone. Lenz asks 
Green what it's like to work with ice all day at Leisure Time Ice and then himself 
theorizes on what it must be like, he'll bet, with your crushed ice and ice cubes in pale- 
blue plastic bags with a staple for a Twistie and dry ice in wood tubs pouring out white 
smoke and then your huge blocks of industrial ice packed in fragrant sawdust, the huge 
blocks of man-sized ice with flaws way inside like trapped white faces, white flames of 
internal cracks. Your picks and hatchets and really big tongs, red knuckles and rimed 
windows and thin bitter freezer-smell with runny-nosed Poles in plaid coats and kalpacs, 
your older ones with a chronic cant to one side from all the time lugging ice. 

They crunch through iridescent chunks of what Lenz I.D.s as a busted windshield. Lenz 
shares feelings on how between three ex-husbands and feral attorneys and a pastry- 
chef that used pastry-dependence to warp and twist her into distorting a testament 
toward the chef and Lenz's being through red-tape still in Quincy's Y.C.A. hold and in a 
weak litigational vantage, the ruptured Mrs. L.'s will had left him out in the cold to self- 
fend by his urban wits while ex-husbands and patissiers lay on Riviera beach-furniture 
fanning themselves with high-denomination currency, about all which Lenz says he 



grapples with the Issues of on a like daily basis; leaving Green a gap to make 
understanding sounds. Green's jacket creaks as he breathes. The windshield-glass is in 
an alley whose fire escapes are hung with what look like wet frozen tarps. The alley's 
tight-packed dumpsters and knobless steel doors and the dull black of total grime. The 
blunt snout of a bus protrudes into the frame of the alley's end, idling. 

Dumpsters' garbage doesn't have just one smell, depending. The urban lume makes 
the urban night only semidark, as in licoricey, a luminescence just under the skin of the 
dark, and swelling. Green keeps them updated re time. Lenz has begun to refer to Green 
as 'brother.' Lenz says he has to piss like a racehorse. He says the nice thing about the 
urban city is that it's one big commode. The way Lenz pronounces brother involves one 
r. Green moves up to stand in the mouth of the alley, facing out, giving Lenz a little 
privacy several dumpsters behind. Green stands there in the start of the alley's shadow, 
in the bus's warm backwash, his elbows out and hands in the jacket's little pockets, 
looking out. It's unclear whether Green knows Lenz is under the influence of Bing. All he 
feels is a moment of deep wrenching loss, of wishing getting high was still pleasurable 
for him so he could get high. This feeling comes and goes all day every day, still. Green 
takes a gasper from behind his ear and lights it and puts a fresh one on-deck behind the 
ear. Union Square, Allston: Kiss me where it smells, she said, so I took her to Allston, 
unquote. Union Square's lights throb. Whenever somebody stops blowing their horn 
somebody else starts blowing their horn. There's three Chinese women waiting at the 
light across the street from the guy with the lobsters. Each of them's got a shopping bag. 
An old VW Bug like Doony Glynn's VW Bug idling mufflerless outside Riley's Roast Beef, 
except Doony's Bug's engine is exposed where the back hood got removed to expose 
the Bug's guts. It's like impossible to ever spot a Chinese woman on a Boston street 
that's under sixty or over 1.5 m. or not carrying a shopping bag, except never more than 
one bag. If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody's 
different footwear's footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by 
something huge and tireless and patient. The searing facts of the case of Bruce Green's 
natural parents' deaths when he was a toddler are so deeply repressed inside Green 
that whole strata and substrata of silence and mute dumb animal suffering will have to 
be strip-mined up and dealt with a Day at a Time in sobriety for Green even to 
remember how, on his fifth Xmas Eve, in Waltham MA, his Pop had taken the hydrant¬ 
sized little Brucie Green aside and given him, to give his beloved Mama for Xmas, a gaily 
Gauguin-colored can of Polynesian Mauna Loa-brand 240 macadamia nuts, said cylindrical 
can of nuts then toted upstairs by the child and painstakingly wrapped in so much foil- 
sheen paper that the final wrapped present looked like an oversized dachshund that had 
required first bludgeoning and then restraint at both ends with two rolls each of Scotch 
tape and garish fuchsia ribbon to be subdued and wrapped and placed under the gaily lit 
pine, and even then the package seemed mushily to struggle as the substrata of paper 
shifted and settled. 

Bruce Green's Pop Mr. Green had at one time been one of New England's most 
influential aerobics instructors — even costarring once or twice, in the decade before 
digital dissemination, on the widely rented Buns of Steel aerobics home-video series — 
and had been in high demand and very influential until, to his horror, in his late 



twenties, the absolute prime of an aerobics instructor's working life, either one of Mr. 
Green's legs began spontaneously to grow or the other leg began spontaneously to 
retract, because within weeks one leg was all of a sudden nearly six inches longer than 
the other — Bruce Green's one unrepressed visual memory of the man is of a man who 
progressively and perilously leaned as he hobbled from specialist to specialist — and he 
had to get outfitted with a specialized orthopedic boot, black as a cauldron, that seemed 
to be 90% sole and resembled an asphalt-spreader's clunky boot, and weighed several 
pounds, and looked absurd with Spandex leggings; and the long and short of it was that 
Brucie Green's Pop was aerobically washed up by the leg and boot, and had to career- 
change, and went bitterly to work for a Waltham novelty or notions concern, something 
with 7V in the name. Acme Novelties 'N Notions or some such, where Mr. Green 
designed sort of sadistic practical-joke supplies, specializing in the Jolly Jolt Hand Buzzer 
and Blammo Cigar product-lines, with a sideline in entomological icecubes and artificial 
dandruff, etc. Demoralizing, sedentary, character-twisting work, is what an older child 
would have been able to understand, peering from his nightlit doorway at an unshaven 
man who clunkily paced away the wee hours on a nightly basis down in the living room, 
his gait like a bosun's in heavy seas, occasionally breaking into a tiny tentative gluteal- 
thruster squat-and-kick, almost falling, muttering bitterly, carrying a Falstaff tallboy. 

Something touching about a gift that a toddler's so awfully overwrapped makes a 
sickly-pale and neurasthenic but doting Mrs. Green, Bruce's beloved Mama, choose the 
mugged-dachshund-foil-sheen-cylinder present first, of course, to open, on Xmas 
morning, as they sit before the crackling fireplace in different chairs by different 
windows with views of Waltham sleet, with bowls of Xmas snacks and Acme-'N-logoed 
mugs of cocoa and hazelnut decaf and watch each other taking turns opening gifts. 
Brucie's little face aglow in the firelight as the unwrapping of the nuts proceeds through 
layer and stratum, Mrs. Green a couple times having to use her teeth on the rinds of 
tape. Finally the last layer is off and the gay-colored can in view. Mauna Loa: Mrs. 
Green's favorite and most decadent special-treat food. World's highest-calorie food 
except for like pure suet. Nuts so yummy they should be spelled S-l-N, she says. Brucie 
excitedly bobbing in his chair, spilling cocoa and Gummi Bears, a loving toddler, more 
excited about his gift's receipt than what he's going to get himself. His mother's clasped 
hands before her sunken bosom. Sighs of delight and protest. And an EZ-Open Lid, on 
the can. 

Which the contents of the macadamia-labelled can is really a coiled cloth snake with 
an ejaculatory spring. The snake sprongs out as Mrs. G. screams, a hand to her throat. 
Mr. Green howls with bitterly professional practical-gag mirth and clunks over and slaps 
little Bruce on the back so hard that Brucie expels a lime Gummi Bear he'd been eating 
— this too a visual memory, contextless and creepy — which arcs across the living room 
and lands in the fireplace's fire with a little green siss of flame. The cloth snake's arc has 
terminated at the imitation-crystal chandelier overhead, where the snake gets caught 
and hangs with quivering spring as the chandelier swings and tinkles and Mr. Green's 
thigh-slapping laughter takes a while to run down even as Brucie's Mama's hand at her 
delicate throat becomes claw-shaped and she claws at her throat and gurgles and 
slumps over to starboard with a fatal cardiac, her cyanotic mouth still open in surprise. 



For the first couple minutes Mr. Green thinks she's putting them on, and he keeps rating 
her performance on an Acme interdepartmental 1-8 Gag Scale until he finally gets 
pissed off and starts saying she's drawing the gag out too long, that she's going to scare 
their little Brucie who's sitting there under the swinging crystal, wide-eyed and silent. 

And Bruce Green uttered not another out-loud word until his last year of grade school, 
living by then in Winchester with his late mother's sister, a decent but Dustbowly- 
looking Seventh-Day Adventist who never once pressed Brucie to speak, probably out of 
sympathy, probably sympathizing with the searing pain the opaque-eyed child must 
have felt over not only giving his Mama a lethal Xmas present but over then having to 
watch his widowed asymetrical Pop cave psycho-spiritually in after the wake, watching 
Mr. Green pace-and-clunk around the living room all night every night after work and an 
undermicrowaved supper-for-two, in his Frankensteinian boot, clunking around in 
circles, scratching slowly at his face and arms until he looked less scourged than 
brambled, and in loosely associated mutters cursing God and himself and Acme Nuts 'N 
Serpents or whatever, and leaving the fatal snake up hanging from the fake-crystal 
fixture and the fatal Xmas tree up in its little red metal stand until all the strings of lights 
went out and the strings of popcorn got dark and hard and the stand's bowl of water 
evaporated so the tree's needles died and fell brownly off onto the rest of the still- 
unopened Xmas presents clustered below, one of which was a package of Nebraska 
corn-fed steaks whose cherub-motif wrapping was beginning ominously to swell...; and 
then finally the even more searing childhood pain of the public arrest and media-scandal 
and Sanity Flearing and Midwest trial as it was established after the fact that the post- 
Xmas Mr. Green — whose one encouraging sign of holding some tattered remnants of 
himself together after the funeral had been the fact that he still went faithfully every 
day to work at Acme Inc. — had gone in and packed a totally random case of the 
company's outgoing Blammo Cigars with vengefully lethal tetryl-based high explosives, 
and a V.F.W., three Rotarians, and 24 Shriners had been grotesquely decapitated across 
Southeastern Ohio before the federal A.T.F. traced the grisly forensic fragments back to 
B. Green Sr.'s Blammo lab, in Waltham; and then the extradition and horribly complex 
Sanity Flearing and trial and controversial sentencing; and then the appeals and 
deathwatch and Lethal Injection, Bruce Green's aunt handing out poorly reproduced W. 
Miller tracts to the crowds outside the Ohio prison as the clock ticked down to Injection, 
little Bruce in tow, blank-faced and watching, the crowd of media and anti-Capital 
activists and Defarge-like picnickers milling and roiling, many T-shirts for sale, and the 
red-faced men in sportcoats and fezzes, oh their rage-twisted faces the same red as 
their fezzes as the men careened this way and that in their little cars, formations of 
motorized Shriners buzzing the gates of the O.D.C.-Maximum facility and shouting Burn 
Baby Burn or the more timely Get Lethally Injected Baby Get Lethally Injected, Bruce 
Green's aunt with her center-parted hair visibly graying under the pillbox hat and face 
obscured for three Ohio months behind the black mesh veil that fluttered from the 
pillbox hat, clutching little Bruce's head to her underwired bosom day after day until his 
blank face was smooshed in on one side... Green's guilt, pain, fear and self-loathing have 
over years of unprescribed medication been compressed to the igneous point where he 
now knows only that he compulsively avoids any product or service with 7V in its name. 



always checks a palm before a handshake, will go blocks out of his way to avoid any 
parade involving fezzes in little cars, and has this silent, substratified fascination/horror 
gestalt about all things even remotely Polynesian. It's probably the distant and 
attenuated luau-music echoing erratically back and forth through angled blocks of 
Allston cement that causes Bruce Green to wander as if mesmerized out of Union 
Square and all the way up Comm. Ave. into Brighton and up to like the corner of Comm. 
Ave. and Brainerd Road, the home of The Unexamined Life nightclub with its tilted 
flickering bottle of blue neon over the entrance, before he realizes that Lenz is no longer 
beside him asking the time, that Lenz hadn't followed him up the hill even though Green 
had stood there outside the Union Square alley way longer than anybody could have 
needed to take a legitimate whiz. 

He and Lenz have become separated, he realizes. Now way southwest of Union on 
Comm., Green looks around at traffic and T-tracks and bar-patrons and T.U.L.'s huge 
bottle's low-neon flutter. He wonders whether he's somehow blown Lenz off or whether 
Lenz's blown him off, and that's all he wonders, that's the total complexity the 
speculation assumes, that's his thought for the minute. It's like the whole nut-can-and- 
cigar traumas drained into some psychic sump at puberty, sank and left only an oily slick 
that catches the light in distorted ways. The warbly Polynesian music's way clearer up 
here. He starts up the steep hill on Brainerd Rd., which terminates at the Enfield line. 
Maybe Lenz can't move straightforwardly south at all past a certain time. The acclivity is 
not kind to asphalt-spreader's boots. After the initial crazed-gerbil-in-brain phase of 
early Withdrawal and detox, Bruce Green has now returned to his normal 
psychorepressed cerebral state where he has about one fully developed thought every 
sixty seconds, and then just one at a time, a thought, each materializing already fully 
developed and sitting there and then melting back away like a languid liquid-crystal 
display. His Ennet House counselor, the extremely tough-loving Calvin T., complains that 
listening to Green is like listening to a faucet with a very slow drip. His rap is that Green 
seems not serene or detached but totally shut down, disassociated, and Calvin T. tries 
weekly to draw Green out by pissing him off. Green's next full thought is the realization 
that even though the hideous Hawaiian music had sounded like it was drifting up 
northward from down at the Allston Spur, it's somewhat louder now the farther west he 
moves toward Enfield's Cambridge St. dogleg and St. Elizabeth's Hospital. Brainerd 
between Commonwealth and Cambridge St. is a sine wave of lung-busting hills through 
neighborhoods Tiny Ewell had described as Depressed Residential, unending rows of 
crammed-together triple-decker houses with those tiny sad architectural differences 
that seem to highlight the essential sameness, with sagging porches and psoriatic paint- 
jobs or aluminum siding gone carbuncular from violent temperature-swings, yard-litter 
and dishes and patchy grass and fenced pets and children's toys lying around in 
discarded attitudes and eclectic food-smells and wildly different-patterned curtains or 
blinds in a house's different windows due to these old houses are carved up inside into 
apartments for like alienated B.U. students or Canadian and Concavity-displaced 
families or even more alienated B.C. students, or probably it looks like the bulk of the 
lease-holders are Green-and-Bonkesque younger blue-collar hard-partying types that 
have posters of the Fiends In Human Shape or Choosy Mothers or Snout or the 



Bioavailable Five 241 in the bathroom and black lights in the bedroom and oil-change 
stains in the driveway and that throw their supper dishes into the yard and buy new 
dishes at Caldor instead of washing their dishes and that still, in their twenties, ingest 
Substances nightly and use party as a verb and put their sound-systems' speakers in 
their apartments' windows facing out and crank the volume out of sheer high-spirit 
obnoxiousness because they still have their girlfriends to pound beers with and do 
shotguns of dope into the mouth of and do lines of Bing off various parts of the naked 
body of, and still find pounding beers and doing bongs and lines fun and get to have fun 
on a nightly after-work basis, cranking the tunes out into the neighborhood air. The 
street's bare trees are densely limbed, they're a certain type of tree, they look like 
inverted brooms in the residential dark. Green doesn't know his tree-names. The 
Hawaiian music is what's pulled him southwest, it emerges: it's originating from 
someplace in this very neighborhood somewhere around W. Brainerd, and Green moves 
upriver toward what sounds like the source of the sound with a blankly horrified 
fascination. Most of the yards are fenced in stainless-steel chain-link fencing, and 
occasional yard-dogs whine or more commonly bark and snarl and leap territorially at 
Green from behind their fences, the fences shivering from the impact and the chain-link 
stuff dented outward from previous impacts from previous passersby. The thought that 
he isn't scared of dogs develops and recedes in Green's midbrain. His jacket creaks with 
every step. The temperature is steadily dropping. The fenced front yards are the toy- 
and-beer-can-strewn type where the brown grass grows in uneven tufts and the leaves 
haven't been raked and are piled in wind-blown lines of force along the base of the 
fence and unpruned hedges and overfull wastebaskets and untwisted trash-bags are on 
the sagging porch because nobody's gotten around to taking them down to the E.W.D. 
dumpster at the corner and garbage from the overfull receptacles blows out into the 
yard and mixes with the leaves along the fences' base and some gets out into the street 
and is never picked up and eventually becomes part of the composition of the street. A 
nonpeanut M&M box is like intaglioed into the concrete of the sidewalk under Green, so 
bleached by the elements it's turned bone-white and is only barely identifiable as a 
nonpeanut M&M box, for instance. And, looking up from identifying the M&M box's 
make. Green now espies Randy Lenz. Green has happened upon Lenz, way up here on 
Brainerd, now strolling briskly alone up ahead of Green, not close but visible under a 
functioning streetlight about a block farther uphill on Brainerd. There's some 
disincentive to call out. The incline on this block isn't bad. It's cold enough now so his 
breath looks the same whether he's smoking or not. The tall curved streetlamps here 
look to Green just like the weaponish part of the Martian vessels that fired fatal rays in 
their conquest of the planet in an ancient cartridge Tommy Doocy'd never tired of that 
he labelled the case 'War of the Welles.' The Hawaiian music dominates the aural 
landscape by this point, now, coming from someplace up near where he sees the back 
of Lenz's coat. Someone has put Polynesian-music speakers in their window, pretty 
clearly. Creepy slack-key steel guitar balloons across the dim street, booms off the 
sagging facades opposite, it's Don Ho and the Sol Hoopi Players, the grass-skirt-and- 
foamy-breakers sound that makes Green put his fingers in his ears while at the same 
time he moves more urgently toward the Hawaiian-music source, a pink or aqua three- 



decker with a second-floor dormer and red-shingled roof with a blue and white 
Quenucker flag on a pole protruding from a window in the dormer and serious JBL 
speakers facing outward in the two windows on either side of the flag, with the screens 
off so you can see the woofers throbbing like brown bellies hula-ing, bathing the 1700 
block of W. Brainerd in dreadful ukuleles and hollow-log percussives. All the blunt 
fingers in his ears do is add the squeak of Green's pulse and the underwater sound of his 
respiration to the music, though. Figures in plaid-flannel or else floral Hawaiian shirts 
and those flower necklaces melt in and out of lit view behind and over the window- 
speakers with the oozing quality of large-group chemical fun and dancing and social 
intercoursing. The lit windows make slender rectangles of light out across the yard, 
which the yard is a sty. Something about Randy Lenz's movements up ahead, the high- 
kneed tiptoed skulk of a vaudeville fiend up to no good at all, keeps Green from calling 
out to him even if he could have made himself heard over what to him is a roar of blood 
and breath and Ho. Lenz moves through the one operative streetlight's cone across the 
sidewalk and over to the stainless chain-link of the same Quenucker house, holding 
something out to a Shetland-sized dog whose leash is attached to a fluorescent-plastic 
clothesliney thing by a pulley, and can slide. It's cold and the air is thin and keen and his 
fingers are icy in his ears, which ache with cold. Green watches, rapt on levels he doesn't 
know he has, drawn slowly forward, moving his head from side to side to keep from 
losing Lenz in the fog of his breath, not calling out, but transfixed. Green and Mildred 
Bonk and the other couple they'd shared a trailer with T. Doocy with had gone through a 
phase one time where they'd crash various collegiate parties and mix with the upper- 
scale collegiates, and once in one February Green found himself at a Harvard U. dorm 
where they were having a like Beach-Theme Party, with a dumptruck's worth of sand on 
the common-room floor and everybody with flower necklaces and skin bronzed with 
cream or UV-booth-salon visits, all the towheaded guys in floral untucked shirts walking 
around with lockjawed noblest oblige and drinking drinks with umbrellas in them or else 
wearing Speedos with no shirts and not one fucking pimple anyplace on their back and 
pretending to surf on a surfboard somebody had nailed to a hump-shaped wave made 
of blue and white papier mache with a motor inside that made the fake wave sort of 
undulate, and all the girls in grass skirts oozing around the room trying to hula in a 
shimmying way that showed their thighs' LipoVac scars through the shimmying grass of 
their skirts, and Mildred Bonk had donned a grass skirt and bikini-top out of the pile by 
the keggers and even though almost seven months pregnant had oozed and shimmied 
right into the mainstream of the swing of things, but Bruce Green had felt awkward and 
out of place in his cheap leather jacket and haircut he'd dyed orange with gasoline in a 
blackout and the EAT THE RICH patch he'd perversely let Mildred Bonk sew onto the 
groin of his police-pants, and then they'd finally got tired of the 'Hawaii Five-0' theme 
and started in with the Don Ho and Sol Hoopi CDs, and Green had gotten so 
uncomfortably fascinated and repelled and paralyzed by the Polynesian tunes that he'd 
set up a cabana-chair right by the kegs and had sat there overworking the pump on the 
kegs and downing one plastic cup after another of beer-foam until he got so blind drunk 
his sphincter had failed and he'd not only pissed but also actually shit his pants, for only 
the second time ever, and the first public time ever, and was mortified with complexly 



layered shame, and had to ease very gingerly into the nearest-by head and remove his 
pants and wipe himself off like a fucking baby, having to shut one eye to make sure 
which him he saw was him, and then there'd been nothing to do with the fouled police- 
pants but crack the bathroom door and reach a tattooed arm out with the pants and 
bury them in the living room's sand like a housecat's litterbox, and then of course what 
was he supposed to put on if he ever wanted to leave that head or dorm again, to get 
home, so he'd had to hold one eye shut and reach one arm out again and like strain to 
reach the pile of grass skirts and bikini-tops and snatch a grass skirt, and put it on, and 
slip out of the Hawaiian dorm out a side door without letting anybody see him, and then 
ride the Red Line and C-Greenie and then a bus all the way home in February in a cheap 
leather jacket and asphalt-spreader's boots and a grass skirt, the grass of which rode up 
in the most horrifying way, and he'd spent the next three days not leaving the trailer in 
the Spur, in a paralyzing depression of unknown etiology, lying on Tommy D.'s crusty- 
stained sofa and drinking Southern Comfort straight out of the bottle and watching 
Doocy's snakes not move once in three days, in their tank, and Mildred had given him 
two days of high-volume shit for first sulking antisocially by the keg and then screwing 
out and abandoning her at seven months gone to a sandy room full of tanly anomic 
blondes who said catty things about her tattoos and creepy boys who talked without 
moving their lower jaw and asked her things like where she 'summered' and kept 
offering her advice on no-load funds and inviting her upstairs to check out their Durer 
prints and saying they found overweight girls terribly compelling in their defiance of 
culturo-ascetic norms, and Bruce Green lay there with a head full of Hoopi and 
unresolved pain and didn't say a word or even have a fully developed thought for three 
days, and had hidden the grass skirt under the dustruffle of the couch and later savagely 
torn it to shreds and sprinkled the clippings over Doocy's hydroponic-marijuana 
development in the tub, for mulch. Lenz goes in and out of Green's focus several times 
within a dozen andante strides, still out in front of the Canadian-refugee-type house 
that's drawn Green on, Lenz holding a little can of something up over one side of the 
fence's gate and dribbling something onto the gate, holding something else that 
suddenly engages the dog's full attention. For some reason Green thinks to check his 
watch. The pink or orange clothesline quivers as the leash's pulley runs along it as the 
dog comes up to meet Lenz inside the gate he's slowly opened. The huge dog seems 
neither friendly nor unfriendly toward Lenz, but his attention is engaged. The leash and 
pulley could never hold him if he decided Lenz was food. There's bitter-smelling material 
from his ear on Green's finger, which he can't help but sniff. He's forgotten and left the 
other finger in his ear. He's now pretty close, standing in a van's shadow just outside the 
pyramid of sodium light from the streetlight, like two houses down from the source of 
the grisly sound, which all of a sudden is in the silence between cuts of Ho's early Don 
Ho: From Hawaii With All My Love, so that Green can hear baritone Canadianese party- 
voices through the open windows and also the low lalations of baby-talk of some sort 
from Lenz, 'Pooty ooty doggy woggy' and whatnot, presumably directed at the dog, 
who's coming over to Lenz in a sort of neutrally cautious but attentive way. Green has 
no clue what kind of dog it is, but it's big. Green can remember not the sight but the two 
very different sounds of the footfalls of his Pop the late Mr. Green pacing the Waltham 



living room, the crinkle of the paper bag around the tallboy in his hand. It's well after 
2245h. The dog's leash slides hissing to the end of the Day-Glo line and stops the dog a 
couple paces from the inside of the gate, where Lenz is standing, inclined in the slight 
forward way of somebody who's talking baby-talk to a dog. Green can see that Lenz has 
a slightly gnawed square of Don G.'s hard old meatloaf out in front of him, holding it 
toward the straining dog. Lenz has the blankly intent look of a short-haired man with a 
Geiger counter. The hideously compelling Ho starts again with the total abruptness that 
makes CDs so creepy. Green's got one finger in one ear, shifting around slightly to keep 
Lenz's lampshadow from blocking the view. The music balloons and booms. The Nucks 
have turned it way up for 'My Lovely Launa-Una Luau Lady,' a song that's always made 
Green want to put his head through a window. Part of the in-strumentals sounds like a 
harp on acid. The hollow-log percussives are like a heart in your extremest-type terror. 
Green fancies he can see windows in the houses opposite vibrate from the horrific 
vibration. Green's having way more than one thought p.m. now, the squeak of the 
gerbil-wheel starting to crank deep inside. The undulating shiver is a slack-steel guitar 
that fills little Brucie's head with white sand and undulating tummies and heads that 
resemble New Year's subsidized parade balloons, huge soft shiny baggy wrinkled 
grinning heads nodding and bobbing as they slowly inflate to the shape of a giant head, 
tilted forward, straining at the ropes they're pulled by. Green hasn't watched a New 
Year's parade since the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad's, which had been obscene. 
Green's close enough to see that the Hawaiianized Nuck house is 412 W. Brainerd. Blue- 
collar-type cars and 4x4s and vans are all up and down the street packed in in a 
somehow partyish attitude, as in parked in a hurry, some of them with Canadian 
lettering on the plates. Fleur-de-lis stickers and slogans in Canadian on some of the 
windows also. An old Montego cammed out into a slingshot dragster is parked square in 
front of 412 in a sort of menacing way with two wheels up on the curb and a circle of 
flowers hung jauntily over the antenna, and the ellipses of dull fade in the paintjob of 
the hood that show the engine's been bored out and the hood gets real hot, and Lenz 
has gotten down on one knee and breaks off some of the meatloaf and tosses it 
underhand to the ground inside the leash's range. The dog goes over and lowers its 
head to the meat. The distinctive sound of Gately's meatloaf getting chewed plus the 
ghastly music's zithery warbling roar. Lenz now rises and his movements in the yard 
have a melting and wraithlike quality in the different shades of shadow. The lit window 
farthest from the limp flag has solid swarthy guys in beards and loud shirts passing back 
and forth snapping their fingers under their elbows with flower-strewn females in tow. 
Many of the heads are thrown back and attached to Molson bottles. Green's jacket 
creaks as he tries to breathe. The snake had leapt from the can with a sound like: 
spronnnnng. His aunt at the Winchester breakfast nook, in dazzling winter dawnlight, 
quietly doing a word-search puzzle. Two dormer windows are half-blocked by the 
throbbing rectangles of the JBLs. Green's the type that can recognize a JBL speaker and 
Molson-green bottle from way far away. 

A developed thought coheres: Ho's voice has the quality of a type of: ointment. 

Any displaced and shaggy Nuck head in these windows chancing to look out into the 
yard now would be able to probably see Lenz depositing another chunk of meat in front 



of the pet and removing something from up near his shoulder under his topcoat as he's 
melting stealthily all the way around behind the dog to sort of straddle the big dog from 
the rear, easing the last of the loaf down in front of the dog, the big dog hunched, the 
crunch of Don's cornflake topping and the goopy sound of a dog eating institutional 
meat. The arm comes out from under the coat and goes up with something that looks 
like it would glitter if the windows' yardlight reached far enough. Bruce Green keeps 
trying to wave his breath out of the way. Lenz's fine coat billows around the dog's flanks 
as Lenz braces and leans and gathers the hunched thing's scruff in one hand and 
straightens up with a mighty grunting hoist that brings the animal up onto its hind legs 
as its front legs dig frantically at empty air, and the dog's whine brings a lei-and-flannel 
shape to the lit space above one speaker overhead. Green doesn't even think of calling 
out from his shadowed spot, and the moment hangs there with the dog upright and 
Lenz behind it, bringing the upraised hand down in front and hard across the dog's 
throat. There's a lightless arc from the spot Lenz's hand crossed; the arc splatters the 
gate and the sidewalk outside it. The music balloons without cease but Green hears Lenz 
say what sounds like 'How dare you' with great emphasis as he drops the dog forward 
onto the yard as there's a high-pitched male sound from the form at the window and 
the dog goes down and hits the ground on its side with the meaty crunch of a 32-kilo 
bag of Party-Size Cubelets, all four legs dog-paddling uselessly, the dark surface of the 
lawn blackening in a pulsing curve before its jaws that open and close. Green has moved 
unthinking out of the vanshadow toward Lenz and now thinks and stops between two 
trees by the street in front of 416 wanting to call to Lenz and feeling the strangled 
aphasia people feel in bad dreams, and so just stands there between the treetrunks with 
a finger in one ear, looking. The way Lenz stands over the hull of the big dog is like you 
stand over a punished child, at full height and radiating authority, and the moment 
hangs there distended like that until there's the shriek of long-shut windows opening 
against the Ho and the dire sound of numerous high-tempo logger's boots rushing down 
stairs inside 412. The creepily friendly bachelor that lived next to his aunt had had two 
big groomed dogs and when Bruce passed the house the dogs' toenails would scrabble 
on the wood of the front porch and run with their tails up to the anodized fence as 
Bruce came by and jump up and like sort of play the metal fence with their paws, 
excited to see him. To just like set eyes on him. Lenz's arm with the knife is up again and 
ungleaming in the streetlight's light as Lenz uses his other hand on the top of the fence 
to vault the fence sideways and tear-ass uphill up Brainerd Rd. in the southwest 
direction of Enfield, his loafers making a quality sound on the pavement and his open 
coat filling like a sail. Green retreats to behind one of the trees as beefy flannel forms 
with leis shedding petals, their speech grunty-foreign and unmistakably Canadian, a 
couple with ukuleles, spill out like ants over the sagging porch and into the yard, mill 
and jabber, a couple kneel by the form of the former dog. A bearded guy so huge a 
Hawaiian shirt looks tight on him has picked up the meatloaf's baggie. Another guy 
without very much hair picks what looks like a white caterpillar out of the dark grass and 
holds it up delicately between his thumb and finger, looking at it. Yet another huge guy 
in suspenders drops his beer and picks up the limp dog and it lies across his arms on its 
back with its head way back like a swooned girl, dripping and with one leg still going. 



and the guy is either screaming or singing. The original massive Nuck with the baggie 
clutches his head to signal agitation as he and two other Nucks run heavily to the 
slingshot Montego. A first-floor light in the house across Brainerd lights up and 
backlights a figure in a sort of suit and metal wheelchair sitting right up next to the 
window in the sideways way of wheelchairs that want to get right up next to something, 
scanning the street and Nuck-swarmed yard. The Hawaiian music has apparently 
stopped, but not abruptly, it's not like somebody took it off in the middle. Green has 
retreated to behind a tree, which he sort of one-arm-hugs. A thick girl in a horrible grass 
skirt is saying 'Dyu!' several times. There are obscenities and heavily accented stock 
phrases like 'Stop! 1 and 'There he goes!,' with pointing. Several guys are running up the 
sidewalk after Lenz, but they're in boots, and Lenz is way ahead and now disappears as 
he cuts like a tailback left and disappears down either an alley or a serious driveway, 
though you can still hear his fine shoes. One of the guys actually shakes his fist as he 
gives chase. The Montego with the twin cam reveals muffler problems and clunks down 
off the curb and lays two parentheses as it 180s professionally around in the middle of 
the street and peels out up in Lenz's direction, a very low and fast and no-shit car, its 
antenna's gay lei tugged by speed into a strained ellipse and leaving a wake of white 
petals that take forever to stop falling. Green thinks his finger might be frozen to his 
ear's inside. Nobody seems to be gesticulating about anything about maybe an 
accomplice. There's no evidence they're looking around for any other unwittingly guilty 
accessory-type party. Another wheelchaired form has appeared just behind and to the 
right of the first seated backlit form across the street, and they're both in a position to 
see Green up against the tree with his hand to his ear so it looks like he's maybe 
receiving communiques from some kind of earpiece. The Nucks are still milling around 
the yard in a way that's indescribably foreign as the one Nuck staggers in circles under 
the weight of the expired dog, saying something to the sky. Green is getting to know this 
one tree very well, spread out against its lee side and breathing into the bark of the tree 
so his exhaled breath won't plume out from behind the tree and be seen as an 
accomplice's breath, potentially. 


Mario Incandenza's nineteenth birthday will be Wednesday 25 November, the day 
before Thanksgiving. His insomnia worsens as Madame Psychosis's hiatus enters its third 
week and WYYY tries bringing back poor Miss Diagnosis again, who's started in on a Pig- 
Latin reading of the Revelation of John that makes you so embarrassed for her it's 
uncomfortable. For a couple nights in the HmH living room he tries falling asleep to 
WODS, an AM-fringe outfit that plays narcotizing orchestral arrangements of old Car¬ 
penters songs. It makes things worse. It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not 
even sure you know. 

He gets a serious burn on his pelvis leaning against a hot steel stove talking to Mrs. 
Clarke. His hip is swaddled in bandages under Orin's old corduroys, and there's a sucking 
sound of salve when he walks, late at night, unable to sleep. The birth-related disability 
that wasn't even definitively diagnosed until Mario was six and had let Orin tattoo his 
shoulder with the red coil of an immersion heater is called Familial Dysautonomia, a 



neurological deficit whereby he can't feel physical pain very well. A lot of the E.T.A.s kid 
him about they should have such problems, and even Hal's sometimes felt a twinge of 
envy about it, but the defect is a serious hassle and actually very dangerous, see for 
instance the burnt pelvis, which wasn't even discovered until Mrs. Clarke thought she 
smelled her eggplant overcooking. 

At HmH he lies on the air mattress in a tight down bag on the edge of the violet plant- 
light with the wind rattling the big east window, listening to buttery violins and what 
sounds like a zither. There's sometimes a scream upstairs, shrill and drawn out, from 
where C.T.'s and the Moms's rooms are. Mario listens closely for whether the sound 
ends up as Avril laughing or Avril screaming. She gets night terrors, which are like 
nightmares but worse, and which afflict small children and apparently also adults who 
eat the day's biggest meal right before bed. 

His nighttime prayers take almost an hour and sometimes more and are not a chore. 
He doesn't kneel; it's more like a conversation. And he's not crazy, it's not like he hears 
anybody or anything conversing back with him, Hal's established. 

Hal had asked him when he'll start coming back to their room to sleep, which made 
Mario feel good. 

He keeps trying to imagine Madame Psychosis — whom he imagines as being very tall 
— lying in an XL beach chair on a beach smiling and not saying anything for days, 
resting. But it doesn't work very well. 

He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's states of 
mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of 
preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even 
if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore. Feel it. 
This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and 
you can't even remember what it was but it's important. Mario loves Hal so much it 
makes his heart beat hard. He doesn't have to wonder if the difference now is him or his 
brother because Mario never changes. 

He hadn't told the Moms he was going to walk around after he left her office after 
their interface: Avril usually tries in a nonintrusive way to discourage Mario from taking 
walks at night, because he doesn't see well at night, and the areas around the E.T.A. hill 
are not the best neighborhood, and there's no skirting the fact that Mario would be easy 
prey for just about anybody, physically. And, though one perk of Familial Dysautonomia 
is a relative physical fearlessness, 242 Mario keeps to a pretty limited area during 
insomniacal strolls, out of deference to Avril's worry. 243 He'll sometimes walk around the 
grounds of the Enfield Marine P.H.H. at the bottom of the hill's east side because they're 
pretty much enclosed, the grounds are, and he knows a couple of the E.M. Security 
officers from when his father got them to portray Boston police in his whimsical Dial C 
for Concupiscence; and he likes the E.M. grounds at night because the different brick 
houses' window-light is yellow lamplight 244 and he can see people on the ground floors 
all together playing cards or talking or watching TP. He also likes whitewashed brick 
regardless of its state of upkeep. And a lot of the people in the different brick houses are 
damaged or askew and lean hard to one side or are twisted into themselves, through 
the windows, and he can feel his heart going out into the world through them, which is 



good for insomnia. A woman's voice, calling for help without any real urgency — not like 
the screams that signify the Moms laughing or screaming at night — sounds from a 
darkened upper window. And across the little street that's crammed with cars 
everybody has to move at OOOOh. is Ennet's House, where the Headmistress has a 
disability and had had a wheelchair ramp installed and has twice invited Mario in during 
the day for a Caffeine-Free Millennial Fizzy, and Mario likes the place: it's crowded and 
noisy and none of the furniture has protective plastic wrap, but nobody notices anybody 
else or comments on a disability and the Headmistress is kind to the people and the 
people cry in front of each other. The inside of it smells like an ashtray, but Mario's felt 
good both times in Ennet's House because it's very real; people are crying and making 
noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight 
face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you 
could tell they were worried inside. 

People from the public can't be in there after 2300, though, because they have a 
Curfew, so Mario just totters past on the broken sidewalk and looks in the ground 
windows at all the different people. Every window is lit up with light and some are slid 
partly open, and there is the noise of being outside a house full of people. From one of 
the upstairs windows facing the street comes a voice going 'Give it here, give it here.' 
Someone is crying and someone else is either laughing or coughing very hard. An 
irritable man's voice from a kitchen window at the side says something to somebody 
else that just said something like 'So get dentures,' followed by curse words. Another 
upstairs window, over at the side by the wheelchair ramp and the kitchen window 
where the ground is soft enough to take the stress of a police lock and lead block nicely, 
the upper window has a billowing lengthwise flag for a curtain and an old bumper 
sticker on the glass half scraped off so it says ONE DAY A in cursive, and Mario is 
arrested by the quiet but unmistakable sound of a recording of a broadcast of 'Sixty 
Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis,' which Mario has never taped a show of 
because he feels it wouldn't be right for him but is strangely thrilled to hear someone in 
Ennet's thinking enough of to tape and replay. What's coming from behind the open 
window with a billowing flag for a curtain is one of the old ones, from the Year of the 
Wonderchicken, Madame's inaugural year, when she'd sometimes talk all hour and had 
an accent. A hard east wind blows Mario's thin hair straight back off his head. His 
standing angle is 50°. A female girl in a little fur coat and uncomfortable-looking 
bluejeans and tall shoes clicks past on the sidewalk and goes up the ramp into Ennet's 
back door without indicating she saw somebody with a really big head standing braced 
by a police lock on the lawn outside the kitchen window. The lady had had on so much 
makeup she'd looked unwell but the wake of her passage smells very good. For some 
reason Mario felt like the person behind the flag in the window was also a female. Mario 
thinks it might not be out of the question that she might lend tapes to a fellow listener if 
he could ask. He usually checks etiquette questions with Hal, who is incredibly 
knowledgeable and smart. When he thinks of Hal his heart beats and his forehead's 
thick skin becomes wrinkled. Hal will also know the term for private tapes made of 
broadcast things on the air. Perhaps this lady owns multiple tapes. This one is from 'Sixty 
Minutes +/-''s first year, when Madame still had a slight accent and often spoke on the 



show as if she were talking exclusively to one person or character who was very 
important to her. The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone 
who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art. Mario'd fallen in love with the first 
Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read 
out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about 
heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is 
increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. The older 
Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the 
age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get 
embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if 
everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. The worst-feeling thing 
that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for 
setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the 
number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good 
one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big 
table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they 
were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario's 
head, and he was unable to understand Lyle's replies when he tried to bring the 
confusion up. And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more 
uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up 
real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he'd wet himself and Hal was going to be 
very patient about helping him change. 

A lot of people are appearing out of the dark and walking by to go in for the Curfew. 
They all seem afraid and scowl to pretend they're not shy. The men have their hands in 
their coat pockets and the females have their hands at their coats' throats, keeping 
them shut. One young person Mario's never seen sees him struggling with the police 
lock and helps him disengage the bar and get the lead block into his backpack. Just that 
little bit of help that makes the difference. Mario is suddenly so sleepy he's not sure he 
can get up the hill to go home. The musics that played at the beginning of Madame 
Psychosis's career are the exact same that played to the end, what sounds so unaccept¬ 
able without her there. 

Mario's forward list is perfect for walking up hills, however. His pelvis's salve makes a 
sound but doesn't hurt. In the big protruding window of Ennet's House's Headmistress's 
office that the window overlooks the Avenue and the train tracks and the Ngs' clean 
Father and Son Grocery, where they give Mario yellow tea in the A.M. when he comes 
by when it's cold, the last thing Mario can see, before the hillside's trees close behind 
him and reduce the Ennet House to shattered yellow lighting, is a wide square-headed 
boy bent over something he's writing at the Headmistress's black desk, licking a pencil- 
end and hunched all uncomfortably with one arm curled out around what he's writing 
in, like a slow boy over a class theme at Rindge and Latin Special. 


Live-in Staffers' evening duties are divided pretty evenly between the picayune and 
the unpleasant. Somebody has to hit the area meetings to verify residents' attendance. 



while somebody else has to miss a nightly meeting to man the empty House and phones 
and do the picayune Daily Log. After the meetings let out, Gately's supposed to do a 
head-count every hour and make a Log-entry on who all's there and what's going on. 
Gately has to do a Chore-patrol and Log-entry on Chore-performance and nail down 
tomorrow's Chore-assignments off the weekly sheet. The residents need to have 
everything expected of them spelled out in advance so they can't bitch if they get 
popped for something. Then people who haven't performed on their Chore have to be 
told they're on a week's Restriction, which tends to be unpleasant. Gately has to unlock 
Pat's cabinets and get the key to the meds locker and open the meds locker. Residents 
on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the 
sound of a can-opener. They just like materialize. Gately has to dispense oral insulin and 
Virus-meds and pimple medicine and antidepressants and lithium to the residents who 
materialize for meds, and then he has to enter everything in the Medical Log, which the 
M. Log is an incredible fucking mess. He has to get out Pat's Week-At-A-Glance book and 
print out her next day's appointments on a sheet of paper in block letters, because Pat 
finds her own palsied handwriting impossible to read. Gately has to confer with 
Johnette Foltz about how different residents conducted themselves at St. E.'s Sharing 
and Caring and Brookline's B.Y.P. and a Women's NA Step down in East Cambridge they 
let a couple of the senior females go to, and then Log all the data. Gately has to go up 
and check on Kate G., who claimed to be too sick to hit AA again tonight and has been in 
bed in her room more or less steadily for three days, reading somebody called Sylvia 
Plate. Going up onto the women's side of the upstairs is an incredible pain in the ass 
because he has to unlock a little steel cage over a little button at the bottom of their 
stairway by the back office and press the button to sound an upstairs buzzer and shout 
up the stairs 'Male on the floor' and then give the female residents as much time as they 
need to get decent or whatever before he can come up. 

Going up there has been educational for Gately because he'd always had this idea that 
women's areas were essentially cleaner and pleasanter than men's areas. Having to 
verify the Chore in the women's two bathrooms smashed his longstanding delusion that 
women didn't go to the bathroom with the same appalling vigor that men did. Gately'd 
done a fair amount of cleaning up after his mother, but he'd never much thought of her 
as a woman. So the whole unpleasant thing's been an education. 

Gately has to check on Doony Glynn, who has recurrent diverticulitis and has to lie 
fetal on his bunk when he gets an attack and has to be brought Motrin and a SlimFast 
shake that Gately had to make with 2% milk because there was no skim left, and then 
Food Bank crackers and a tonic out of the basement's machine when Glynn can't drink 
the 2% shake, and then Log Glynn's comments and condition, neither of which are good. 

Somebody has made those disgusting marshmallowy Rice Krispie things in the kitchen 
and then not cleaned up after themselves, and Gately has to clomp around finding out 
who's responsible and get them to clean it up, and the code about ratting among the 
residents is such that you'd think he was a narc all of a sudden. The daily bullshit here is 
hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking; a double-shift here now empties 
him out by dawn, just in time to clean real shit. It hadn't been this way at the start, the 
soul-sucking aspect, and Gately every couple minutes wonders again what he'll end up 



doing when his year's Staff term is up and his soul is sucked out and he's sober but 
without any money and still clueless and has to leave here and do something back Out 
There. 

Kate Gompert, when he buzzed and went up to the 5-Woman room to look in, had 
made a possible sideways comment about hurting herself, 245 and Gately has to call Pat 
at home about it, and she's out or not picking up, so then he has to call the House 
Manager and relay the verbatim comment and let her interpret it and tell Gately what 
action to take and how the comment stands in relation to Gompert's Suicide Contract 
and how the whole thing should be Logged. A resident at Ennet had hung herself from a 
heating pipe in the basement a couple years before Gately arrived, and there are now 
baroque procedures for monitoring ideation among residents with psych issues. The 
number of 5-East at St. Elizabeth's is on a red card in Pat's Rolodex. 

Gately has to collect the previous week's counselor-reports and collate them and get 
the residents' files together and get any updates or changes printed out and into the 
files for tomorrow's All-Staff Meeting, where the Staff gets together in Pat's office and 
interfaces on how each resident seems to be doing. Residents have a pretty good idea 
that their alumni counselors basically rat them out in toto at each Staff meeting, which 
is why counselling sessions tend to be so incredibly dull that only really grateful giving 
Ennet alumni are willing to serve as counselors. Filing-organization is picayune, and for 
Gately using the back office's TP array to print stuff out is unpleasant, mostly because 
each of his fingers covers almost three keys of the keyboard and he has to hit each key 
carefully with the tip of a pen, which sometimes he forgets to retract the nub of, leaving 
blue smears on the keys that the House Manager always gives him an ass-chewing for. 

And Gately has to have each newer resident in to the office for at least a couple 
minutes to like touch base and see how they're doing and make it clear they're regarded 
as existing so they can't just melt into the living room's decor and disappear. The newest 
guy's still sitting in the linen closet claiming he's comfortablest there with the door open 
and the new 'helpless' Amy Johnson hasn't come back yet. A brand-new Court-Ordered 
female, Ruth van Cleve, who looks like one of those people you see in pictures of African 
famine, has to fill out Intake forms and go through Orientation, and Gately goes over the 
House rules with her and gives her a copy of the Ennet House Survival Guide, which 
some resident years gone had written for Pat. 

Gately has to answer the phone and tell people who call the office for a resident that 
residents can receive calls only on the pay phone in the basement, which he has to say 
yes is frequently busy all the time. The House prohibits cellular/mobiles and has a 
Boundary about the office phone for residents. Gately has to kick residents off down 
there when other residents in line come and complain they've exceeded their five 
minutes. This also tends to be unpleasant: the pay phone down there is undigital and 
un-shutoffable and a constant source of aggravation and beefs; every conversation is 
life-and-death; crisis down there 24/7. There's a special way to kick somebody off a pay 
phone that's respectful and nonshaming but also firm. Gately has gotten good at 
assuming a blank but not passive expression when residents are abusive. There's this 
look of weary expertise the House Staffers cultivate, then have to flex their face to get 
rid of when they're off-duty. Gately's gotten so stoic in the face of abuse that a resident 



has to mention actual unnatural acts in connection with his name for Gately to Log the 
abuse and give out a Restriction. He's respected and well-liked by almost all the 
residents, which the House Manager says causes the veteran Staff some concern, 
because Gately's job is not to be these people's friend all the time. 

Then in the kitchen with the fucking Krispie-treat bowls and pans still a fucking mess 
Wade McDade and some other residents were standing around waiting for various 
things to toast and boil and McDade was using his finger and pushing the tip of his nose 
up so that his nostrils faced straight out at everybody. He was looking piggishly around 
and asking if people knew any people where their nose looked like this right here, and 
some people said yes, sure, why. Gately checked the fridge and again saw evidence that 
his special meatloaf had a secret admirer, it looked like, another big rectangle cut out of 
the leftovers he'd carefully wrapped and laid out on the sturdiest shelf in there. 
McDade, who Gately struggles daily with the urge to hit McDade so hard there'd be 
nothing but eyes and a nose down over the tops of his cowboy boots, McDade's telling 
everybody he's constructing a Gratitude List at Calvin T.'s tough-love suggestion and he 
says he's decided one of the things he's grateful for is his nose don't look like this here. 
Gately tries not to judge on the basis of who laughs and who doesn't. When Pat's phone 
rings and Gately leaves, McDade's squunching his upper lip up in his hand and asking 
people about acquaintance with cleft palates. 

Gately has to monitor the like emotional barometer in the House and put a wet finger 
to the wind for potential conflicts and issues and rumors. A subtle art here is 
maintaining access to the residents' gossip-grapevine and keeping on top of rumors 
without seeming like you're inducing a resident to cross the line and actually eat cheese 
on another resident. The only thing a resident is actually encouraged to rat out another 
resident on here is picking up a Substance. All other-type issues it's supposed to be 
Staff's job to glean and ferret out etc., to decoct legitimate infractions out of the tides of 
innuendo and bullshit complaint 20+ bored crammed-together street-canny people in 
detox from wrecked lives can generate. Rumors that so-and-so blew so-and-so on the 
couch at 0300, that thus-and-such's got a knife, that X was using what had to be some 
kind of code on the pay phone, that Y's gone back to carrying a beeper, that so-and-so's 
making book on football out of the 5-Man room, that Belbin had led Diehl to believe 
she'd clean up if he made Krispie Treats and then she weaseled out, and etc. Almost all 
of it's picayune and, over time, as it accretes, unpleasant. 


Rarely a feeling of outright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward — just an abrupt loss 
of hope. Plus there is the contempt he belies so well with gentleness and caring during 
that post-coital period of small sounds and adjustments. 

Orin can only give, not receive, pleasure, and this makes a contemptible number of 
them think he is a wonderful lover, almost a dream-type lover; and this fuels the 
contempt. But he cannot show the contempt, since this would pretty clearly detract 
from the Subject's pleasure. 

Because the Subject's pleasure in him has become his food, he is conscientious in the 
consideration and gentleness he shows after coitus, making clear his desire to stay right 



there very close and be intimate, when so many other male lovers, the Subjects say, 
seem afterward to become uneasy, contemptuous, or distant, rolling over to stare at 
the wall or tamping down a smoke before they've even stopped twitching. 

The hand-model told him very softly how the photograph's big pink Swiss husband 
after coitus hove himself off her and lay there stunned under his stomach's weight, his 
eyes narrowed to piggy slits and the faint smirk on his face that of a gorged predator: 
not like the punter: uncaring. As was S.O.P. with Subjects she became then briefly 
stricken and anxious and said no one must ever know, she could lose her children. Orin 
administered the standard assurances in a very soft intimate voice. Orin was 
resoundingly gentle and caring afterward, as she could somehow just intuitively tell he 
would be. It was true. It gave him real pleasure to give the impression of care and 
intimacy in this interval; if someone asked about his favorite part of the anticlimactic 
time after the Subject lay back and glisteningly opened and he could see her eyes 
holding him whole, Orin would say his #2 favorite is this post-seminal interval of clingy 
vulnerability on the Subject's part and gentle intimate care on his own. 

When the knock on the room door came it seemed like a further grace, for the Subject 
had been up on an elbow in bed, exhaling slim tusks of cigarette-smoke from her nose 
and starting to ask him to tell her things about his own family, and Orin was stroking her 
very tenderly and watching the twin curves of smoke pale and spread and trying not to 
shudder at the thought of what the inside of the Subject's fine nose must look like, what 
gray-white tangles of necrotic snot must hang and twine up in there, from the smoke, 
whether she had the stomach to look at a hankie she'd used or whether she balled the 
thing up and flung it from her with the sort of shudder 0. knew he'd feel; and when the 
brisk action of male knuckles sounded against the room's door he watched her face 
whiten from the forehead down as she pleaded that no one must know of her whoever 
was there and stabbed out her butt and dove beneath the blankets as he called out for 
patience to the door and veered to the bathroom to wrap a towel around him before he 
went to it, the sort of bland hotel door you used a card and not a key for. The defiled, 
guilty, and frightened married hand-model's wrist and hand protruded for a moment 
from the edge of the bedding and felt the floor for shoes and clothes, the hand moving 
like a blind spider and sucking things up under the blankets. Orin didn't ask who it was 
at the door; be had nothing to hide. His mood at the door became extraordinarily fine. 
When the wife and mother had erased all evidence of herself and heaped the bedding 
over her so she could lie there sniffing grayly and imagining that she was hidden from 
view, just one lumpy part of a celibate napper's dishevelled bed, Orin checked the 
door's fish-eye peeper, saw only the hallway's claret-colored wall opposite, and opened 
the door with a smile he felt all the way down to his bare soles. Swiss cuckolds, furtive 
near-Eastern medical attaches, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything. 

The man in the hall at the door was handicapped, challenged, in a wheelchair, looking 
up at him from well below peephole-range, bushy-haired and mostly nose and looking 
up into the swell of Orin's pectorals, making no attempt to see around him into the 
room. One of the disabled. Orin looked down and felt both let down and almost 
touched. The little fellow's wheelchair shiny and his lap blanketed and his string tie half- 
hidden by the clipboard he held to his chest with a curled and motherly arm. 



'Survey,' the man said, nothing else, joggling the clipboard a little like an infant, 
presenting it as evidence. 

Orin imagined the terrified Subject lying there hidden and trying to hear, and despite a 
sort of mild disappointment he felt touched at whatever this shy ruse of an excuse for 
proximity to his leg and autograph might be. He felt for the Subject the sort of clinical 
contempt you feel for an insect you've looked down and seen and know you're going to 
torture for a while. From the way she smoked and performed certain other manual 
operations, Orin'd noted she was left-handed. 

He said to the man in the wheelchair, 'Goody.' 

'Plus or minus three percent sample.' 

'Eager to cooperate in any way.' 

The man cocked his head in that way people in wheelchairs do. 'Scholarly academic 
study.' 

'Pisser.' Leaning against the jamb with arms crossed, watching the man try to process 
the dissimilarity in the size of his limbs. No shins or extremities, however withery, 
extended below the wheelchair's blanket's hem. The guy was like totally legless. Orin's 
rising heart went out. 

'Chamber of Commerce survey. Concerned veterans' group systematic inquiry. 
Consumer advocacy polling operation. Three percentage points error on either of two 
sides of the issue.' 

'Bully.' 

'Consumer-advocacy group opinion sweep. Very little time involved. Government 
study. Ad council demographic assessment. Sweeps. Random anonymity. Minimum in 
terms of time or trouble.' 

'I'm clearing my mind to be of maximum help.' 

When the man had taken out his pen with a flourish and looked down at his board 
Orin got a look at the yarmulke of skin in the center of the seated man's hair. There was 
something almost unbearably touching about a bald spot on a handicapped man. 

'What do you miss, please?' 

Orin smiled coolly. 'Very little, I like to think.' 

'Backtrack. U.S.A. citizen?' 

'Yes.' 

'You have how many years?' 

'Age?' 

'You have which age?' 

'Age is twenty-six.' 

'Over twenty-five?' 

'That'd follow.' Orin was waiting for the ruse involving the pen that'd get him to sign 
something so the very shy fan club'd get their autograph. He tried to remember from 
Mario's childhood how long under blankets before it got unbearably hot and you started 
to smother and thrash. 

The man pretended to notate. 'Employed, self-employed, unemployed?' 

Orin smiled. 'The first.' 

'Please list what you miss.' 



The whisper of the vent, hush of the wine-colored hallway, vaguest whisper of rustling 
sheets behind, imagining the growing bubble of CO 2 under the sheets. 

'Please list lifestyle elements of your U.S.A. lifetime you recall, and/or at present lack, 
and miss.' 

'I'm not sure I follow.' 

The man flipped a page over to check. 'Pine, yearn, winsome, nostalgia. Lump of 
throat.' Flipping one more sheet. 'Wistful, as well.' 

'You mean childhood memories. You mean like cocoa with half-melted marshmallows 
floating on top in a checker-tiled kitchen warmed by an enamel gas range, that sort of 
thing. Or omnissent doors at airports and Star Markets that somehow knew you were 
there and slid open. Before they disappeared. Where did those doors go?' 

'Enamel is with the e?' 

'And then some.' 

Orin's gaze now was up at the ceiling's acoustic tile, the little blinking disk of the hall's 
smoke detector, as if memories were always lighter than air. The seated man stared 
blandly up at the throb of Orin's internal jugular vein. Orin's face changed a little. Behind 
him, under the blankets, the non-Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, 
breathing silently into the portable 0 2 -mask w/ canister from the purse beside her, one 
hand in the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol. 

'I miss TV,' Orin said, looking back down. Fie no longer smiled coolly. 

'The former television of commercial broadcast.' 

'I do.' 

'Reason in several words or less, please, for the box after REASON,' displaying the 
board. 

'Oh, man.' Orin looked back up and away at what seemed to be nothing, feeling at his 
jaw around the retromandibular's much tinier and more vulnerable throb. 'Some of this 
may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the 
phrases "Order before midnight tonight" and "Save up to fifty percent and more." I miss 
being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems 
and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss 
"Sermonette" and "Evensong" and test patterns and being told how many megahertz 
something's transmitter was broadcasting at.' Fie felt his face. 'I miss sneering at 
something I love. Flow we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of 
the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at 
the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.' 

'Vapid ditty,' pretending to notate. 

'I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were 
going to say.' 

'Emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure.' 

'You can say that again, boy. I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill 
the intervals of writers' strikes. Actors' Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and 
Diane, Gilligan, Flawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I 
miss seeing the same things over and over again.' 

There were two muffled sneezes from the bed behind him that the handicapped man 



didn't even acknowledge, pretending to write, brushing his string tie's dangle away 
again and again as he wrote. Orin tried not to imagine the topography of the sheets the 
Subject'd sneezed into. He no longer cared about the ruse. He did feel tender, 
somehow, toward him. 

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and 
planes. 'You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on 
TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.' 

Orin's way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy's way of 
looking up. 'But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you 
were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.' 

'Inflicted.' 

'I don't think I exactly know,' Orin said, suddenly dimly stunned and sad inside. The 
terrible sense as in dreams of something vital you've forgotten to do. The inclined 
head's bald spot was freckled and tan. 'Is there a next item?' 

'Things to tell me you do not miss.' 

'For symmetry.' 

'Balance of opinion.' 

Orin smiled. 'Plus or minus.' 

'Just so,' the man said. 

Orin resisted an urge to lay his hand tenderly over the arc of the disabled man's skull. 
'Well how much time do we have here?' 

The skyscraper-gawking aspect was only when the man's gaze went higher than Orin's 
neck. They were not shy or indirect or even the eyes of someone in any way disabled, 
was what struck Orin later as odd — besides the Swiss accent, the absence of a 
signature-ruse, the Subject's patience with the wait and the absence of gasping when 0. 
pulled the covers abruptly back, later. The man had looked up at Orin and flicked his 
eyes slightly past him, at the room behind with pantyless floor and humped covers. Orin 
was meant to see the glance past him. 'Can return at later time which we specify. You 
are, comme on dit, engaged?' 

Orin's smile wasn't as cool as he thought as he told the seated figure that that was a 
matter of opinion. 


As at all D.S.A.S.-certified halfway facilities, Ennet House's resident curfew is 2330h. 
From 2300 to 2330, the Staffer on night-duty has to do head-counts and sit around like 
somebody's mom waiting for different residents to come in. There's always ones that 
always like to cut it close and play with the idea of getting Discharged for something 
picayune so it won't be their fault. Tonight Clenette H. and the deeply whacked-out 
Yolanda W. come back in from Footprints 246 around 2315 in purple skirts and purple 
lipstick and ironed hair, tottering on heels and telling each other what a wicked time 
they just had. Hester Thrale undulates in in a false fox jacket at 2320 as usual even 
though she has to be up at like 0430 for the breakfast-shift at the Provident Nursing 
Home and sometimes eats breakfast with Gately, both of their faces nodding down 
perilously close to their Frosted Flakes. Chandler Foss and the spectrally thin April 



Cortelyu come in from someplace with postures and expressions that arouse comments 
and force Gately to Log a possible issue about an in-House relationship. Gately has to 
bid goodnight to two craggy-faced brunette ex-residents who've been planted on the 
couch all night talking cults. Emil Minty and Nell Gunther and sometimes Gavin Diehl 
(who Gately did three weeks of a municipal bit with, once, at Concord Farm) make a 
nightly point of going to smoke outside on the front porch and coming in only after 
Gately says twice he's got to lock the door, just as some limp rebellious gesture. Tonight 
they're closely followed by a mustacheless Lenz, who sort of oozes through the door just 
as Gately's going through his keys to get the key to lock it, and kind of brushes by and 
goes up to the 3-Man without a word, which he's been doing a lot lately, which Gately 
has to Log, plus the fact that it's now after 2330 and he can't account for either the 
semi-new girl Amy J. or — more upsetting — Bruce Green. Then Green knocks at the 
front door at 2336 — Gately has to Log the exact time and then it's his call whether to 
unlock the door. After curfew Staff doesn't have to unlock the door. Many a bad-news 
resident gets effectively bounced this way. Gately lets him in. Green's never come close 
to missing curfew before and looks godawful, skin potato-white and eyes vacant. And a 
big quiet kid is one thing, but Green looks at the floor of Pat's office like it's a loved one 
while Gately gives him the required ass-chewing; and Green takes the standard dreaded 
week's Full House Restriction 247 in such a vacantly hangdog way, and is so lamely vague 
when Gately asks does he want to tell him where he's been at and why he couldn't 
make 2330 and whether there's anything that's an issue that he might want to share 
with Staff, so unresponsive that Gately feels like he has no choice but to pull an 
immediate spot-urine on Green, which Gately hates doing not only because he plays 
cribbage with Green and feels like he's taken Green under the old Gately wing and is 
probably the closest thing to a sponsor the kid's got but also because urine samples 
taken after Unit #2's clinic's closed 248 have to be stored overnight in the little Staff 
miniature fridgelette in Don Gately's basement room — the only fridge in the House 
that no resident could conceivably dicky into — and Gately hates to have a warm blue- 
lidded cup of somebody's goddamn urine in his fridgelette with his pears and Polar selt¬ 
zer, etc. Green submits to Gately's cross-armed presence in the men's head as Green 
produces a urine so efficiently and with so little bullshit that Gately is able to take the 
lidded cup between gloved thumb and finger and get it downstairs and tagged and 
Logged and down in the fridgelette in time to not be late for getting the residents' cars 
moved, the night-shift's biggest pain in the ass; but then his final head-count at 2345 
reminds Gately that Amy J. isn't back, and she hasn't called, and Pat has told him the 
decision to Discharge after a missed curfew is his call, and at 2350 Gately makes the 
decision, and has to get Treat and Belbin to go up into the 5-Woman room and pack the 
girl's stuff up in the same Irish Luggage she'd brought it in Monday, and Gately has to 
put the trashbags on the front porch with a quick note explaining the Discharge and 
wishing the girl good luck, and has to call Pat's answering device down in Milton and 
leave word of a mandatory Curfew-Discharge at 2350h., so Pat can hear about it first 
thing in the A.M. and schedule interviews to fill the available bed ASAP, and then with a 
hissed curse Gately remembers the anti-big-hanging-gut situps he's sworn to himself to 
do every night before 0000, and it's 2356, and he has time to do only 20 with his huge 



discolored sneakers wedged under the frame of the office's black vinyl couch before it's 
unavoidably time to supervise moving the residents' cars around. 

Gately's predecessor as male live-in Staff, a designer-narcotics man who's now (via 
Mass Rehab) learning to repair jet engines at East Coast AeroTech, once described 
residents' vehicles to Gately as a continuing boil on the ass of night Staff. Ennet House 
Jets any resident with a legally registered vehicle and insurance keep their car at the 
House, if they want, during residency, to use for work and nightly meetings, etc., and 
the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital goes along, except they put authorized parking 
for all the Units' clients out in the little street right outside the House. And since metro 
Boston's serious fiscal troubles in the third year of Subsidized Time there's been this 
hellish municipal deal where only one side of any street is legal for parking, and the legal 
side switches abruptly at OOOOh., and cruisers and municipal tow trucks prowl the 
streets from OOOlh. on, writing $95.00 tickets and/or towing suddenly-illegally-parked 
vehicles to a region of the South End so blasted and dangerous no cabbie with anything 
to live for will even go there. So the interval 2355h.-0005h. in Boston is a time of total 
but not very spiritual community, with guys in skivvies and ladies in mud-masks 
staggering out yawning into the crowded midnight streets and disabling their alarms 
and revving and all trying to pull out and do a U and find a parallel-parking place facing 
the other way. There's nothing very mysterious about the fact that metro Boston's 
battery- and homicide-rates during this ten-minute interval are the highest per diem, so 
that ambulances and paddy wagons are especially aprowl at this hour, too, adding to 
the general clot and snarl. 

Since the E.M.P.H.H. Units' catatonics and enfeebled people rarely own registered 
vehicles, it's generally pretty easy to find places along the little road to switch to, but it's 
a constant sore point between Pat Montesian and the E.M.P.H.H. Board of Regents that 
Ennet House residents don't get to park overnight in the big off-street lot by the 
condemned hospital building — the lot's spaces are reserved for all the different Units' 
professional staff starting at 0600h., and E.M. Security got sick of staffs' complaints 
about drug addicts' poorly maintained autos still sitting there taking up their spots in the 
A.M. — and that Security won't consider changing the little E.M. streetlet's nightly side- 
switch to 2300h., before Ennet Houses's D.S.A.S.-required curfew; E.M.'s Board claims 
it's a municipal ordinance that they can't be expected to mess with just to 
accommodate one tenant, while Pat's memos keep pointing out that the Enfield Marine 
Hospital complex is state- not city-owned, and that Ennet House residents are the only 
tenants who face the nightly car-moving problem, since just about everyone else is 
catatonic or enfeebled. And so on. 

But so every P.M. at like 2359 Gately has to lock up the lockers and Pat's cabinets and 
desk drawers and the door to the front office and put the phone console's answering 
machine on and personally escort all residents who own cars out post-curfew outside 
into the little nameless streetlet, and for somebody with Gately's real limited 
managerial skills the headaches involved are daunting: he has to herd the vehicular 
residents together just inside the locked front door; he has to threaten the residents 
he's herded together into staying together by the door while he clomps upstairs to get 
the one or two drivers who always forget and fall asleep before 0000 — and this 



straggler-collecting is a particular pain in the ass if the straggler's a female, because he 
has to unlock and press the Male Coming Up button by the kitchen, and the 'buzzer' 
sounds more like a klaxon, and wakes the edgiest female residents up with an ugly surge 
of adrenaline, and Gately as he clomps up the stairs gets roundly bitched out by all the 
mud-masked heads sticking out into the female hall, and he by regulation can't go into 
the sleeper's bedroom but has to pound on the door and keep shouting out his gender 
and get one of the straggler's roommates to wake her up and get her dressed and to the 
bedroom door; so he has to retrieve the stragglers and chew them out and threaten 
them with both a Restriction and a possible tow while herding them quick-walking down 
the staircase to join the main car-owner herd as quickly as possible before the main 
herd can like disperse. They'll always disperse if he takes too long getting stragglers; 
they'll get distracted or hungry or need an ashtray or just get impatient and start looking 
at the whole car-moving-after-curfew thing as an imposition on their time. Their early- 
recovery Denial makes it impossible for them to imagine their own car getting towed 
instead of, say, somebody else's car. It's the same Denial Gately can see at work in the 
younger B.U. or -C. students when he's driving Pat's Aventura to the Food Bank or Purity 
Supreme when they'll fucking walk right out in the street against the light in front of the 
car, whose brakes are fortunately in top shape. Gately's snapped to the fact that people 
of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they're immortal: college 
students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they're exempt 
from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else. They'll piss and 
moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they don't deep down see 
themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they're constitutionally unable to learn 
from anybody else's experience: if some jaywalking B.U. student does get splattered on 
Comm, or some House resident does get his car towed at 0005, your other student's or 
addict's response to this will be to ponder just what imponderable difference makes it 
possible for that other guy to get splattered or towed and not him, the ponderer. They 
never doubt the difference — they just ponder it. It's like a kind of idolatry of 
uniqueness. It's unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only 
way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like 
upset the idolatry. Eugenio M. and Annie Parrot always recommend letting everybody 
get towed at least once, early on in their residency, to help make believers out of them 
in terms of laws and rules; but Gately for some reason on his night-shifts can't do it, 
cannot fucking stand to have one of his people get towed as long as there's something 
he can do to prevent it, and then plus if they do get towed there's the nail-chewing 
hassle of arranging their transport to the South End's municipal lot the next day, fielding 
calls from bosses and supplying verification of residents' carlessness in terms of getting 
to work without letting the boss know that the earless employee is a resident of a 
halfway house, which is totally sacred private residents' private information to give out 
or not — Gately breaks a full-body sweat just thinking about the managerial headaches 
involved in a fucking tow, so he'll spend time herding and regathering and chewing the 
absentminded asses of residents who Gene M. says have such calloused asses still it's a 
waste of Gately's time and spirit: you have to let them learn for themselves. 249 Gately 
alerts Thrale and Foss and Erdedy and Henderson, 250 and Morris Hanley, and drags the 



new kid Tingley out of the linen closet, and Nell Gunther — who's fucking sacked out 
slack-mouthed on the couch, in violation — and lets them all get coats and herds them 
together by the locked front door. Yolanda W. says she left personal items in Clenette's 
car and can she come. Lenz owns a car but doesn't answer Gately's yell up the stairs. 
Gately tells the herd to stay put and that if anybody leaves the herd he's going to take a 
personal interest in their discomfort. Gately clomps up the stairs and into the 3-Man 
room, plotting different fun ways to wake Lenz up without bruises that'd show. Lenz is 
not asleep but is wearing personal-stereo headphones, plus a jock strap, doing 
handstand-pushups up against the wall by Geoffrey Day's rack, his bottom only inches 
from Day's pillow and farting in rhythm to the pushups' downstrokes, as Day lies there 
in pajamas and Lone Ranger sleep mask, hands folded over his heaving chest, lips 
moving soundlessly. Gately's maybe a little rough about grabbing Lenz's calf and lifting 
him off his hands and using his other big hand on Lenz's hip to twirl him around upright 
like a drill-team's rifle, but Lenz's cry is of over-ebullient greeting, not pain, but it sends 
both Day and Gavin Diehl bolt-upright in their racks, and then they curse as Lenz hits the 
floor. Lenz starts saying he'd let time completely get away from him and didn't know 
what time it was. Gately can hear the herd down by the front door at the bottom of the 
stairs stamping and chuffing and getting ready to maybe disperse. 

Up this close, Gately doesn't even need his Staffer's eerie seventh sense to sense that 
Lenz is clearly wired on either 'drines or Bing. That Lenz has been visited by the Sergeant 
at Arms. Lenz's right eyeball is wobbling around in its socket and his mouth writhing in 
that way and he has that Nietzschean supercharged aura of a wired individual, and all 
the time he's throwing on slacks and topcoat and incognitoizing wig and getting almost 
pitched headfirst down the stairs by Gately he's telling this insane breathless whopper 
about his finger once getting cut off and then spontaneously regentrifying itself back on, 
and his mouth is writhing in that fish-on-a-gaff way distinctive of a sustained L-Dopa 
surge, and Gately wants to pull an immediate urine, immediate, but meanwhile the cars' 
herd's edges are just starting to widen in that way that precedes distraction and 
dispersal, and they're angry not at Lenz for straggling but at Gately for even bothering 
with him, and Lenz pantomimes the akido Serene But Deadly Crane stance at Ken 
Erdedy, and it's 0004h. and Gately can see tow trucks aprowl way down on Comm. Ave., 
coming this way, and he jangles his keys and unlocks all three curfew-locks on the front 
door and gets everybody out in the scrotum-tightening November cold and out down 
the walk to the line of their cars in the little street and stands there on the porch 
watching in just orange shirtsleeves, making sure Lenz doesn't bolt before he can pull a 
spot-urine and extract an admission and Discharge him officially, feeling a twinge of 
conscience at so looking forward to giving Lenz the administrative shoe, and Lenz 
jabbers nonstop to whoever's closest all the way to his Duster, and everybody goes to 
their car, and the backwash around Gately from the open House door is hot and people 
in the living room provide loud feedback on the draft from the open door, the sky 
overhead immense and dimensional and the night so clear you can see stars hanging in 
a kind of lacteal goo, and out on the streetlet a couple car doors are squeaking and 
slamming and some people are conversing and delaying just to make Staff have to stand 
there in shirtsleeves on the cold porch, a small nightly sideways ball-busting rebellious 



gesture, when Gately's eye falls on Doony R. Glynn's specialty-disembowelled old dusty- 
black VW Bug parked with the other cars on the now-illicit street-side, its rear-mount 
engine's guts on full glittered display under the little street's lights, and Glynn's upstairs 
in bed tonight legitimately prostrate with diverticulitis, which for insurance reasons 
means Gately has to go back in and ask some resident with a driver's license to come 
move Glynn's VW across the street, which is humiliating because it means admitting 
publicly to these specimens that he, Gately, doesn't have a valid license, and the sudden 
heat of the living room confuses his goose-pimples, and nobody in the living room will 
admit to have a driver's license, and it turns out the only licensed resident who's still 
vertical and downstairs is Bruce Green, who's in the kitchen expressionlessly stirring a 
huge amount of sugar into a cup of coffee with his bare blunt finger, and Gately finds 
himself having to ask for managerial assistance from a kid he likes and has just bitched 
out and extracted urine from, which Green minimizes the humiliation of the whole thing 
by volunteering to help the second he hears the words Glynn and fucking car, and goes 
to the living room closet to get out his cheap leather jacket and fingerless gloves, and 
but Gately now has to leave the residents outside still unsupervised for a second to go 
clomping upstairs and verify that it's kosher with Glynn for Bruce Green to move his 
car. 251 The 2-Man seniorest males' bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it 
and a calligraphic poster saying EVERYTHING I'VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON 
IT, and the answer to Gately's knock is a moan, and Glynn's little naked-lady bedside 
lamp he brought in with him is on, he's in his rack curled on his side clutching his 
abdomen like a kicked man. McDade is illicitly sitting on Foss's rack reading one of Foss's 
motorcycle magazines and drinking Glynn's Millennial Fizzy with stereo headphones on, 
and he hurriedly puts out his cigarette when Gately enters and closes the little drawer in 
the bedside table where Foss keeps his ashtray just like everybody else. 252 The street 
outside sounds like Daytona — a drug addict is like physically unable to start a car 
without gunning the engine. Gately looks quickly out the west window over Glynn's rack 
to verify that all the unsupervised headlights going down the little street are Uing and 
coming back the right way to repark. Gately's forehead is wet and he feels the start of a 
greasy headache, from managerial stress. Glynn's crossed eyes are glassy and feverish 
and he's softly singing the lyrics to a Choosy Mothers song to a tune that isn't the song's 
tune. 

'Doon,' Gately whispers. 

One of the cars is coming back down the street a little fast for Gately's taste. Anything 
involving residents that happens on the grounds after curfew is his responsibility, the 
House Manager's made clear. 

'Doon. 1 

It's the bottom eye, grotesquely, that rolls up at Gately. 'Don.' 

'Doon.' 

'Don Doon the witch is dead.' 

'Doon, I need to let Green move your car.' 

'Vehicle's black, Don.' 

'Brucie Green needs your keys so's we can switch your car over, brother, it's midnight.' 

'My Black Bug. My baby. The Roachmobile. The Doonulater's wheels. His mobility. His 



exposed baby. His slice of the American Pie. Simonize my baby when I'm gone, Don 
Doon.' 

'Keys, Doony.' 

'Take them. Take it. Want you to have it. One true friend. Brought me Ritz crackers 
and a Fizz. Treat it like a roachlady. Shiny, black, hard, mobile. Needs Premium and a 
weekly wax.' 

'Doon. You got to show me where's the keys, brother.' 

'And the bowel. Gotta weekly shine the pipes in the bowel. Exposed to view. With a 
soft cloth. The mobile roach. The bowelmobile.' 

The heat coming off Glynn is face-tightening. 

'You feel like you got a fever, Doon?' At one point elements of Staff thought Glynn 
might be playing sick to get out of looking for a job after losing his menial job at 
Brighton Fence & Wire. All Gately knows about diverticulitis is that Pat said it's intestinal 
and alcoholics can get it in recovery from impurities in bottom-shelf blends that the 
body's trying to expel. Glynn's had physical complaints all through his residency, but 
nothing like this here. His face is gray and waxy with pain and there's a yellowish crust 
on his lips. Glynn's got a real severe adtorsion, and the bottom eye is rolled up at Gately 
with a terrible delirious glitter, the top eye rolling around like a cow's eye. Gately still 
cannot bring himself to feel another man's forehead. He settles for punching Glynn very 
lightly on the shoulder. 

'You think we need to take you over to St. E.'s to get your intestine looked at, Doon, 
do you think?' 

'Hoits, Don. 1 

'You think you —?' 

Because he's worrying about what if a resident comas or dies on his shift, and then 
feeling shame that this is his worry, the squeal of brakes and raised voices' noises down 
out front hasn't registered on Gately right away, but Hester Thrale's unmistakable high- 
B# scream does — i.e. register — and now serious feet running up the stairs: 

Green's face in the doorway, red in round patches high on his cheeks: 'Come out.' 

'The fuck's the problem out —' 

Green: 'Come now Gately.' 

Glynn sotto: 'Mother.' 

Gately doesn't get to even ask Green what the fuck again on the stairs because Green 
is down ahead out the door so fast; the damn front door's been open all this time. A 
watercolor of a retrieverish dog cants and then falls from the wall on the staircase from 
the vibrations of Gately taking two stairs down at a time. He doesn't take time to grab 
his coat off Pat's couch. All he's got on is a donated orange bowling shirt with the name 
Moose cursive-stitched on the breast and SHUCO-MIST M.P.S. in ghastly aqua blocks 
across the back, 253 and he feels every follicle on his body hump up again as the cold 
encases him on the front porch and the wheelchair-ramp down to the little walkway. 
The night is cold and glycerine-clear and quite still. Very distant sounds of car horns and 
raised voices down on Comm. Green's receding at a run off up the little streetlet into a 
glare of highbeams that diffracts in the clouds of Gately's breath, so even as Gately 
walks briskly 254 in Green's leather-smelling backwash toward a rising hubbub of curses 



and Lenz's high-speed voice and Thrale's glass-shattering cries and Henderson and Willis 
talking shit angrily to somebody and the sound of Joelle v.D.'s veiled head in an upstairs 
window that isn't the 5-Women room's shouting something down to Gately as he 
appears in the street, even as he closes in it takes a while for the scene to decoct out of 
the fog of his breath and its shifting spears of color against the headlights. He passes 
Glynn's disembowelled and illegally parked Bug. Several of the residents' cars are idling 
at haphazard angles of mid-U-turn in the middle of the street, and in front of them is a 
modified dark Montego with highbeams and jacked rear wheels and a turbo's 
carnivorous idle. Two almost Gately-sized bearded guys in loose like bowling-wear shirts 
with flowers or suns on them and what look like big faggy necklaces of flowers around 
what would be their necks if they had necks turn out to be chasing Randy Lenz around 
this Montego car. Yet another guy with a necklace and a plaid Donegal is holding the 
rest of the residents at bay on the lawn of #4 with a nasty-looking Item 255 expertly held. 
Everything now slightly slows down; at the sight of an Item held on his residents there's 
almost a kind of mechanistic click as Gately's mind shifts into a different kind of drive. 
He gets very cool and clear and his headache recedes and his breathing slows. It's not so 
much that things slow as break into frames. 

The ruckus has aroused the old nurse in #4 who Asks For Help, and her spectral figure 
is splayed in a nightie against an upstairs #4 window yelling 'Eeeeeeeyelp!' Hester Thrale 
now has her pink-nailed hands over her eyes and is screaming over and over for nobody 
to hurt nobody especially her. It's the Bulldog Item that holds the attention. The two 
guys chasing Lenz around the Montego are unarmed but look coldly determined in a 
way Gately recognizes. They're not wearing coats either but they don't look cold. All this 
appraisal's taking only seconds; it only takes time to list it. They have vaguely non-U.S. 
beards and are each about% Gately's size. They take turns coming around the car and 
running past the headlights' glare and Gately can see they have similar froggy lippy pale 
foreign faces. Lenz is talking at the guys nonstop, mostly imprecating. They're all three 
going around and around the car like a cartoon. Gately's still walking up as he sees all 
this. It's obvious to appraisal the foreignish guys aren't real bright because of they're 
chasing Lenz in tandem instead of heading around the car in opposite directions to trap 
him in like a pincer. They all three stop and start, Lenz across the car from them. Some 
of the at-bay residents are yelling to Lenz. Like most coke-dealers Lenz is quick on his 
feet, his topcoat billowing and then settling whenever he stops. Lenz's voice is nonstop 
— he's alternately inviting the guy to perform impossible acts and advancing baroque 
arguments for how whatever they think he did there's no way he was even in the same 
area code as whatever happened that they think he did. The guys keep speeding up like 
they want to catch Lenz just to shut him up. Ken Erdedy has his hands up and his car 
keys in his hand; his legs look like he's about to wet himself. Clenette and the new black 
girl, clearly veterans at gunpoint-etiquette, are prone on the lawn with their fingers 
laced behind their heads. Nell Gunther's assumed Lenz's old martial-arts Crane stance, 
hands twisted into flat claws, eyeing the guy's .44, which pans coolly back and forth over 
the residents. This smaller guy gets the most frames the slowest. He's got on a plaid 
hunting cap that keeps Gately from seeing if he's foreign also. But the guy's holding the 
weapon in the classic Weaver stance of somebody that can really shoot — left foot 



slightly forward, slightly hunched, a two-handed grip with the right arm cocked elbow- 
out so the Item's held high up in front of the guy's face, up to his sighting eye. This is 
how policemen and Made Guys from the North End shoot. Gately knows weapons way 
better than sobriety, still. And the Item — if the guy trig-pulls on some resident that 
resident's going down — the Item's some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog 
Special, or maybe a Nuck or Brazilian clone, blunt and ugly and with a bore like the 
mouth of a cave. The stout alcoholic kid Tingley has both hands to his cheeks and is 
100% at bay. The piece's been modified, Gately can appraise. The barrel's been vented 
out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog's infamous recoil, the hammer's bobbed, and 
the thing's got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor. This is not a 
weekend-warrior or liquor-store-holdup type Item; it's one that's made real specifically 
for putting projectiles into people. It's not a semiauto but is throated for a fucking 
speed-loader, which Gately can't see if the guy's got a speed-loader under the loose 
floral shirt but needs to assume the guy's got near-unlimited shots with a speed-loader. 
The North Shore Finest on the other hand wrap their grips in this like colored gauze that 
wicks sweat. Gately tries to recall a past associate's insufferable ammo-lectures when 
under the influence — your Bulldog and clones can take anything from light target loads 
and wadcutter to Colt SofTip dum-dums and worse. He's pretty sure this thing could put 
him down with one round; he's not sure. Gately's never been shot but he's seen guys 
shot. Fie feels something that is neither fear nor excitement. Joelle van D. is shouting 
stuff you can't make out, and Erdedy at bay on the lawn's calling out to her to get her 
head out of the whole picture. Gately's been bearing down this whole brief time, both 
seeing his breath and hearing it, beating his arms across his chest to keep some feeling 
in his hands. You could almost call what he feels a kind of jolly calm. The unAmerican 
guys chase Lenz and then stop across the car facing him for a second and then get 
furious again and chase him. Gately guesses he ought to be grateful the third guy 
doesn't come over and just shoot him. Lenz puts both hands on whatever part of the car 
he stops at and sends language out across the car at the two guys. Lenz's white wig is 
askew and he's got no mustache, you can see. E.M. Security, normally so scrupulous 
with their fucking trucks at 0005h., is nowhere around, lending weight to yet another 
cliche. If you asked Gately what he was feeling right this second he'd have no idea. He's 
got a hand up shading his eyes and closes on the Montego as things further clarify. One 
of the guys now you can see has Lenz's disguise's mustache in two fingers and keeps 
holding it up and brandishing it at Lenz. The other guy issues stilted but colorful threats 
in a Canadian accent, so it emerges on Gately it's Nucks, the trio Lenz has managed to 
somehow enrage is Nucks. Gately cops a black surge of Remember-Whenning, the 
babbling little football-head Quebecer he'd killed by gagging a man with a bad cold. This 
line of thinking is intolerable. Joelle's overhead shout to for Christ's sake somebody call 
Pat mixes in and out of the Help lady's cries. It occurs to Gately that the Help lady has 
cried Wolf for so many years that real shouts for real help are all going to be ignored. 
The residents all look to Gately as he crosses the street directly into the Montego's wash 
of light. Hester Thrale screams out Look out there's a Item. The plaid-hat Nuck pans 
stiffly to sight at Gately, his elbow up around his ear. It occurs to Gately if you fire with 
an Item right up to your sighting-eye like that won't you get a face full of cordite. There's 



a break in the circular action around the throbbing car as Lenz shouts Don with great 
gusto just as the Help lady shouts for Help. The Nuck with the Item has backed up 
several steps to keep the residents in his peripheral vision while he sights square on 
Gately as the massive Nuck holding the mustache across the car tells Gately if he was 
him he'd return to whence he came, him, to avoid the trouble. Gately nods and beams. 
Nucks really do pronounce the with a z. Both the car and Lenz are between Gately and 
the large Nucks, Lenz's back to Gately. Gately stands quietly, wishing he felt different 
about potential trouble, less almost jolly. Late in Gately's Substance and burglary 
careers, when he'd felt so low about himself, he'd had sick little fantasies of saving 
somebody from harm, some innocent party, and getting killed in the process and getting 
eulogized at great length in bold-faced Globe print. Now Lenz breaks away from the 
hood of the car and dashes Gately's way and around behind him to stand behind him, 
spreading his arms wide to put a hand on each of Gately's shoulders, using Don Gately 
like a shield. Gately's stance has the kind of weary resolution of like You'll Have to Go 
Through Me. The only anxious part of him can see the Log entry he'll have to make if 
residents come to physical grief on his shift. For a moment he can almost smell the 
smells of the penitentiary, armpits and Pomade and sour food and cribbage-board-wood 
and reefer and mopwater, the rich piss stink of a zoo's lion house, the smell of the bars 
you lace your hands through and stand there, looking out. This line of thinking is 
intolerable. He's neither goosepimpled nor sweating. His senses haven't been this keen 
in over a year. The stars in their jelly and dirty sodium lamplight and stark white steer- 
horns of headlights splayed at residents' different angles. Star-chocked sky, his breath, 
faraway horns, low trill of ATHSCMEs way to the north. Thin keen cold air in his wide- 
open nose. Motionless heads at #5's windows. 

The Nuck duo with flowers chasing Lenz come around this side and now break away 
from the car toward them. Now Hester Thrale at Gately's right periphery breaks away 
from the cluster and runs for it off into the night across the lawn and behind #4, waving 
her arms and screaming, and Minty and McDade and Parias-Carbo and Charlotte Treat 
appear out of Ennet House's back door across the hedge and mill and jostle amid the 
mops and old furniture on Ennet's back porch, watching, and a couple of the more 
mobile catatonics appear on the porch of the Shed across the little street, staring at the 
spect-op, all this flummoxing the smaller one so he keeps swinging the Item stiffly this 
way and that way, trying to keep way more people at potential bay. The two alien 
foreigners that want Lenz's map bear down slowly across the Montego's headlights 
toward where Lenz is holding Gately like a shield. The larger one that's so large his 
luauish shirt won't even button all the way holding out the mustache adopts the overly 
reasonable tone that always precedes a serious-type beef. He reads Gately's bowling 
shirt in the headlight and says reasonably that Moose still has a chance to keep out of 
what they've got no beef with him, them. Lenz is pouring a diarrheatic spatter of 
disclaimers and exhortations into Gately's right ear. Gately shrugs at the Nucks like he's 
got no choice but to be here. Green's just looking at them. It occurs to Gately by White 
Flag suggestion that who gives a fuck how it'd look, he ought to hit his knees right here 
on the headlit blacktop and ask for guidance on this from a Higher Power. But he stands 
there, Lenz chattering in his shadow. The fingernails of Lenz's hand on Gately's shoulder 



have horseshoes of dried blood in the creases between nail and finger, and there's a 
coppery smell off Lenz that isn't just fear. It occurs to Gately that if he'd pulled the 
instant spot-urine he'd wanted on Lenz this whole snafu wouldn't maybe be happening. 
The one Nuck is holding Lenz's disguise's mustache out at them like a blade. Lenz hasn't 
asked the time once, notice. Then the other Nuck's got his hand down at his side and a 
real blade's gleam appears in that hand with the familiar snick. At the blade's sound the 
situation becomes even more automatic and Gately feels adrenaline's warmth spread 
through him as his subdural hardware clicks deeper into a worn familiar long-past track. 
Having no choice now not to fight and things simplify radically, divisions collapse. 
Gately's just one part of something bigger he can't control. His face in the left headlight 
has dropped into its fight-expression of ferocious good cheer. He says he's responsible 
for these people on these private grounds tonight and is part of this whether he wants 
to be or not, and can they talk this out because he doesn't want to have to fight them. 
He says twice very distinctly that he does not want to fight them. He's no longer divided 
enough to think about whether this is true. His eyes are on the two men's maple-leaf 
belt buckles, the part of the body where you can't get suckered by a feint. The guys 
shake their manes and say they're going to unembowel this craven batard here like this 
sans-Christe batard killed somebody they call either Pepe or Bebe, and if Moose has any 
self-interest he'll backpedal away from there's no way it is his duty to get trapped or 
fropped for this sick gutless U.S.A. batard in his womanly wig. Lenz, apparently thinking 
they're Brazilian, pops his head around Gately's flank and calls them maricones and tells 
them they can suck his batard is what they can do. Gately has just division enough to 
almost wish he didn't feel such a glow of familiar warmth, a surge of almost sexual 
competence, as the two shriek at Lenz's taunts and split and curve in at them an arm's 
length apart, walking gradually faster, like unstoppable inertia, but stupidly too close 
together. At two meters off they charge, shedding petals and unisonly bellowing 
something in Canadian. 

It's always that everything always speeds up and slows down both. Gately's smile 
broadens as he's shoved slightly forward by Lenz as Lenz recoils backward off him to run 
from the guys' shrieking charge. Gately takes the shove's momentum and bodychecks 
the enormous Nuck holding the mustache into the Nuck holding the blade, who goes 
down with an euf of expelled air. The first Nuck has hold of Gately's bowling shirt and 
rips it and punches Gately in the forehead and audibly breaks his hand, letting go of 
Gately to grab his hand. The punch makes Gately stop thinking in any sort of spiritual 
terms at all. Gately takes the man's broken hand's arm he's holding out and with his 
eyes on the ground's other Nuck breaks the arm over his knee, and as the guy goes 
down on one knee Gately takes the arm and pirouettes around twisting the broken arm 
behind the guy's back and plants his sneaker on the guy's floral back and forces him 
forward so there's a sick crack and he feels the arm come out of the socket, and there's 
a high foreign scream. The Nuck with the blade who was down slashes Gately's calf 
through his jeans as the guy rolls gracefully left and starts to rise, up on one knee, knife 
out front, a guy that knows his knives and can't be closed with while he's got the blade 
up. Gately feints and takes one giant step and gets all his weight into a Rockette kick 
that lands high up under the Nuck's beard's chin and audibly breaks Gately's big toe in 



the sneaker and sends the man curving out back into the dazzle of the highbeams, and 
there's a metallic boom of him landing on the Montego's hood and the click and skitter 
of the blade landing somewhere on the street beyond the car. Gately on one foot, 
holding his toe, and his slashed calf feels hot. His smile is broad but impersonal. It's 
impossible, outside choreographed entertainment, to fight two guys together at once; 
they'll kill you; the trick to fighting two is to make sure and put one down for long 
enough that he's out of the picture long enough to put the other guy down. And this 
first larger one with the extreme arm-trouble is clutching himself as he rolls, trying to 
rise, still perversely holding the white mustache. You can tell this is a real beef because 
nobody's saying anything and the sounds from everybody else have receded to the 
sounds stands' crowds make and Gately hops over and uses the good foot to kick the 
Nuck twice in the side of the big head and then without a thought in his head moves 
down the guy and lines it up and drops to one knee with all his weight on the guy's 
groin, resulting in an indescribable sound from the guy and a shout from J.v.D. overhead 
and a flat crack from the lawn and Gately's punched so hard in the shoulder he's spun 
around on one knee and almost goes over backwards and the shoulder goes hotly 
numb, which tells Gately he's gotten shot instead of punched in the shoulder. He never 
got shot before. SHOT IN SOBRIETY in bold headline caps goes across his mind's eye like 
a slow train as he sees the third Nuck with his cap pushed back and Nuck face contorted 
with cordite in his good stance with elbow back up drawing a second bead on Don's big 
head from #4's lawn with the bore's lightless eye and a little pubic curl of smoke coming 
up from the vented muzzle, and Gately can't move and forgets to pray, and then the 
bore zagging up and away as it blooms orange as good old Bruce Green's got the Nuck 
from behind in a half-nelson with his hand in the necklace of flowers and with the other 
hand is forcing the cocked elbow down and the Item skyward away from Gately's head 
as it blooms with that flat crack of a vented muzzle. The first thing somebody's who's 
shot wants to do is throw up, which by the way the larger Nuck with the breezeblocked 
crotch under Gately's doing all over his beard and flower necklace and Gately's leg's 
thigh as Gately weaves on one knee on the guy's groin still. The lady yells for Help. Now 
a meaty thwack as Nell Gunther on the lawn leaps several twirling meters and kicks the 
Nuck Green's half-nelsoning in the face with her paratrooper-boot's heel, and the guy's 
hat flies off and his head snaps back and hits Green's face, and there's the pop of 
Green's nose breaking but he doesn't let go, and the guy's slumped forward in the 
Parkinsonian half-bow of a guy in a quality half-nelson, with the guy's Item-hand's arm 
still up in the air with Green's arm like they're dancing, and good old Green doesn't even 
let go to hold his spurting nose, and now that the Nuck's restrained, notice, here comes 
Lenz barrelling in howling from the hedge's shadows and leaping and he tackles the 
Nuck and Green both, and they're a roil of clothes and legs on the lawn, the Item not in 
sight. Ken Erdedy still has his hands up. Gately, still kneeling shot on the Nuck's 
sickeningly softened groin, Gately hears the second Nuck trying to slide himself off the 
hood of the Montego and hops and wobbles over. Joelle v.D. keeps yelling something 
monosyllabic from what can't be her window. Don goes to the Montego's front bumper 
and punches the large man carefully in the kidneys with his good arm and takes him by 
the thick foreign hair and slides him back up the hood and begins banging his head off 



the Montego's windshield. He remembers how he'd stay in luxury furnished North Shore 
apts. with G. Fackelmann and T. Kite and they'd gradually strip the place and sell the 
appointments off until they were sleeping in a totally bare apartment. Green has risen 
bloody-faced, and Lenz is on the lawn with his heaving topcoat covering him and the 
third Nuck, and Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are now up and not at bay and circling them 
and getting solid high-heel kicks into the Nuck's and sometimes hopefully Lenz's ribs, 
reciting 'Motha -fucko' and landing a kick each time they get to fu. Gately, canted way 
over to the side, methodically beats his Nuck's shaggy head against the windshield so 
hard that spidered stars are appearing in the shatterproof glass until something in the 
head gives with a sort of liquid crunch. Petals from the guy's necklace are all over the 
hood and Gately's torn shirt. Joelle v.D. in her terry robe and gauze veil and still 
clutching a toothbrush has climbed out onto the little balcony outside the 5-Woman's 
window and into a skinny ailanthus beside it and is coming down, showing about two 
meters of spectacularly undeformed thigh, shouting Gately's name by the first name, 
which he likes. Gately leaves the largest Nuck prone on the idling hood, his head resting 
in a shatter-frosted head-shaped recession in the windshield. It occurs to Ken Erdedy, 
looking up into the oak past his upraised hands, that this deformed veiled girl likes Don 
Gately in an extracurricular way, it would seem. Gately, toe and shoulder or no, has 
looked strictly all-business this whole time. He's projected a sort of white-collar attitude 
of cheery competence and sangfroid. Erdedy's found he rather likes standing there with 
his hands up in a gesture of noncombatant status while the Afro-American girls curse 
and kick and Lenz continues to roll around with the unconscious man hitting him and 
going 'There, there,' and Gately moves backward between the second fellow in the 
windshield and the first fellow he'd originally disarmed, his smile now as empty as a 
pumpkin's grin. Chandler Foss is trying on the third fellow's plaid hunting cap. There's a 
sound in #4 of somebody trying to force a warped window. An Empire W.D.V. is 
launched with a kind of spronging thud and whistles overhead, climbing, its warning- 
light wrap of like Xmas lights winking red and green as Don Gately starts to come over in 
the direction of the lawn and the fellow who appears to have winged him and then 
veers drunkenly and changes direction and in three one-foot hops is over to the vomit- 
covered first Nuck, the one who'd called Gately Moose and punched him in the 
forehead. There's the slow trundle of the Green T and exhortations from Minty as 
Gately begins stomping on the supine face of the Nuck with the heel of his good foot as 
if he were killing cockroaches. The guy's movable arm is waggling pathetically in the air 
around Gately's shoe as it rises and falls. Gately's hideous torn orange shirt's whole right 
side is dark and his right arm drips blackly and seems weirdly set in its socket. Lenz is up 
and adjusting his wig and brushing off. The veiled girl has hit a rough part some three 
meters up and is hanging from a limb and kicking, Erdedy staring Copernicanly up her 
flapping robe. The new Tingley kid sits cross-legged in the grass and rocks as the black 
ladies continue stomping the inert Nuck. You can hear Emil Minty and Wade McDade 
exhorting Yolanda W. to use the spike heel. Charlotte Treat is reciting the Serenity 
Prayer over and over. Bruce Green has his head back and his finger held like a mustache 
under his nostrils. Hester Thrale can still be heard way off down Warren Street, 
receding, as Gately wobbles back from the Nuck's map and sits heavily down in the little 



street, in shadow except for his huge head in the Nucks 1 car's lights, sitting there with 
his head on his knees. Lenz and Green move in toward him the cautious way you 
approach a big animal that's hurt. Joelle van Dyne lands on her feet. The lady at the high 
warped window shouts for Helphelphelphelpf?e/p. Minty and McDade come down off 
the back porch, finally, McDade for some reason wielding a mop. Everybody except Lenz 
and Minty looks unwell. 

Joelle runs just like a girl, Erdedy notes. 256 She gets out through the many-angled cars 
into the street just as Gately decides to lie down. 

It's not like passing out. It's just a decision Gately makes to like lie back with his knees 
bent and pointing up into the sky's depth, which seems to bulge and recede with the 
pulse in his right shoulder, which has now gone dead cold, which means there will very 
soon be pain, he predicts. 

He waves off concern with the left hand and goes 'Flesh-wound' the second Joelle's 
bare feet and robe's hem are in view. 

'Son of a fucking bitch. ’ 

'Flesh-wound.' 

'Are you ever bleeding.' 

'Thanks for the feedback.' 

You can hear Henderson and Willis off in the background still going fu.' 

'I think you can tell them he's probably subdued,' Gately pointing off in what he thinks 
is #4's lawn's direction. His lying flat gives him a double-chin, he can feel, and pulls his 
big face into a smile. His big present fear is throwing up in front of and maybe partly on 
Joelle v.D., whose calves he's noted. 

Now Lenz's lizard-skin loafers with grass stains at the toes. 'Don what can I say.' 

Gately struggles to sit back up. 'You got fucking armed Nucks wanting your ass too?' 

Revealing a kind of blackly kimonoish thing under, Joelle has taken off the terry robe 
and folds the robe into a kind of trapezoidal pad and is kneeling over Gately's shoulder, 
straddling his arm, pressing down on the pad with the heels of her hands. 

'Owie.' 

'Lenz he's really bleeding bad here.' 

'I'm groping to even know what to begin to say, Don.' 

'You owe me urine, Lenz.' 

'I think there's two of them, like, desisted.' Wade McD.'s unlaced high-tops, his voice 
breathy with awe. 

'He's bleeding really bad I said.' 

'You mean deceased.' 

'There's one of their shoes in one of them's fucking eye.' 

'Tell Ken to put his hands down for Christ's sake.' 

'Oh fucking God.' 

Gately can feel his eyes crossing and uncrossing by themselves. 

'He soaking right through it man look at that shit.' 

'This man needs an ambulance.' 

Somebody else female says God again and Gately's hearing warbles a bit as Joelle 
snaps at her to shut up. She leans down and in, so Gately can see up at what looks like a 



regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip under the veil's billowing hem. 
'Whom should we call?' she asks him. 

'Call Pat's machine and Calvin. You have to dial 9. Tell them to come down.' 

'I'm going to be sick.' 

'Airdaddy!' Minty is shouting at Ken E. 

'Tell her to call Annie and the E.M. office down there and do some like strategic thing.' 

'Where the fuck is Security when it isn't just innocent recovering cars to get towed?' 

'And call Pat,' Gately says. 

A forest of footwear and bare feet and shins all around him, and heads too high to 
see. Lenz screaming back to somebody in the House: 'Call a fucking ambulance already.' 

'Regulate the voice, man.' 

'Fucking call about five ambulances is more like it.' 

'Motha/ucka.' 

'Ssshh.' 

'I just never saw anything like that.' 

'Nuh-uh,' Gately gasps, trying to rise and deciding he just likes it better lying down. 
'Don't call one for me.' 

'This is the straight and narrow?' 

'By doze is fide.' 

'He doesn't want one he said.' 

Green's and Minty's boots. Treat's purple plastic shower-thongs. Somebody has on 
Clearasil, he can smell. 

'Seen some righteous ass-kickings in my past, brother, but —' 

Somebody male screams back off to the right. 

'Just don't try and walk me around,' Gately grins up. 

'Dipshit.' 

'He can't go in no E.R. with a gunshot,' Minty says to Lenz, whose shoes keep moving 
to get himself north of everybody. 

'Somebody turn off the car will you?' 

'I wouldn't touch nothing.' 

Gately focuses at where the Joelle girl's eyes would be. Her thighs are forked way wide 
to straddle his arm, which is numb and doesn't feel like his. She's bearing down on him. 
She smells strange but good. She's got all her weight on her bathrobe's pad. She weighs 
roughly nothing. The first threads of pain are starting to radiate out of the shoulder and 
down the side and into the neck. Gately hasn't looked down at the shoulder, on 
purpose, and he tries to wedge his left hand's finger under the shoulder to see if 
anything went through. The night's so clear the stars shine right through people's heads. 

'Green.' 

Tb dot touchig dothig, dud worry.' 

'Look at his head." 

Her kimono's shoulders are humped and glassy black in the Montego's light. Gately's 
brain keeps wanting to go away inside himself. When you start to feel deeply cold that's 
shock and blood-loss. Gately sort of wills himself to stay right here, looks over past 
Joelle's hand at Lenz's fine shoes. 'Lenz. You and Green. Get me inside.' 



'Green!' 

The circle of stars' heads' faces above are all faceless from the headlights' shadows. 
Some car engines have shut off and some haven't. One of the cars has a twittering fan- 
belt. Somebody's suggesting to call the genuine Finest — Erdedy — which everybody 
greets with scorn at his naivete. Gately's figuring Staff from the Shed or #4 has called 
them or at least dialed down to Security. By the time he was ten only his pinkie-finger 
would fit in the dialer's holes of his mother's old princess phone; he exerts will to un¬ 
cross his eyes and stay right here; he in the worst way does not want to be lying here 
with a gunshot in shock trying to deal with the Finest. 

'I think one of these guys is, like, expired.' 

'No shit Shylock.' 

'Nobody call. 1 Gately yells it up and out. He's afraid he's going to vomit when they 
stand him up. 'Nobody call nobody til you get me in.' Fie can smell Green's leather jacket 
overhead. Bits of grass and whatnot drifting down onto him from where Lenz is still 
brushing off his clothes, and coins of blood on the street from Green's nose. Joelle tells 
Lenz if he doesn't cut something out she's going to hand him his ass. Gately's whole 
right side had gone deadly cold. To Joelle he says, 'I'm Supervised. I'll go to jail sure.' 

'You got fucking eyewitnesses out the ass behind you Don man,' either McDade or 
Glynn says, but it can't be Glynn, for some reason he tries to bring up inside him. And it 
seems like Charlotte T.'s voice saying Ewell's trying to get in Pat's office to call but Gately 
locked Pat's door. 

'Nobody call anyone!' Joelle shouts up and out. She smells good. 

'They're calling!' 

'Get him off the phone! Say prank for Christ's sake! You hear me?' Her kimono smells 
good. Her voice has a Staff-like authority. The scene out here has changed: Gately's 
down, Madame Psychosis is in charge. 

'We're going to get him up and we're going to get him inside,' she says to the circle. 
'Lenz.' 

There's impending static-crackle and the sound of a serious set of keys. 

Her voice is that one Madame lady's voice on no-subscription radio, from out of 
nowhere he's all of a sudden sure, is where he heard that odd empty half-accented 
voice before. 

'Secyotty! Hold it right thaah.' It's at least luckily one of the ex-football E.M. Security 
guys, that spends half his shift down at the Life and then goes up and down the streetlet 
all night playing with his service baton and singing sea chanties off-key, that's just 
impressively qualified to Come In to AA with them. 

Joelle: 'Erdedy — deal with him.' 

'Pardon me?' 

'It's the drunk,' Gately gets out. 

Joelle's looking up at presumably Ken E. 'Go over and look high-income and 
respectable at him. Verbalize at him. Distract him while we get him inside before the 
real ones come.' 

'How am I supposed to explain all these prone figures draped over cars?' 

'For Christ's sake Ken he's not a mental titan — distract him with something shiny or 



something. Get your thumb out of your ass and move.' 

Gately's smile has reached his eyes. 'You're Madame on the FM, is how I knew you.' 

Erdedy's squeaky shoe and the obese guy's radio and keys. 'Who hold it? As in desist?' 

'Sec yotty I said halt!' 

Green and Lenz bending in, white breath all over and Green's dripping nose the same 
copper smell as Lenz. 

'I knew I knew you,' Gately says to Joelle, whose veil remains inscrutable. 

'If I could ask you to specify halt from what.' 

'Get his back up here first,' Green tells Lenz. 

'Not crazy about all this blood,' Lenz is saying. 

Many hands slide under his back; the shoulder blooms with colorless fire. The sky 
looks so 3-D you could like dive in. The stars distend and sprout spikes. Joelle's warm 
legs shift with her weight to keep pressure on the pad. The squishing sound Gately 
knows means the robe's soaked through. He wants somebody to congratulate him for 
not having thrown up. You can tell some of the stars are nearer and some far, down 
there. What Gately's always thought of as the Big Question Mark is really the Big Dipper. 

'I'm oddering desist until who's in change that I can repot the si chation. ’ The Security 
guy's hammered, his name's Sidney or Stanley and he wears his Security-hat and baton 
shopping in the Purity Supreme and always asks Gately how it's hanging. His shoes' 
uppers are blasted along the feet's insides the way fat men that have to walk a lot's are; 
his ex-ballplayer's collops and big hanging gut are one of Gately's great motivators for 
nightly situps. Gately turns his head to throw up a little on both Green and Joelle, who 
both ignore it. 

'Oh sorry. Oh shit I hate that.' 

Joelle v.D. runs a hand down Gately's wet arm that leaves a warm wake, the hand, and 
then gently squeezes as much of the wrist as she can get her hand around. 'And Lo,' she 
says softly. 

'Jesus his leg's all bloody too.' 

'Boy do I know guys loved that show you did.' A tiny bit more throwing up. 

'Now we're going to lift him very gently and get the feet under.' 

'Here Green man get over here on the south why don't you.' 

'I'm oddering the whole sitchation halt it right thaah wheyoof?.' 

Lenz and Green's shoes coming together and moving apart at either side of Gately, 
faces coming down in a fish-eye lens, lifting: 

'Ready?' 



Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: 


InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink 2 , 
post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and 
quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def 
you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD- 
ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser 
chromatography. Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer 
apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. 
Ha If of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50% of all public 
education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses, absorbable at home on 
couches. Ms. Tawni Kondo's immensely popular exercise program spontaneously 
disseminated daily in all three O.N.A.N. time zones at 0700h., a combination of low- 
impact aerobics, Canadian Air Force calisthenics, and what might be termed 'cosmetic 
psychology' — upwards of 60 million North Americans daily kicking and genuflecting 
with Tawni Kondo, a mass choreography somewhat similar to those compulsory A.M. tai 
chi slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China — except that the Chinese assemble 
publicly together. One-third of those 50% of metro Bostonians who still leave home to 
work could work at home if they wished. And (get this) 94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid 
entertainment now absorbed at home: pulses, storage cartridges, digital displays, 
domestic decor — an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes. 

Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of 
annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no 
one can imagine being without. 

But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the 
dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole 
new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forche. Total freedom, privacy, choice. 

Flence the new millennium's passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub- 
rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, 'spect-ops,' the priceless chance to be 
part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers' Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas 
explosions, muggings, purse-snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an 
incomplete vector splatting into North Shore suburbs and planned communities and 
people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and 
spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in 
rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all 
see. Flence the apotheosis and intricate pecking-order of Boston street musicians, the 
best of whom now commute to work in foreign autos. The nightly chance to crank back 
the drapes and face out into the streets at OOOOh., when all street-parked vehicles have 
to switch sides and everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or watching. Street 
fights, supermarket-checkout confrontations, tax-auctions, speeders stopped for 



ticketing, coprolaliac Touretters on downtown corners, all drawing liquid crowds. The 
fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a mass of 
eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way. Q.v. the crowd- 
control headaches at crime-scenes, fires, demonstrations, rallies, marches, displays of 
Canadian insurgency; crowds brought together now so quickly, too quickly even to see 
them, a kind of visual inversion of watching something melt, the crowds collect and are 
held tight by an almost seemingly nucleic force, watching together. Almost anything can 
do it. Street vendors are back. Homeless vets and twisted figures in wheelchairs with 
hand-lettered signs outlining entitlement. Jugglers, freaks, magicians, mimes, 
charismatic preachers with portable PAs. Hardcore panhandlers stem like they're selling 
nostrums to small crowds; the best panhandling now verges on stand-up comedy, and is 
rewarded by watching crowds. Cultists in saffron with much percussion and laser-jet 
leaflets. Even some old-style Eurobeggars, black-browed persons in striped leggings, 
mute and aloof. Even local candidates, activists, advocates and grass-roots aides have 
returned full-circle to the public stump — the bunting-hung platform, the dumpster-lid, 
vehicles' roofs, awnings, anything overhead, anything raised to a crowd-collecting public 
view: people climb and declaim, drawing crowds. 

One top Back Bay public spect-op every November is watching expressionless men in 
federal white and municipal cadet-blue drain and scrub the Public Gardens' man-made 
duck pond for the upcoming winter. They drain it sometime in November every year. It's 
publicly unannounced; there's no fixed schedule; long shiny trucks just all of a sudden 
appear in a ring at pond's rim; it's always a weekday c. mid-November; it's also always 
somehow a gray raw sad windy Boston day, gulls cartwheeling in a sky the color of dirty 
glass, people mufflered and with new gloves on. Not your ideal sylvan-type day for 
conventional lounging or public spectation. But a massive crowd always collects and 
thickens in a dense ring along the banks of the Public Gardens' pond. The pond has 
ducks. The pond is perfectly round, its surface roughened to elephant skin by the wind, 
geometrically round and banked with lawn-quality grass and shrubbery in even-spaced 
clumps, with park-type benches between the shrubs overhung by white-barked willows 
who've now wept their yellow autumn grit onto the green benches and grass banks 
where an arc of crowd now forms and thickens, watching duly designated authorities 
commence to drain the pond. Some of the pond's flightier ducks have already 
decamped for points south, and more leave on some phylogenic cue just as the shiny 
trucks pull up, but the main herd remains. Two private planes fly in lazy ellipses just 
under the cloud-cover overhead, banners strung out behind them advertising four 
different levels of comfort and protection from Depend. The wind keeps blowing the 
banners sideways, mobiusizing them and then straightening them back out with the 
loud pop of flags unfurling. From the ground the engines and banners' pops are too faint 
to hear above the crowd-noise and ducks and wind's mean whistle. The swirling 
groundwind's so bad that U.S. Chief of Unspecified Services Rodney Tine, standing with 
his hands at the small of his back at a window on the eighth floor of the State House 
Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts., looking southwest and down at the concentric rings of 
pond and crowd and trucks, can see wind-driven leaves and street-grit swirling right 
outside and pecking at this very window he stands before, massaging his coccyx. 



Dr. James 0. Incandenza, filmmaker and almost a scopophile about spect-ops and 
crowds, never once missed this spectacle, when alive and in town. Hal and Mario have 
both been to a few. So have several Ennet residents, though some of them weren't in 
much of a position to remember. It seems as if everyone in metro Boston's seen at least 
one pond-draining. It's always the same sort of grim windy Northeast November day 
where if you were at home you'd be eating earth-tone soups in a warm kitchen, 
listening to the wind and glad of home and hearth. Every year Himself came was the 
same. The deciduous trees were always skeletal, the pines palsied, the willows wind- 
whipped and nubbly, the grass dun and crunchy underfoot, the water-rats always seeing 
the big drainage-picture first and gliding like night to the cement sides to flee. Always a 
crowd in thickening rings. Always rollerblades on the Gardens' paths, lovers joined at 
the hand, Frisbee in the distance on the rim of the Gardens' other side's hillside's slope, 
which faces away from the pond. 

U.S. Office of Unspecified Services Chief Rodney Tine stands at the unclean window for 
much of the morning, ruminative, his posture a martial at-ease. A stenographer and an 
aide and a Deputy Mayor and the Director of the Massachusetts Division for Substance 
Abuse Services, and Unspecified Services Regional Operatives Rodney Tine Jr. 257 and 
Hugh Steeply 258 all sit silently in the conference room behind him, the stenographer's 
Gregg pen poised in mid-dictation. The eighth-floor window's purview goes all the way 
to the ridge of the hillside at the Gardens' other end. Two Frisbees and what looks like a 
disembowelled ring of Frisbee float back and forth along this ridge, dreamily floating 
back and forth, sometimes dipping below the ridge and lost, for a moment, to the 
specular vision of Tine. 

Trying at the same time to give his bad skin some quality UV and a good chill's chap, 
the grad-work-study engineer of M.I.T.'s WYYY-109 lies bare-chested on a silvery NASA- 
souvenir space blanket, supine and cruciform at about the angle of a living-room 
recliner on the Public Gardens' far hillside. This is out by Arlington St., in the Gardens' 
southwest corner, hidden by its ridge from the pond's basin and tourism booth and 
pavilion and the hub of radial paths and the giant verdigrised statues of ducklings in a 
row commemorating Robert McCloskey's beloved and timeless Make Way for Ducklings. 
The Gardens' only other slope is now the bowl of the former pond. The hillside's grassy 
decline, not too steep, runs at a wedge's angle down toward Arlington St. and is one 
broad greensward, free of dog droppings because dogs won't go to the bathroom on 
inclined terrain. Frisbees float on the ridge behind the engineer's head, and four lithe 
boys on the ridge play a game with a small beanbaggy ball and bare blue feet. It is 5° C. 
The sun has the attenuated autumn quality of seeming to be behind several panes of 
glass. The wind is bitter and keeps flopping unmoored sections of NASA blanket over 
parts of the engineer's body. Goose-pimples and real pimples jostle each other for space 
on his exposed flesh. The student engineer's is the hillside's only metallic space blanket 
and bare torso. He lies there splayed, wholly open to the weak sun. The WYYY student 
engineer is one of roughly three dozen human forms scattered over the steep slope, a 
human collection without pattern or cohesion or anything to bind them, looking rather 
like firewood before it's been gathered. Wind-bronzed sooty men in zipperless parkas 
and mismatched shoes, some of the Gardens' permanent residents, sleeping or in 



stupors of various origin. Curled on their sides, knees drawn up, unopen to anything. In 
other words huddled. From the great height of one of Arlington St.'s office buildings, the 
forms look like things dumped onto the hillside from a great height. An overhead 
veteran'd be apt to see a post-battle-battlefield aspect to the array of forms. Except for 
the WYYY engineer, all the men are textured in urban scuz, unshaven, yellow-fingered 
and exposure-bronzed. They have coats and bedrolls for blankets and old twine-handle 
shopping bags and Glad bags for recyclable cans and bottles. Also huge camper's packs 
without any color to them. Their clothes and appurtenances are the same color as the 
men, in other words. A few have steel supermarket-carts filled with possessions and 
wedged by their owners' bodies against a downhill roll. One of the cart-owners has 
vomited in his sleep, and the vomit has assumed a lava-like course toward the huddled 
form of another man curled just downhill. One of the shopping carts, from upscale 
Bread & Circus, has an ingeniously convenient little calculator on its handlebar, designed 
to let shoppers subtotal their groceries as they select them. The men have sepia nails 
and all somehow look toothless whether they have teeth or not. Every so often a 
Frisbee lands among them. The loose ball makes a beanbaggy sound against players' 
feet above and behind them. Two skinny and knit-capped boys descend very close to 
the engineer, chanting very softly 'Smoke,' ignoring all the other forms, which anyone 
could tell are undercapitalized for purchasing Smoke. When his eyes are open he's the 
only one on the hillside to see the round bellies of ascending ducks pass low overhead, 
catching a thermal off the hillside and rising to wheel away left, due south. His WYYY- 
109 T-shirt and inhaler and glasses and M. Fizzy and spine-split copy of Metallurgy of 
Annular Isotopes are just off the edge of the reflecting blanket. His torso is pale and 
ribby, his chest covered with tough little buttons of acne scar. The hillside's grass is still 
pretty viable. One or two of the scattered fetal forms have black cans of burnt-out 
Sterno beside them. Bits of the hillside are reflected in Arlington's storefronts and office 
windows and the glass of passing cars. An unexceptional white Dodge or Chevy-type van 
pulls out of Arlington's traffic and does some pretty impressive parallel parking along 
the curb at the hillside's bottom. A man in an ancient NATO-surplus wool greatcoat is up 
on his hands and knees to the engineer's lower left, throwing up. Bits of chyme hang 
from his mouth and refuse to detach. There's little bloody threads in it. His hunched 
form looks somehow canine on the uneven slope. The fetal figure wedged unconscious 
under the front wheels of the shopping cart nearest the engineer has only one shoe, and 
that shoe's without laces. The exposed sock is ash-colored. Besides the FIANDICAPPED 
license plate, the only exceptional things about the van now idling at the curb far below 
are the tinted windows and the fact that the van is spotless and twinkly with wax to 
about halfway up its panelled side, but above that line dirty and rust-saucered and 
shamefully neglected-looking. The engineer has been turning his head this way and that, 
trying to tan evenly along his whole jawline. The curbside van idles at a distant little 
point between his heels. Some of the hillside's forms have curled themselves around 
bottles and pipes. A smell comes off them, rich and agricultural. The student engineer 
doesn't usually try to sun and chap his skin at the same time, but chapping-ops have 
lately been scarce: since Madame Psychosis of '60+/-' took her sudden leave of medical 
absence, the student engineer hasn't once had the heart to sit out on the Union's 



convoluted roof and monitor the substitute shows. 

The engineer moves his upturned face back and forth. First, Madame was replaced by 
a Mass Comm, graduate student who proved a crushing disappointment as a Miss 
Diagnosis; then Madame was publicly deemed irreplaceable by management, and the 
engineer is now paid simply to cue her background music and then sit monitoring a live 
mike for a noiseless 60 minutes, which means he has to stay in his booth maintaining 0- 
levels with a live mike and can't ascend with his receiver and cigarettes even if he 
wanted to. The station's student manager's given the engineer written instructions on 
just what to say when people phone in during the hour to inquire and wish Psychosis a 
speedy recovery from whatever might ail her. At once denying and encouraging rumors 
of suicide, institutionalization, spiritual crisis, silent retreat, pilgrimage to the snow¬ 
capped East, the disappearance of someone who's been only a voice is somehow worse 
instead of better. A terrible silence now, weeknights. A different silence altogether from 
the radio-silence-type silence that used to take up over half her nightly show. Silence of 
presence v. silence of absence, maybe. The silences on the tapes are the worst. Some 
listeners have actually come in and down through the deep cortex and into the cold pink 
studio itself, to inquire. Some to allay this firm conviction that Madame was still actually 
still showing up and sitting there by the mike but not saying anything. Another of the 
men sleeping nearby keeps punching at the air in his sleep. Almost all the personal wee- 
hour inquiries are from listeners somehow bent, misshapen, speech-defective, vacantly 
grinning, damaged in some way. The type whose spectacles have been repaired with 
electrician's tape. Shyly inquiring. Apologies for bothering someone they can clearly see 
is not even there. Before the student manager's written instructions, the student 
engineer'd wordlessly directed their attention to Madame's triptych screen with no 
silhouette behind it. Another white Dodge van, just as unevenly clean and opaque- 
windowed, has appeared on the ridge above and behind the hillside's littered forms. It 
casts no visible shadow. A Frisbee-ring caroms off the clean grille of its snout. It idles, its 
panel door facing the declivity and the other white van's panel door far below. One 
hideous little inquirer had had a hat with a lens on it and seemed about to fall forward 
into the engineer's lap. His attendant wanting some address where they might send 
something supportive and floral. The NASA blanket's micronized aluminumoid coating is 
designed to refract every possible UV ray into the student engineer's bare skin. The 
engineer knows about the ambulance and the Brigham and Women's ICU and five-day 
rehab ward from the thick swart girl Notkin, the one with the disreputable hat and Film- 
Dept. I.D. who came down via the Basilar elevator late at night to retrieve some old 
tapes of the program for the Madame's personal listening use, she said, and was 
fortunate enough to know the Madame in private life, she said. The term is Treatment, 
Madame Psychosis is in long-term Treatment at something the bearded girl in the sooty 
hat obliquely described as only half a house in some unbelievably unpleasant and low- 
rent part of the metro-area. This is the precise total of what the WYYY engineer knows. 
Fie is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more. Q.v. the dimpled steel 
ramp now protruding from the squeakily opened panel door of the van on the ridge 
above and behind him. Q.v. the utter darkness inside the idling van down along the 
Arlington St. curb, whose side panel's also been slid open from within. The southwest 



hillside is copless: the Gardens' platoon of M.D.C. Finest are all in their souped-up golf 
carts over at the drained pond, throwing curved sections of glazed doughnut into the 
ducks' shrubbery and telling a largely-dispersed-already crowd to please move along. 
The ridge's Frisbees and hackysackers have abruptly vanished; there's now an eerie 
stillness like a reef when a shark cruises through; the ridge's van's idling maw open and 
black, silver-tongued. 

Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the hillside's van's ramp 
as a madly squeaking brass-colored blur, a snowplow-like scoop-type thing welded to it 
and out front skimming the ground and throwing off chaff from the swath of grass it's 
mowing, moving terrifically fast, brakes unapplied, the legless figure up on burly stumps 
in the chair fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem-masked and bent far forward for a skier's pure 
speed, the huddled fetal hillside figures the speeding chair slaloms, the dim glittered 
movements of arrangement for reception deep within the curbside van way at the 
bottom of the steep grade, the engineer arching his neck way out to capture sun on the 
scarred hollows under his jaw, the shopping cart with the calculator clipped by a 
squeaking rubberized wheel at an angle and sent clattering off down the hillside, 
spraying possessions, the homeless shoe to which it had been roped skittering empty 
behind it and the cart's now shoeless unconscious owner just waving at the air in front 
of his face in sleep as if at a bad D.T.-dream of lost shoe and worldly goods, the 
calculating cart whumping into the side of the hunched man vomiting and flipping over 
and bouncing several times and the vomiting man rolling and yelping, vulgarities 
echoing, the WYYY engineer now to be seen hiking himself up on a chill-reddened elbow 
with a start and starting to turn and look above and behind him up at the ridge just as 
the speeding wheelchair with the hunched figure reaches him and the chair's shovel 
scoops the engineer and his NASA blanket and shirt and book up and runs over the 
glasses and bottle of M. Fizzy with one wheel and bears the engineer in the scoop up 
and away and down the steep grade toward the idling van at the bottom, a van whose 
own angled ramp now slides out like a tongue or Autoteller's transaction-receipt, the 
NASA blanket blowing away from the scooped engineer's flailing form about halfway 
down and suddenly aloft in a hillside thermal and blown far out over Arlington St. traffic 
by the keen November wind, the madly squeaking wheelchair aloft over hillside moguls 
and coming back down and up again, the snatched engineer in the chair's scoop 
appearing to the hillside's roused figures mostly as a hallucinatory waggle of bare limbs 
and strangely wheezy shrieks for Help or at least to Look Out Below, all as the modified 
chair squeaks frantically straight down the hillside's most efficient downward line 
toward the van with the ramp now idling in gear, its pipe's exhaust beating the street in 
high-rpm idle, the NASA blanket twisting coruscant in the air high above the street, and 
the shriek-roused figures on the hillside lying there still bent in and barely moving, stiff 
with cold and general woe, except for the hunched man, the unwell man who'd been hit 
by the dislodged cart, who's rolled to a stop and is thrashing, holding the parts that 
were hit. 



11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


1810h.,133 kids and thirteen assorted staff sitting down at suppertime, the E.T.A. 
dining hall taking most of the first floor of West House, a sort of airy atrium-like 
commons, broad and knotty-pine-panelled, the east wall hugely fenestrated and 
columns running the length of the room at center, with ceiling fans high overhead 
circulating the rich and slightly sour smell of bulk-prepared food, the oceanic sound of 
20 different tables' conversation, the flat clink of utensils on plates, much chewing, the 
clank and tinkle of the dishwasher's conveyor belt behind the tray-bus window with its 
sign saying YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE; BUS YR TRAY, the muffled shouts of 
kitchen workers in steam. The top upperclassmen get the best table, an unspoken 
tradition, the one nearest the gas fireplace in winter and the AC venting in July, the one 
whose chairs' legs are all pretty much even, both seats and backs with thin corduroy 
cushions in E.T.A. red and gray. The prorectors have their own permanent table near the 
carbs bar; the Syrian Satelliter and enormous peasant-skirted Moment soft-profiler are 
with them. 

The players can all do some very serious eating, some of them still in sweaty sweats 
with salt-stiff hair, too hungry after three-set P.M.s to shower before refueling. Coed 
tables are quietly discouraged. The Boys 18's and the cream of the 16's are all at the 
best table. Ortho ('The Darkness') Stice, E.T.A.'s 16's A-l, has just this P.M. gone three 
sets with Hal Incandenza, seventeen, E.T.A.'s second-best overall boy, taking Hal all the 
way to 7-5 in the third in an off-record nonchallenge exhibitionish engagement Schtitt 
had them play out on the West Courts that afternoon for reasons no one has yet pinned 
down. The match's audience had grown steadily as other challenges got done and 
people came up from the weight room and showers. News that Stice had very nearly 
beaten an Inc nobody but John Wayne has been able to beat has made its figure-eight 
way around the tables and serving line and salad bar, and lots of younger kids keep 
looking to the best table and Stice, sixteen, crew-cutted and still in his black Fila sweats 
with no shirt under the unzipped top, assembling a complex sandwich on his plate, and 
they let their eyes widen and postures sag to communicate awe: R.H.I.P. 

Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it's the wrist of an assailant. The only 
sound at the table for the first few minutes is of forkwork and mastication and the slight 
gasping sounds of people trying to breathe while they eat. You rarely speak for the first 
few minutes here, eating. Supper is deadly-serious. Some of the kids even start in on 
their trays while still in line at the milk dispenser. Now Coyle bites in. Wayne has made 
his entree into a sandwich and lowers and bites. Keith Freer's eyes are half closed as his 
jaw muscles bulge and slacken. Some of the players' inclined heads are hard to see over 
the height of their food. Struck and Schacht, side by side, bite in sync and chew. The 



only one at the table not eating like a refugee is Trevor Axford, who as a small child back 
in Short Beach CT once fell off his bike onto his head and received a tiny lesion-type 
brain injury after which all food everywhere tastes horrible to him. His clearest 
explanation of the way food tastes to him is that it tastes the way vomit smells. He's 
discouraged from speaking at meals and holds his nose while he eats and eats with the 
neutral joyless expression of somebody dispensing fuel into his car. Hal Incandenza 
dismantles the stelliform-mold shape E.T.A. mashed potatoes come in, mixing baby- 
boileds in with the mashed. Petropolis Kahn and Eliot Kornspan eat with such horrible 
P.O.W.ish gusto that nobody else will sit with them — they're by themselves at a small 
table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid a kind of fine mist or spray. Jim 
Troeltsch keeps holding a clear tumbler of milk up to the ceiling's full-spectrum lights 
and swirling the milk around in the light, looking at it. Pemulis chews with his mouth 
open, producing moist noises, a habit so family-of-origin-ingrained no amount of peer 
pressure can break him of it. 

Eventually The Darkness clears his throat to speak. In the showers he'd gotten up to 
the middle of an Xmas story about one of his parents' epic rows. His parents had met 
and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS — just outside Liberal KS on 
the Oklahoma border — met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this popular 
Kansas C/W-bar-game where they put their bare forearms together and laid a lit 
cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms' flesh and kept it there till one of 
them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm. Mr. and Mrs. 
Stice each discovered somebody else that wouldn't jerk away and reel away, Stice 
explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white slugs of burn- 
scar. They'd toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice explained. They'd 
been divorced and remarried four or five times, depending on how you defined certain 
jurisprudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms they stayed in their 
bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except for brief sallies out 
for Beefeater gin and Chinese take-out in little white cardboard pails with wire handles, 
with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard house in sagging 
diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econobags bigger than 
most of them were, the Stice kids. The kids did somewhat physically better during 
periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and 
went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice — whom both Mr. Stice and The 
Darkness called 'The Bride' — while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking 
intricate multicourse meals she'd feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself 
and his six siblings as 'The Brood') and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots 
and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of 
cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride's own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to 
distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes 
highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclass-men with 
them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and 
people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their 
surroundings to be regaled. Some of them listen, drifting in and out. Troeltsch and 
Pemulis are arguing about whether E.T.A.'s kitchen staff has started trying to slip them 



powdered milk on the sly. Freer and Wayne are still hunched and chewing, very intent. 
Hal's making some sort of structure out of his food. Struck keeps both elbows on the 
table at all times and utensils in his clenched fists like a parody of a man eating. Pemulis 
always listens to Stice's tales, often repeating little phrases, shaking his head in 
admiration. 

'I'm just going to go up and refuse to eat one more thing with a utensil that's gone 
down the disposal.' Schacht is holding up a fork with crazy tines. 'Just look at it. Who 
could eat with something like that.' 

'The old man is a son of a bitch that is cool under fire, in terms of The Bride,' Stice 
says, leaning in to bite and chew. The tendency at E.T.A. is to take the entree and unless 
it's a wet entree to take wheat bread and make it a sandwich, for the extra carbs. It's 
like Pemulis can't really taste his food unless he mashes it against his palate. The 
Academy's wheat bread is bicycled in by guys in Birkenstock sandals from Bread & Circus 
Quality Provisions in Cambridge, because it's got to be not only sugarless but low in 
glutens, which Tavis and Schtitt believe promote torpor and excess mucus. Axford, who 
lost to Tall Paul Shaw in straight sets and if he loses to him again tomorrow goes down 
to #5-A, stares stonily into space, his motions less like somebody eating than like 
somebody miming eating. Hal's made an intricate fortification-structure of his food, 
complete with turrets and archer-slits, and even though he's not much eating or 
drinking his six cranberry juices he keeps swallowing a lot, studying his structure. As the 
eating slows down at the best table the more observant of them give Hal and Axford 
tiny sideways looks, the players' different CPUs humming through Decision Trees on 
whether a still-publicly-undiscussed but much-rumored showdown with Dr. Tavis and 
the O.N.A.N.T.A. urology guy, plus now this loss to Shaw and near-loss to Ortho Stice, 
might not have shaken Inc and Axhandle along some psychic competitive fault-line, 
different guys with different rankings calculating the permuted advantages to 
themselves of Hal and Axford having a deeply distracted and anxious week. Though 
Michael Pemulis, the other rumored O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scannee, ignores Axford's 
expression and Hal's excessive swallowing altogether, though possibly studiously 
ignoring them, staring meditatively at the squeegees 259 taken down off the wall and 
leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers steepled before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, 
who blows his nose with one hand and rattles his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the 
tabletop with the other. 

Pemulis shakes his head very seriously at Troeltsch. 'Not a chance, brother.' 

'I'm telling you man this milk is powdered.' Troeltsch peering down into the tumbler, 
probing the milk's surface with a thick finger. 'Me I can tell from powdered. I have 
growing-up domestic confirmed traumas around powdered. The day Mother announced 
milk was too heavy to keep lugging back from the store and switched to powdered, with 
Father's OK. Father knuckling under like Roosevelt at Yalta. My big sister ran away from 
home, and the rest of us were traumatized around it, this switch to powdered, which is 
unmistakable if you know what to look for.' 

Freer makes a snoring noise. 

'And do I ever know what to look for, to verify.' Troeltsch is hoarse, and one of these 
people who speaks to more than one person at once by looking from one person to one 



person to one person; he's not a born public speaker. 'Namely your telltale residues 
along the sides of the glass, when swished.' W/ great flourished swishings of the milk. 

'Except Troeltsch you can turn around and see them fucking loading the bags into the 
dispenser every twenty minutes. Bags of milk. That say MILK on them, the bags. Liquid, 
sloshy, hard to handle. It's milk.' 

'You see bags, you see the word MILK. They're counting on the packaging. Image 
management. Sensory management.' Responding to Pemulis but looking at Struck. 'Part 
of some larger overall kertwang. Possible punishment for the Eschaton thing.' Eyes 
going briefly to Hal. 'Covert vitamins possibly next. Let's not even mention saltpeter. Put 
aside deductions from bags a second. I'm sticking to facts. Fact: this is verifiably 
powdered milk.' 

'You're saying they mix powdered milk and then try and pour it into milk-bags, all to 
allay?' 

Schacht clears his mouth and swallows mightily. 'Tavis can't even regrout tile in the 
locker room without calling a Community Meeting or appointing a committee. The 
Regrouting Committee's been dragging along since May. Suddenly they're pulling secret 
0300 milk-switches ? It doesn't ring true, Jim.' 

'And Troeltsch has a cold, he said,' Freer observes, indicating the little bottle of 
Seldane next to Troeltsch's squeezing-ball, by his plate. 'You can't even taste, Troeltsch, 
if you got a real cold.' 

'Trevor should have the cold, Axhandle, no?' Schacht says, tapping carminative 
capsules onto his palm from his own amber bottle. 

With supper they can choose milk or else cranberry juice, that most carbcaloric of 
juices, which froths redly in its own clear dispenser by the salad bar. The milk dispenser 
stands alone against the west wall, a big huge 24-liter three-bagger, the milk inserted in 
ovaloid mammarial bags into its refrigerated cabinet of brushed steel, with three 
receptacles for tumblers and three levers for controlled dispensing. There's two levers 
for skim and one for supposedly high-lecithin chocolate skim, which every new E.T.A. 
tries exactly once and discovers tastes like skim with a brown crayon melted into it. 
There's a sign in a kitchen-staffer's crude black block caps taped to the dispenser's 
facade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The sign used to say MILK IS 
FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of 
a blue dot by a fairly obvious person. 260 The line for seconds on entrees now stretches 
out past the milk dispenser. The best thing about satiation and slowing down on the 
eating is leaning back and feeling autolysis start in on what you ate and tending to your 
teeth while you gaze around the airy room at crowds and clumps of kids, observing 
behaviors and pathologies with a clear and sated head. The littler kids running in tight 
circles trying to follow the shadow of the ceiling fan. Girls laughing crumpled against 
their seatmates' shoulders. People protecting their plates. The blurred sexuality and 
indecisive postures of puberty. Two marginal male 16's have their heads directly in the 
bowls in the salad bar, and some of the surrounding females are commenting. Different 
kids are illustrating points with different gestures. John Wayne and Keith Freer stroll 
purposefully through the serpentine crowd and up to the front of the Seconds line and 
insert themselves in front of a little boy who's tearing at a held bagel with great violent 



movements of head and neck. The 18-A's get free buttinskis: R.H.I, literal P., at E.T.A. Jim 
Struck spears one of the cherry tomatoes out of Hal's salad bowl with a savage fork- 
gesture; Hal makes no comment. 

Troeltsch has run his thick finger around the inside of the tumbler and is holding the 
digit out at different guys around the table. 'Note a certain bluish cast to it. Traces and 
remains. Suspicious foam. Minute grains of not quite altogether dissolved particulate 
powdered stuff. Powdered always leaves its telltale signs.' 

'Your fucking head is a minute grain, Troeltsch.' 

'Put that finger away.' 

'Tryna eat here.' 

'Paranoia,' Pemulis says, scooping up stray peas with the flat of his knife. 

'Base tuition of 21,700 scooters, not counting,' Troeltsch says, moving the finger back 
and forth in the air — the stuff drying on the finger does not, admittedly, exactly look 
appetite-whetting — 'and yet let's note how the Lung's not up in spite of rampant 
weather and Achilles'-complaints, and today's lunch a total deja vu of yesterday's lunch, 
and the bread and bagels they've started getting us Day-Old with the yellow stickers on 
the bags, and there's dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and lawn- 
mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on the wall and Stice's 
bed moves around, and there's a ball machine in the girls' lockers, Longley reports, that 
for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef—' 

Stice's head has jerked up, a trace of mashed potato on his nose. 'Who says my bed 
moves? How's it you know anything about any beds moving?' 

But it's true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario's near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. 
Millicent Kent was only the beginning. Starting with the mysterious and continuing fall 
of acoustic ceiling-tiles from their places in the subdorms' drop ceilings, inanimate 
objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly 
inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating 
and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-crew lawnmower sitting clean and silent and 
somehow menacing in the middle of the dawn kitchen gave Mrs. Clarke the fantods and 
resulted in Eggplant Parmesan for two suppers in a row, which sent shock waves. 
Yesterday A.M. there'd been a cannonesque ball machine — no small feat to move 
around anywhere or get through doors — in the Females' Sauna, which machine some 
of the upperclass girls had found and screamed at when they went in for the dawn 
saunas that help alleviate some vague female-type problem that none of the guys quite 
fathom. And two black girls on the breakfast crew reportedly found a set of squeegees 
on the dining hall's north wall, several meters up and hung crossed in a kind of saltire, 
placed there by parties unknown. F. D. V. Harde's A.M. groundsmen reportedly took the 
things down, and now they're leaning by the fireplace. The inappropriate found objects 
have had a tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; 
they're not funny. To varying degrees they've given everyone the fantods. Mrs. Clarke 
had taken the morning off again, was why the repeat-lunch. Stice's eyes are back on his 
plate, which is nearly clean. Unmentioned is the fact that Schacht and Tall Paul Shaw at 
lunch went over the whole part of the north wall the black girls said they found the 
squeegees on and could find neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visible means of 



attachment. The whole thing's been studiously not talked about, adding to everybody's 
discomfort at Troeltsch's hoarse complaints about tuition, which vary in specifics but are 
otherwise routine. 

'And then now the ultimate dietary cluster-fuck: attempted powdered milk.' 

'Trying to foist it you're saying.' 

'I'm saying and look at us and what do we do?' 

'Fake a cold and stay in bed playing sportscaster with the TP, in protest?' says Pemulis. 

Troeltsch uses the bottle of Seldane to point for emphasis. 'We don't want to hear 
about it. We look the other way with our heads in the sand.' 

'Sounds fucking painful.' 

'Go find some fucking synonyms for beat.' 

Slice swallows hugely: 'Never open your eyes underground: my old man's dictum.' 

'And so we distract ourselves,' Troeltsch says; 'we yuck it up.' 

Pemulis makes a k-sound. 'Here's the real question: how dumb is Troeltsch?' 

'Troeltsch's so dumb he thinks a manila folder's a Filipino contortionist.' 

'Troeltsch, who's buried in Grant's Tomb?' 

Kyle Coyle says surely they've all heard the one about what do Canadian girls put 
behind their ears to attract boys. John Wayne gives him not a look. Wayne's peering 
inside his own tumbler, where there does seem to be some sort of residue. There are 
fragments of lettuce in his eyelashes. Ortho Stice's cheeks are ballooned with food, his 
eyes on his own salad's remains, expression abstract and furrowed. A terrible kind of 
community energy in the whole dining hall, a kind of anxious sound-carpet under the 
surf of voices and the tinkle of flatware, and The Darkness is at some vague center of 
this energy, somehow, you can feel. Neither Wayne nor Hal's been approachable all fall, 
on-court. Kids at other tables say low-toned things to their seatmates, and then the 
seatmate looks covertly over at Stice's table. Forehead purply crumpled. Slice stares 
hard at his salad and tries to block input from his phenomenal peripheral vision. Two 
14's are contending over toast. Petropolis Kahn is preparing to catapult a chickpea at 
somebody. Jim Struck points out Bridgette Boone and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent returning 
for what Struck counts as Fourths, and Stice blocks the sight out. The sad pretty sunset 
out over the hilltops of Newton cannot be seen because the room's big windows face 
east, out over the hillside and the Enfield Marine complex that the Academy has bathed 
in shadow, so E.M.'s porch lights are already on, and tall cubist bits of the old metropolis 
beyond that, east, with shadows encroaching. The afternoon just past was a glory, 
scrubbed and cool and windless, cloud-free, the sun a disk, the sky a dome, soaked in 
light, even the northern horizons bell-clear against a faint green-yellow cast. Schacht has 
about eight amber bottles of various medicines for his Crohn's Disease, and a whole 
ritual of administration. A couple of the black girls who work kitchen and custodial day- 
shifts can be seen against the shadowy tree-line, making their way down the steep 
hillside's unauthorized path back down to the halfway-house thing for wretched people 
who come up here to work short-time. The girls' bright cheap jackets are vivid in the 
shadow and trees' tangle. The girls are having to hold hands against the grade, walking 
sideways and digging heavily in at each step. The black girl Clenette Hal had read fear in 
as she left C.T.'s office with his litter now has a bulging backpack on her back, as in 



bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage, 261 her arms strung way out between the other 
black girl Didi and the trees she grabs and digging in sideways with each step, the 
hesitancy of steep dark slopes, rooty and shot through with briers. 

A girl with bangs rises and tings her tumbler with a spoon to make an announcement; 
nobody pays any attention. 

Now Kahn's by custom allowed to come over and sit with them at the best table, post- 
prandia lly. 

Wayne and Stice both shiver at the same time as the overhead lighting suddenly 
becomes the big room's primary light. 

There's a brief and sort of ignorant discussion on why girls who hit backhands one- 
handed seem prone to having different-sized breasts. Hal recalls his brother's late-in- 
college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet and 
have covert sex with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl. This was after 
the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had 
been disfigured. Orin kept a record of Subjects that was sort of a cross between a chart 
and a journal. He used to come home and leave it out just pleading to be read. This was 
back when his brother Orin needed only to have sexual intercourse with them instead of 
getting them to fall so terribly in love with him they'd never be able to want anyone 
else. He'd taken obscure massage and psych courses and read tantric books whose 
illustrations seemed about as sexy to Hal as Twister. 

Coyle says 'Their ankles'; everybody ignores him. Wayne's already left the table. 

Little 14-C Bernard Makulic, two tables over from the milk dispenser and 
constitutionally delicate and not long for E.T.A., throws up in a silky tan cataract onto 
the floor by his chair, and there is the shriek of the feet of other chairs being scooted in 
a star pattern away from the table, and the protracted vowels of repulsed children. 

Struck, Pemulis, Schacht and Freer have all had sexual intercourse. Coyle's a probable, 
but reticent. Axford has trouble even publicly showering, much less submitting nude to 
a female's inspection. Hal is maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime virginity is a 
conscious goal. He sort of feels like O.'s having enough acrobatic coitus for all three of 
them. Freer even has a like souvenir-colposcope bolted to the inside of his locker door 
where a pin-up'd have been in days of yore, and Pemulis and Struck have allegedly 
patronized the Combat Zone after the fiscally pressed city'd buckled and rehung the 
Combat Zone's red lights, east of the Common. But Jim Troeltsch and sex: no way. And 
with Wayne and Stice the question seems somehow beside the point. Hal's mouth feels 
like it's overflowing with spit. He should by all rights have lost to Stice today, and he 
knows it. Stice was in physical control of the third set. Stice choked it away only because 
he didn't believe he could beat Hal yet, deep down, since Hal's competitive explosion. 
But the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can 
tell. It's now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days 
is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and 
exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head. No one except Pemulis and 
Axford know it's a whole new and chemical-free Hal who should by all rights have lost to 
a 16-year-old out there in public on what ended up a gorgeous NNE autumn day. 

Wayne had gotten up and bussed his tray in the middle of the jejune breast thing. 



Ortho ('The Darkness') Stice is still staring into his salad. If you could open Stice's head 
you'd see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place. Stice 
has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with 
the people at the table. A lot of the guys interpret his intense distraction as Stice's still 
being in the magic can't-miss Zone from this P.M.'S match. 

'The idea being that Nuck girls can only attract guys by being really easy to X, is the 
joke,' Coyle says into the noise. 

Then there's a brief rippling lull in the whole dining hall as little Evan Ingersoll emerges 
from the Entree Line's end on crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, 
prorector Tony Nwangi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the kid's tray 
for him. The hall's unease is almost visible, a corona around Ingersoll and the ruptured 
patellar tendon that'll cost him at least six months of competitive development. Penn, 
whose femoral fracture'll cost him a year, isn't even back yet from St. E.'s orthopedic. 
But at least Ingersoll's back. Hal gets up to go over, Troeltsch rising to accompany him 
after a long look at Trevor Axford, Ingersoll's B.B. of record, who's sitting in his chair 
with his eyes shut tight, unable to make any sort of conciliatory gesture. A match-sore 
Hal not limping but stiff-legged and shoulders slightly rolling as he and Troeltsch move 
serpentine around tables, steering way clear of the custodian and dull-steel bucket on 
rollers and the mop spreading and diluting Makulic's chyme out in a thinning circle that 
clears three tables, which Hal and Troeltsch avoid with practiced curves around tables 
whose layout they all know well, Hal to say Hey and How's the Limb, Troeltsch to say 
Hey and be basically relieved he's away from a discussion of females as sexual objects. 
Troeltsch's never come close to even dating anybody. Some guys here never do. It's the 
same at all the academies, this asexual contingent. Some junior players don't have the 
emotional juice left over after tennis to face what dating requires. Bold nerveless guys 
on the court who go slack and pale at the thought of approaching a female in any social 
context. Certain things not only can't be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that 
can be taught. The whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward 
self-forgetting; some find the whole girl-issue thing brings them face to face with 
something in themselves they need to believe they've left far behind in order to hang in 
and develop. Troeltsch, Shaw, Axford: any sort of sexual tension makes them feel like 
they need more oxygen than is available right then. A couple of the girls at E.T.A. are 
kind of slutty, and some of the more aggressive Freer-type guys can break some of the 
girls down and get them to have sex — there's nothing if not time and proximity here. 
But E.T.A. is mostly a comparatively unsexual place, maybe almost surprisingly so, 
considering the constant roar and gurgle here of adolescent glands, the emphasis on 
physicality, the fears of mediocrity, the back-and-forth struggles with ego, the loneliness 
and close proximity. There's scattered homosexuality, much of it emotional and 
unconsummated. Keith Freer's pet theory is that the bulk of E.T.A. females are nascent 
lesbians who don't know it yet. That like any serious female athletes they're basically 
vigorously male inside, and so Sapphic-tending. The ones that get to the W.T.A. 262 
Show'll probably be the only ones who find out that they are, he believes — dykes that 
is. The rest will marry and spend a lifetime by the club pool wondering why the hair on 
their husbands' backs makes them shudder. E.g. the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, sixteen and 



phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with breasts like artillery and a butt like two 
bulldogs in a bag (Stice's term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, 
Freer likes to observe. And no one likes the fact that Carol Spodek's carried and prized 
the same single large-grip Donnay stick for going on five straight years. 

Ortho Stice of southwest Kansas looks briefly up at Hal and Troeltsch's departure 
before returning his attention to a certain cherry tomato perched somehow halfway up 
the shallow incline of his salad bowl. It's possible that the cherry tomato is attached 
halfway up the incline by an adhesive bit of yogurt dressing rather than just sitting there 
defying gravity on its own. Stice doesn't use a finger to move the tomato and check this. 
He's using only his concentrated will. He's trying to will the cherry tomato to roll of its 
own objectile power down the incline and into the bowl's center. He stares at the cherry 
tomato with enormous concentration, chewing his tri-level skinless-chicken-fillet 
sandwich. The chewing makes overlapping plates of muscle all the way up one side of 
his face and crew-cut scalp bulge and roll. He's trying to flex some kind of psychic 
muscle he's not sure he even has. The crew cut lends his head an anvil-like aspect. 
Complete concentration makes his round red fleshy face look crumpled. Stice is one of 
those athletes whose body you know is an unearned divine gift because its conjunction 
with his face is so incongruous. He resembles a poorly spliced photo, some superhuman 
cardboard persona with a hole for your human face. A beautiful sports body, lithe and 
tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth — like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus 
before his trials — on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, 
broad and slab-featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored, with a mottled forehead under the 
crew cut's V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowls that hang and whenever he 
moves suddenly or lithely make a sort of meaty staccato sound like a wet dog shaking 
itself dry. Tony Nwangi is saying something acerbic to Hal, who looks like he's kneeling 
penitent before Ingersoll, everyone at the surrounding tables inclined very subtly away 
from Hal. Troeltsch is signing Ingersoll's cast as he speaks into his fist. Off the court. 
Ortho Slice's flattop crew cut and penchant for cuff-rolled bluejeans and button-down 
short-sleeves with a checkered pattern are strictly from hick. The facial scrunching that 
attends concentration adds crevices and seams and an uneven flush to the bulldog face. 
His cheeks are ballooned with food as he stares at the perched cherry tomato, trying to 
respect this object with all his might. Summoning the sort of coercive reverence he'd felt 
this P.M. as several balls' sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own 
vectors half convinced Stice they'd become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times. 
He'd mishit one cross-court volley and seen the thing head for an area wide even of the 
doubles sideline and then curve like a drenched spitter back to land just inside the 
singles corner, and this at a time when the grounds' pines behind Hal Incandenza were 
breeze-leaning in the exact opposite direction. Hal had given Stice a little bit of a look on 
that one. Stice couldn't finally tell whether Hal noticed anything amiss in the mysterious 
curves and downdrafts that seemed to favor The Darkness alone; Hal had played with 
the wide-eyed but unfocused look of a tennis player right on the verge of falling apart 
out there, and yet strangely affectless, as if deep inside some well of his own private 
troubles; and Stice wills himself again not to wonder what had passed with the 
Headmaster and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist, whose lab-equipped van's unscheduled 



appearance in the E.T.A. parking lot yesterday afternoon had caused a tsunami of panic 
just before supper, especially since Pemulis and his supply of lab-ready Visine bottles 
were nowhere to be found. 

Even among the small circle who know Hal gets secretly high, it doesn't make much 
sense that Hal's misery'd be Tavis- or urine-related, since Pemulis has never seemed 
blither than today; and if anyone were going to get the boot, chemically or otherwise, it 
was not going to be the E.T.A. administration's relative and second-best boy. 

Hal and his brother Mario both know that the skim milk at E.T.A. has been pre-mixed 
powdered milk since Charles Tavis assumed the helm four years back and told Mrs. 
Clarke he wanted the kids' animal-fat intake halved in a month by any and all means. 
The kitchen's graveyard shift power-mixes it in enormous steel bowls and then strains 
out the foam and pours the milk into real-milk milk-dispenser bags for a kind of placebo 
effect; it's mostly just the concept of powdered milk that gags people. 

Struck has traded his shiny clean plate for the absent Incandenza's fortification- 
structured plate of uneaten fillets, low-gluten bread, corn-bread, baby boileds, a pea- 
chickpea-based olla, half a fresh squash, mashed potatoes packed in a stelliform gelatin 
mold, and a shallow bowl of dessert-tsimmes featuring mostly it seemed like plums. Hal 
is still down on one knee by Ingersoll's chair, his elbows on his knee, listening across 
Ingersoll and a blindfolded Idris Arslanian to Tony Nwangi. Keith Freer remarks blandly 
on how Hal seems like he's feeling sort of punk this evening, checking Stice for a 
reaction. Struck utters truisms about wasting food and global hunger through a full 
mouth. Struck is wearing a Sox cap to the side so the bill shadows half his face. The 
bread is unkind to his braces. Freer is wearing the leather vest with no shirt under, 
which is what he favors after weights have pumped his torso full of air. Stice had had a 
traumatic psychic experience at fourteen when he'd set the weight on the pull-down 
station too high, and Dr. Dolores Rusk has authorized his exemption from all but very 
basic weights, pending resolution of his fear of weights. The joke around E.T.A. is that 
Stice, who's surely Show-bound after graduation, has no fear of heights, but does fear 
weights. Keith Freer, though kind of a second-rank junior player, does look beautiful in 
his calfskin vest — his face and body match. Troeltsch wants a sportscasting career, but 
Freer is the E.T.A. with looks InterLace would favor. Freer's from inland Maryland, 
originally, his family's riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in the B.S. 
'90s with his now-deceased father's invention of a Pet-Rockish novelty that was 
ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases — the so-called Phoneless 
Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, 
ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho's first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old 
man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee. Nobody now 
much even gets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. 
But Freer's old man had invested his windfall shrewdly. 


1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ 



U.S.A. 


'My own father,' Steeply said. Steeply again faced outward, one hip out and a hand on 
that hip. The scratch on his triceps was now ugly and puffed. Also, an area of Steeply's 
left finger was whiter than the skin around it. The removal of a university ring, or more 
probably a wedding band. It seemed curious to Marathe that Steeply would undergo 
electrolysis but not take trouble to fix his finger's annular pallor. 

Steeply said 'My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get 
consumed with a sort of entertainment. It wasn't pretty. I was never sure how it started 
or what it was about.' 

'You are now imparting a personal anecdote of you,' Marathe stated. 

Steeply did not shrug. He was pretending to study something particular out on the 
floor of the desert. 'But nothing like this sort of Entertainment — a plain old television 
program.' 

'Television of broadcasting and — how did one express it? — the passivity.' 

'Yes. Broadcast television. The program in question was called "M*A*S*H." The title 
was an acronym, not a command. As a boy I can recall some confusion on this point.' 

'I am knowing of the U.S.A. historical broadcast television comedy program 
"M*A*S*H,"' Marathe stated. 

'The fucking thing ran forever, it seemed. The program that would not die. B.S. 70s 
and '80s before it finally died, mercifully. Set in a military hospital during the U.N.'s 
action on Korea.' 

Marathe remained without expression. 'Police Action.' 

Many small birds of the mountain of the outcropping had begun to whistle and twitter 
somewhere off above and behind them. Also maybe the tentative rattle of some 
serpent. Marathe pretended to search for the watch in his pocket. 

Steeply said 'Now, nothing prima facie exceptional about getting attached to a show. 
God knows I was attached to my share of shows. That's all it started as. An attachment 
or habit. Thursday nights at 2100h. "Nine O'clock Eastern, Eight O'clock Central and 
Mountain." They used to broadcast this, to alert you to when to watch, or if you were 
going to tape it.' Marathe watched the big man shrug from behind. 'So the show was 
important to him. So, fine. OK. So he took pleasure in the program. God knows the guy 
was entitled — he'd worked like a dog his whole life. So OK, so at the start he scheduled 
his Thursday around the show, to an extent. It was hard to pinpoint anything wrong or 
consumptive. He was, yes, always home from work by 2050 on Thursdays. And he 
always had his supper watching the program. It seemed almost cute. Mummykins used 
to tease him, think it was adorable.' 

'Cuteness in fathers, this is rare.' There was no way Marathe was going to touch the 
evident U.S.A. childhood expression Mummykins. 

'My old man worked for a heating-oil distributorship. Home heating-oil. Have your 



files got this? A tidbit for M. Fortier: U.S.O.U.S.'s Steeply, H.H.: late father a heating-oil- 
delivery dispatcher. Cheery Oil, Troy, New York.' 

'State of New York, U.S.A., prior to Reconfiguration.' 

Hugh Steeply turned around but not all the way, scratching absently at his wens. 'But 
then: syndication. "M*A*S*H." The show was incredibly popular, and after a few years 
of Thursday nights it started also to run daily, during the day, or late at night, 
sometimes, in what I remember all too well was called syndication , where local stations 
bought old episodes and chopped them up and loaded them with ads, and ran them. 
And this, note, was while all-new episodes of the show were still appearing on 
Thursdays at 2100. I think this was the start.' 

'The cuteness, it was over.' 

'My old man started to find the syndicated reruns extremely important to him, too. As 
in like not to be missed.' 

'Even though he had viewed and enjoyed them before, these reruns.' 

'The fucking show ran on two different local stations in the Capital District. Albany and 
environs. For a while, this one station even had a "M*A*S*H" hour, two of them, back 
to back, every night, from 2300. Plus another half an hour in the early P.M., for the 
unemployed or something.' 

Marathe said 'Virtually a bombardment of this U.S.A. broadcast comedy program.' 

After a brief pause of attention to some wens of the face. Steeply said 'He started to 
keep a small television down at work. Down at the distributorship.' 

'For the broadcast of afternoon.' 

Steeply appeared to Marathe uncalculating in his statements. 'Broadcast TVs, toward 
the end they made some of them really small. Kind of a pathetic try at keeping cable 
down. Some as small as like wrist-size. You'd be too young to remember.' 

'I remember well a pre-digital television.' Marathe, if Steeply's anecdote of himself 
had a political point or communique, Marathe could not yet determine this. 

Steeply moved his foul Belgian cigarette into his right hand to flick it out into the space 
below. 'It progressed very slowly. The gradual immersion. The withdrawal from life. I 
remember guys from his bowling league calling, that he'd quit. Our Mummykins found 
out he'd dropped out of Knights of Columbus. Thursdays the jokes and cuteness stopped 
— him all hunched in front of the set, barely even eating from his tray. And every night 
late at night, for the nightly hour, the old man too wide awake, and hunched over 
weirdly, head out, as if pulled toward the screen.' 

'I too have seen this posture of viewing,' Marathe grimly said, recalling his second- 
oldest of brothers and the Canadiens of the N.L. of H. 

'And he got anxious, ugly, if something made him miss even one. Even one episode. 
And he'd get ugly if you pointed out he'd already seen most of them about seven times 
before. Mummykins began to have to lie to get them out of engagements that would 
have infringed. Neither of them talked about it. I don't remember any of us trying to 
name the thing out loud — this dark shift in his attachment to the program "M*A*S*H." 

l 

'The organism of family simply shifted to accommodate.' 

'Which it wasn't even all that consuming an entertainment,' Steeply said. He sounded 



to Marathe uncalculated and somewhat younger. 'I mean it was OK. But it was 
broadcast TV. Broad comedy and canned laughter.' 

'I am remembering well this rerunning program, do not worry about me,' said 
Marathe. 

'It was at some point during this gradual shift the notebook first appeared. He began 
writing notes in a notebook as he viewed. But only when viewing "M*A*S*H." And he 
never left the notebook lying around where you could get any kind of look at it. He 
wasn't openly secretive about it; you couldn't even point to that and say something was 
wrong. The "M*A*S*H" notebook just never seemed to be lying around.' 

With the hand that was not below the blanket still gripping the Sterling UL35, Marathe 
was holding his thumb and forefinger up against the smear of red which was just over 
the Mountains of Rincon and craning his neck to see his shadow behind them on the 
hillside. 

Steeply changed the hip which was out, in his standing, to his other hip. 'As a child, 
this is when it became impossible to ignore the odor of obsession about the whole 
thing. The secrecy about the notebook, and the secrecy about the secrecy. The 
scrupulous recording of tiny details, in careful order, for purposes you could just tell 
were both urgent and furtive.' 

'This is unbalance,' Marathe concurred. 'This attaching of excessive importance.' 

'Jesus, you don't know the half of it.' 

'And for you also,' Marathe said, 'excessive unbalance. For your father progresses 
downhill in this obsessing, but always so slowly that always you could question yourself, 
whether you were maybe yourself the one out of balance, attaching too much 
importance to any one thing — a notebook, a posture. Crazy making.' 

'And the toll on Mummykins.' 

Marathe had turned the chair to a slight angle to be able to see his shadow, which 
appeared blunt and deformed by the topography of the steep hillside above the 
outcropping, and in general pathetic and small. There would be no titanic or menacing 
Brockengespenstphanom with the sunrise of dawn. Marathe said 'The whole organism 
of family becomes out of balance, questioning its perceptions.' 

'The old man — then he started developing this habit of quoting little lines and scenes 
from "M*A*S*H," to illustrate some idea, make some point in conversation. At the 
beginning of the habit he seemed casual about it, as if the little bits and scenes simply 
occurred to him. But this changed, but slowly. Plus I remember he started seeking out 
feature films that also featured the television program's actors.' 

Marathe pretended to sniff. 

'Then at some point it was as if he was no longer able to converse or communicate on 
any topic without bringing it back to the program. The topic. Without some system of 
references to the program.' Steeply gave small indications of paying attention to the 
small squeaks as Marathe turned his chair slightly this way and that way, achieving 
different angles of sight on his small shadow. Steeply exhaled air through the nostrils 
with a forceful sound. 'Though it wasn't as though he was wholly uncritical of it.' 

It sometimes from somewhere blue occurred to Marathe that he did not dislike this 
Steeply, though like or respect would be too far in going, to say. 



'It was not that type of obsession with it, it, you are saying.' 

'It was gradual and slow. He started at some point I remember to refer to the kitchen 
as the Mess Tent and his den as the Marsh or Swamp. These were fictional locations on 
the show. He began renting films with even crowd-extra or cameo appearances by the 
program's actors. He bought what was then called a Betamixer, 263 a kind of early 
magnetic-video recorder. He began a practice of magnetically recording each week's 29 
broadcasts and reruns. He stored the tapes, organizing them in baroque systems of 
cross-reference that had nothing discernible to do with dates of recording. I remember 
Mummykins didn't say anything when he moved his bedding and began to sleep at night 
in the easy chair in his den, the Swamp. Or pretend to. Sleep.' 

'But you had your suspicions of not real sleeping.' 

'It was gradually obvious he was viewing his magnetic recordings of the program 
"M*A*S*H" throughout the night, probably over and over again, using a crude white 
plastic earplug to hide the noise, scribbling feverishly in his notebook.' 

In contrast with the violence and transpergant puncturing of the sunset, the dawn sun 
seemed slowly exhaled from the more rounded salience of the Mountains of Rincon, its 
heat a moister heat and the light the vague red of a type of fond sentiment; and 
U.S.O.U.S.'s Steeply's standing shadow was cast back over the outcropping toward 
Marathe behind him, close enough that Marathe might reach his arm out and touch the 
shadow. 

'You can tell I don't have a good recall of the exact progression of the thing,' Steeply 
said. 

'The gradual.' 

'I do know that Mummykins, I remember one day in the garbage can out behind the 
house she found a number of letters addressed to a "M*A*S*H" character named — 
this I fucking-A sure remember — Major Burns. She found them.' 

Marathe did not allow himself the chuckle. 'While searching inside the can of waste in 
the back. For evidence of unbalance.' 

Steeply waved Marathe off. He was incapable of amused. 'She didn't search through 
the garbage. Mumkinsky had too much class. She probably forgot and threw away the 
day's Troy Record before she'd clipped her food-coupons. She was an inveterate 
coupon-clipper.' 

'This was prior to the days of North American laws of recircling 264 of newspapers.' 

Steeply did not wave off or give a glare. He wore the look of concentrating. This 
character — this I remember, too well — was portrayed by I remember the actor Maury 
Linville, a plain old employee of 20th Century Fox.' 

'Which later upstarted the fourth network of the Large Four.' 

Steeply's luridly run makeup from the heat of the day before had now over the night 
hardened into a configuration of almost horror. 'But the letters, the letters were 
addressed to Major Burns. Not to Maury Linville. And not c/o Fox Studios or wherever, 
but addressed to an involved military address, with a Seoul routing code.' 

'In the South Korea of history.' 

'The letters were hostile, savage, and lavishly descriptive. He'd come to think the 
show's character Major Burns embodied some type of cataclysmic, Armageddon-type 



theme that was slowly assembling itself on the program and progressively being hinted 
at and emerging in the gradual succession of seasons of this "M*A*S*H."' Steeply felt at 
his lip. 'I remember Mummykins never mentioned the letters. From the garbage. She 
just left them around where my kid sister and I would see them.' 

'You are not meaning your sister was a goat.' 

Steeply was not provokable into some different emotion, however, Marathe observed. 
'Younger sister. But my old man, the progression of the program from fun to obsession 
— crucial distinctions had collapsed, I think, now. Between the fictional Burns and this 
Linville who portrayed Burns.' 

Marathe raised a brow for concurring: 'This is signifying a severe loss of balance.' 

'I remember something about he seemed to believe the name of the character Burns 
also somehow hiddenly signified the English verb for the promise of the consuming fire 
of apocalypse.' 

Marathe looked puzzled or else squinted because of a rising sun. 'But he threw the 
letters into the waste receptacle, you stated, instead of the Snail's Mail.' 

'He'd already started missing whole weeks at a time from work. He'd been at Cheery 
for decades. He was only a few years from retirement.' 

Marathe was looking at his lap's blanket's brightening colors of plaid. 

'Mo Cheery and the old man — they'd bowled together, they were in Knights of 
Columbus together. Missing all the weeks of work made things awkward. Mo didn't 
want to can the old man. He wanted the old man to see somebody.' 

'A professional person.' 

'A lot of this I wasn't even there for. The "M*A*S*H" thing. I was at college by the time 
the really crucial distinctions had collapsed.' 

'Studying the multiple cultures.' 

'My kid sister had to keep me abreast of developments during the term. Good old Mo 
Cheery'd come by the house, view magnetic tapes of the show with the old man a while, 
listen to the old man's theories and views, then on his way out he'd collar Mummykins 
and take her out into the garage and talk to her very quietly about the fact that the old 
man was in a high-angle psychic nose-dive and needed with all due regard in his opinion 
to see somebody in the direst fucking way. My kid sister said the Mumkinsky always 
acted like she had no idea what Mo Cheery was talking about.' 

Marathe smoothed at his blanket. 

'Mumkinsky being a type of pet family name,' Steeply said, looking a little bit of 
embarrassed. 

Marathe nodded. 

'I'm trying to reconstruct this out of memory,' Steeply said. 'The old man is by this time 
pretty much unable to converse about anything except the television program 
"M*A*S*H." The theory of the theme of this Burns-slash-Burning apocalypse now sort of 
spreads out to become huge and complex theories about wide-ranging and deeply 
hidden themes having to do with death and time, on the show. Like evidence of some 
sort of coded communication to certain viewers about an end to our familiar type of 
world-time and the advent of a whole different order of world-time.' 

'Your mother continues to play-act at normalcy, however.' 



'I'm trying to reconstruct things that weren't even clear at the time,' Steeply said, his 
wet and then dried makeup now grotesque in his concentration in the sunrise, like a 
mask of a mentally ill clown. He said 'One theory involved the fact, which the old man 
found extremely significant, that the historical Korean Police Action of the U.N. lasted 
only roughly two-odd years, but that "M*A*S*H" itself was by then into something like 
its seventh year of new episodes. Some characters of the program were getting gray 
hair, receding hair, face-lifts. The old man was convinced this signified intentional 
themes. According to my kid sister, who bore the brunt of time spent with him, 
watching,' Steeply said, 'the old man's theories were almost inconceivably complex and 
wide-ranging. As the years of new seasons went on and some actors retired and 
characters were replaced by other characters, the old man generated baroquoco 
theories about what it was that had quote-underline '"really" happened to the absent 
characters. Where they'd gone, where they were, what it all augured. Then the next 
thing was one or two of the letters started to appear, canceled and returned, stamped 
as undeliverable, or to addresses that were not just nonexistent but absurd.' 

'Unbalanced letters were no longer being discarded as waste, but now mailed.' 

'And Mummykins was uncomplaining throughout. It was enough to break your heart. 
She was a rock. She did, granted, begin taking prescription anti-anxiety medication.' 

Land of the freely brave: Marathe did not say this aloud. He looked at his pocket's 
watch and was trying to remember a time when he had ever with Steeply had to 
consider the tact of departing. 

Steeply, at this time, gave the impression somehow of having several cigarettes going 
at one time. 'Somewhere along late in the progression the old man let it be known he 
was working on a secret book that revised and explicated much of the world's military, 
medical, philosophical and religious history by analogies to certain subtle and complex 
thematic codes in "M*A*S*H." 1 Steeply would stand on one foot to raise the other foot 
to look at a shoe's inflicted damage, all the time smoking. 'Even when he went in to 
work, there were problems. Heating-oil customers who called for deliveries or 
information or whatever began to complain that the old man kept trying to engage 
them in bizarre theoretical discussions of the thematics of "M*A*S*H."' 

'Because it is necessary that I leave soon, a central point must be soon emerging,' 
Marathe worked in as gracefully as possible. 

Steeply seemed not to hear this other man. He seemed not only uncalculated and self- 
enmeshed; his demeanor itself seemed more young, that of some young person. This 
unless this was part of some performance beyond Marathe, Marathe knew he must 
consider. 

'Then the double blow, 1 Steeply said. 'In B.S. 1983. My memory's clear on this. The 
Mumkinsky opened an alarming letter from attorneys for CBS and 20th Century Fox. 
Certain letters had been apparently rerouted by do-goodnik military postal clerks to Fox. 
The old man'd been trying to correspond with different past and present "M*A*S*H" 
personas in letters the family never saw get mailed but whose content, the attorneys 
said, raised quote grave concern and could quote constitute grounds for strenuous legal 
action. 1 Steeply raised the foot to look, his face in pain. He said, 'Then the program's 
final episode ran. Late autumn of B.S. 1983.1 was on an ROTC marching-band trip to 



Fort Ticonderoga. My kid sister, who'd by this time left home herself, and who could 
blame the kid, she reported that the Mumkinsky was talking very casually and 
uncomplainingly of the old man's now refusing to leave his den. 1 

'This, the final enclosing isolation of obsession.' 

Steeply looked over his shoulder on one awkward foot to look slightly at Marathe. 'As 
in even to go to the bathroom, now, the not leaving.' 

'Your mother's prescriptions prevented some episodes of great anxiety, I think.' 

'He'd gotten a special A.C.D.C. cable hook-up that brought in extra syndication. When 
reruns weren't running, the video-magnetic tapes ran constantly. He was haggard and 
spectral and his easy chair was all but unrecognizable. Cheery Oil was keeping him on 
the books until he could get his thirty years in at age sixty. My kid sister and I started 
reluctantly discussing intervening on Mummykins to intervene on the old man and force 
him to see somebody.' 

'Yourselves, you could not reach him.' 

'He died just before his birthday. He died in his easy chair, set at full Recline, watching 
an episode in which Alda's Hawkeye can't stop sleepwalking and fears he's going out of 
his fucking mind until a professional military therapist reassures him, I remember.' 

'Me, I too have seen this episode rerunning, in my childhood.' 

'All I can recall of it is the army professional telling Alda not to worry, that if he was 
truly crazy he'd sleep like a newborn, as did the notorious Burns-slash-Linville.' 

'The program's character of Burns slept exceptionally well, I remember.' 

'His secret book's manuscript filled scores of notebooks. This is what the notebooks 
turned out to be. One closet in the den had to be forced open. All these notebooks 
tumbled out. The whole thing was written in a kind of medical-slash-military-looking 
code, though, indecipherable — Sis and her first husband and I spent some time trying 
to decode them. After his death in the chair.' 

'His unbalance of temptation cost him life. An otherwise harmless U.S.A. broadcast 
television program took his life, because of the consuming obsession. This is your 
anecdote.' 

'No. It was a transmural infarction. Blew out a whole ventricle. His whole family had a 
history: the heart. The pathologist said it was amazing he'd lasted this long.' 

Marathe shrugged. 'The obsessed frequently endure.' 

Steeply shook the head. 'It must have been hell on the poor old Mumkinsky.' 

'She never complained, however.' 

Already the sun was up and pulsing. Light ran over everything in a sickening yellow 
way like gravy. All birds and living animals had been silenced, stunned already by heat, 
and the site's bright loaders had not yet been started in movement. All was calm. All 
was bright. Steeply's shadow on the shelf was squat and blunt, already shorter than the 
living figure of Steeply himself, who was leaning outward to try to find a spot far below 
to litter with a crumpled Belgian packing with one prayed no more finally to smoke. 

Marathe took his watch from out of the windbreaker's pocket. 

Steeply shrugged. 'I think you're right, that it's part of both the horror and the pull. 
When I'm east and thinking of Flatto's lab and I sort of look up and find myself tempted.' 

'About the Entertainment of now.' 



'And I kind of half-picture Hank Hoyne in the old man's old recliner, hunched and 
scribbling feverishly.' 

'In military coding.' 

'His eyes, they got like that, too, the old man's, like Hoyne's. Periodically.' 

Heat began to shimmer, as well, off the lionhide floor of a desert. The mesquite and 
cactus wobbled, and Tucson AZ resumed once more the appearance of the mirage, as it 
had appeared when Marathe had first arrived and found his shadow so entrancing in its 
size and reach. The sun of A.M. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and 
businesslike and harmful to look upon. Marathe allowed himself a few diverting seconds 
of watching the Mountains of the Rincons' widening shadows melt slowly backward into 
the base of the Mountains of the Rincons. Steeply hawked and spat, still holding the last 
crumpled pack of Flanderfumes. 

'My time is sharply finite to remain.' Marathe said this. Every change of his postures 
brought small squeaks of leather and metal. 'I would feel gratitude if you departed first.' 

Steeply figured Marathe wanted him to have no idea how he got up and down, in and 
out. To no real purpose; a personal point of pride. Steeply squatted for adjusting the 
straps of his high heels. His prostheses were still not quite aligned. He spoke with the 
faintly breathless quality of large men trying to bend: 

'Well. Remy, but I don't think Dick Willis's "empty of intent" quite does it. Captures it. 
The eye-factor. Hoyne, the Arab internist. The old man. Not for eyes like that.' 

'You would say it does not capture these eyes' expression.' 

Looking up while squatting, this made Steeply's neck appear thick. He stared past 
Marathe, at the shale. He said 'The expressions seem more like — fuck, how to say it. 
Fuck,' Steeply said in concentration. 

'Petrified,' Marathe said. 'Ossified. Inanimate.' 

'No. Not inanimate. More like the opposite. More as if... stuck in some way.' 

Marathe's neck itself was stiff from so much time looking out and down from a height. 
'What is it this wishes here to mean? Glued?' 

Steeply was doing something to a toenail's cracked polish. 'Stuck. Fixed. Held. 
Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in 
different directions.' 

Marathe's eyes searched the sky, which this was already too light blue for his 
pleasure, filmed with a sort of eggy plura of heat. 'Meaning between different cravings 
of great intensity, this.' 

'Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that. As if he were stuck wondering. As if 
there was something he'd forgotten.' 

'Misplaced. Lost.' 

'Misplaced.' 

'Lost.' 

'Misplaced.' 

'As you wish.' 



13 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


0245h., Ennet House, the hours that are truly wee. Eugenio M., voluntarily filling in for 
Johnette Foltz on Dream Duty, is out in the office playing some sort of hand-held sports 
game that blips and tweets. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy and Bruce 
Green are in the living room with the lights mostly out and the old jumpy-picture D.E.C. 
viewer on. Cartridges not allowed after OOOOh., to encourage sleep. Sober cocaine-and 
stimulant-addicts sleep pretty well by the second month, straight alcoholics by the 
fourth. Abstinent pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for the first 
year. Though Bruce Green is asleep and would be in violation of the no-lying-on-the- 
couch rule if his legs weren't twisted over and his feet on the floor. All the Ennet House 
viewer gets on Spontaneous Dissemination is basic InterLace, and from 0200 to 0400 
InterLace NNE downloads for the next dissemination-day and cuts all transmissions 
except one line's four straight redissemms of 'The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program,' 
and when Mr. Bouncety-Bounce appears in his old cloth-and-safety-pin diaper and 
paunch and rubber infant-head mask he is not a soothing or pleasant figure at all, for 
the sleepless adult. Ken Erdedy has started to smoke cigarettes and sits smoking, 
joggling one leather slipper. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day are on the nonleather 
couch. Kate Gompert sits cross-legged on the couch with her head all the way forward 
so her forehead touches her foot. It looks like some kind of spiritually advanced yoga 
position or stretching exercise, but it's really just the way Kate Gompert has been sitting 
on the sofa all night every night since Wednesday's free-for-all unpleasantness with Lenz 
and Gately in the streetlet, from which the whole House is still reeling and spiritually 
palsied. Day's bare calves are completely hairless and look sort of absurd with dress 
shoes and black socks and a velour bathrobe, but Day's proven kind of admirably 
resistant to caring what other people think, in a way. 

'Like you really care.' Kate Gompert's voice is toneless and hard to hear because it 
issues from out of the circle formed by her crossed legs. 

'It isn't a question of caring or not caring,' Day says quietly. 'I meant only that I identify 
to an extent.' 

Gompert's sarcastic chuff of air raises a section of her unwashed bangs. 

Bruce Green doesn't snore, even with his nose broken and cross-hatched in white 
tape. Neither he nor Erdedy is listening to them. 

Day speaks softly and doesn't cross his legs to incline over to the side toward her. 
'When I was a little boy —' 

Gompert chuffs air again. 

'— just a boy with a violin and a dream and special roundabout routes to school to 
avoid the boys who took my violin case and played keep-away over my head with it, one 



summer afternoon I was upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, 
alone, practicing my violin. It was very hot, and there was an electric fan in the window, 
blowing out, acting as an exhaust fan.' 

'I know from exhaust fans, believe you me.' 

'The direction of flow is beside the point. It was on, and its position in the window 
made the glass of the upraised pane vibrate somehow. It produced an odd high-pitched 
vibration, invariant and constant. By itself it was strange but benign. But on this one 
afternoon, the fan's vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing 
on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in 
my head. It is impossible really to explain it, but it was a certain quality of this resonance 
that produced it.' 

'A thing.' 

'As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came 
billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, 
dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I 
had not had the slightest inkling was there.' 

'But it was inside you, though.' 

'Katherine, Kate, it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given 
form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan 
and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I 
shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room.' 

'Was it triangular? The shape? When you say billowing, do you mean like a triangle?' 

'Shapeless. Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean 
only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the 
moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It 
seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an 
anomaly.' 

A mirthless laugh into the ankle. 'Alcoholics Anomalous.' 

Day hasn't switched legs or moved, and he isn't looking at her ear or her scalp, which 
are in view. 'In just the way any child will probe a wound or pick at a scab I returned 
shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the 
resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in 
my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too 
large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold 
empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever 
confronted.' 

'But you still forgot and went back up there and brought it back. And it was inside 
you.' 

Completely incongruously, Ken Erdedy says 'His head's shaped like a mushroom.' Day 
has no idea what he was referring to or talking about. 

'Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape 
began rising out of my mind's corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from 
the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not 
recede.' 



'The triangular horror.' 

'It was as if I'd awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived 
in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and 
blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I'd 
awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would rise inside me.' 

It isn't like a real interface or conversation. Day doesn't seem to be addressing 
anybody in particular. 'The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of 
college. I attended Brown University in Providence Rl, graduating magna cum laude. 
One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in 
years.' 

'But there was an inevitability-feeling about it, too, when it came.' 

'It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible 
way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older.' 

'Tell me all about it.' 

'I thought I'd have to hurl myself out of my dormitory's window. I simply could not live 
with how it felt.' 

Gompert's head isn't all the way up, but now it's about halfway up; her forehead has a 
major red impression-spot from her ankle-bone. She's looking roughly halfway between 
straight ahead and Day beside her. 'And there was this idea underneath that you'd 
brought it on, that you'd wakened it up. You went back up to the fan that second time. 
You like despised yourself for waking it up.' 

Day is looking straight ahead. Mr. Bouncety-Bounce's head is in no way mushroom¬ 
shaped, though it is large and — in the rubber infant-mask — apt to appear to the adult 
viewer kind of grotesque. 'Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me 
staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me 
until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn't converse; he didn't try to 
comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn't become friends. By 
graduation I'd forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the 
piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself.' 

Green in his sleep cries out something that sounds like 'For God's sake no Mr. Ho don't 
light it!' His swollen black eyes and R.E.M.'s non sequiturs, plus the capering 130-kilo 
infant on the viewer, plus Day and Gompert conversing while both staring into space, all 
backed by the blurps and wonks of Gene M.'s hand-held game in the office, give the 
dark living room a dreamy and almost surreal atmosphere. 

Day finally uncrosses his legs and switches them. 'It's never come back. Over twenty 
years. But I've not forgotten. And the worst times I have felt since then were like a day 
at the foot-masseur's compared to the feeling of that black sail or wing rising inside me.' 

'Billowing.' 

'Not the nuts Jesus God not the nutsss.' 

'I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore 
dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell. They did not mean the black sail. 
They meant the associated feelings.' 

'Or the corner it came up out of, inside, if they mean a place.' Kate Gompert is now 
looking at him. Her face doesn't look better but does look different. Her neck's clearly 



stiff from having been contorted. 

'From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,' Day says, holding the 
knee of the leg just crossed, 'I understood on an intuitive level why people killed 
themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself.' 
'Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.' 

'Oh God please,' Green says very distinctly. 

Day says: 'There is no way it could feel worse.' 


11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


Apparently some higher-up had sent Mary Esther Thode out on her little yellow Vespa 
with the order for their match; she'd pulled up alongside Stice and Wayne just as they 
cleared the Hammond golf course, Hal a good half km. behind them with galumphers 
Kornspan and Kahn. Schtitt was inscrutable about the whole thing. The match wasn't 
like a ladder-challenge; Stice and Hal were in different age-divisions this year. The match 
was more like maybe an exhibition, and by the second set, as people got done with the 
weight room and showers, it was attended like one. The match. Helen Steeply of 
Moment, possessed of a certain thuggish allure but hardly the pericardium-piercer that 
Orin had made her sound like, to Hal, sat through the whole thing, accompanied for the 
first set by Aubrey deLint before Thierry Poutrincourt stole his spot on the bleacher. It 
was the first high-caliber junior tennis she'd ever seen, she said, the massive journalist. 
They played on #6, the best of the east Show Courts. Also the scene of some of the 
recent Eschaton's worst carnage. It was a conditioning-heavy day, a very light schedule 
of matches. Bags of smoke burped steadily up from Schtitt's crow's nest high overhead, 
and sometimes you could hear the weatherman's pointer tapping absently on the 
transom's iron. The only other thing nearby was down on #10, a challenge in Girls' 14's, 
two baseliners sending parabolas back and forth: ponytails, an air of baseline attrition, 
the ball's high heavy arc that of a loogy spat for distance. Shaw and Axford were also 
way out on #3, warming up. No one paid them or the 14's much mind. The bleachers 
behind the Show Court filled steadily up. Schtitt had Mario film the whole first set from 
above, leaning way out over the transom's railing with Watson braced and gripping his 
vest from behind, Mario's police lock protruding and casting a weird needly shadow 
slanted northeast of Court 9's net. 

'This is the first real match I've seen, after hearing so much about the junior tour,' 



Helen Steeply told deLint, trying to cross her legs on a cramped bleacher a few tiers 
from the top. Aubrey deLint's smile was notoriously bad, his face seeming to break into 
crescents and shards, wholly without cheer. It was almost more like a grimace. Orders 
that deLint keep the mammoth soft-profiler in direct sight at all times were explicit and 
emphatic. Helen Steeply had a notebook, and deLint was filling in both players' names 
on performance charts Schtitt won't ever let anyone look at. 

The P.M. was moving fast from a chilly noon cloud-cover into blue autumn glory, but 
in the first set it was still very cold, the sun still pale and seeming to flutter as if poorly 
wired. Hal and Stice didn't have to stretch and barely warmed up at all, after the run. 
They'd changed clothes and were both expressionless. Stice was in all-black, Hal in E.T.A. 
sweats with his left shoe's upper bulging distended around his AirStirrup brace. 

A born net-man. Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a 
back-brace. He was shorter than Hal but better-built and with quicker feet. A southpaw 
with factory-painted W's on his Wilson Pro Staff 5.8 si's. 

Hal was left-handed too, which complicated strategy and percentages hideously, 
deLint told the journalist beside him. 

The Darkness's service motion was in the McEnroe-Esconja tradition, legs splayed, feet 
parallel, a figure off an Egyptian frieze, side so severely to the net he's almost facing 
away. Both arms out straight and stiff on the serve's downswing. Hal bobbed on his 
feet's balls a little in the ad court, waiting. Stice started his service-motion motion in 
little segments — it looks a little like bad animation — then grimaced, tossed, pivoted 
netward and served it with a hard flat spang way out to Hal's forehand, pulling Hal wide. 
The finish of Stice's pivot lets his momentum carry him naturally up to net, following the 
serve. Hal lunged for the serve and chipped a little forehand return down the line and 
scrambled right to get back into court. The return was lucky, a feeble chip that just 
cleared the net's tape, so shallow that Stice had to half-volley it at the service line, still 
moving in, his backhand two-handed and clumsy for half-volleys; he had to sort of scoop 
it and hit up soft so it wouldn't float out deep. Axiom: the man who has to hit up from 
the net is going to get passed. And Stice's half-volley landed in the ad court squishy and 
slow and sat up for Hal, who was waiting for it. Hal's stick was back for the forehand, 
waiting, and there was a moment of total mentation as the ball hung there. Statistically, 
Hal was book to pass a left-handed volleyer cross-court off a ball this ripe, though he 
also always loved a good humiliating topspin lob, and Stice's fractional chance at saving 
the point was to guess what Hal would do — Stice couldn't crowd the net because Hal 
would put it up over him; he stayed a couple stick-lengths off the net, leaning for a 
cross. Everything seemed to hang distended in air now so clear it seemed washed, after 
the clouds. The bleachers' people could feel Hal feel Stice letting the point go, inside, 
figuring it lost, knowing he could only guess and stab, hoping. Little hope of Hal fucking 
up: Hal Incandenza does not fuck up passes off floater half-volleys. Hal's forehand's 
wind-up was nicely disguised, prepped for either lob or pass. When he hit it so hard his 
forearm's musculature stood starkly out it was a pass but not cross-court; he went 
inside-out on it, a flat forehand as hard as he could from the baseline's center back 
toward Stice's deuce-sideline. Stice had finally guessed lob at the start of the stroke and 
had half-turned to sprint back for where it would land, and the inside-out pass wrong- 



footed him; he could do no more than stand there flat-footed and watching as the fresh 
ball landed a meter fair to get Hal back to deuce in the fifth game. There was applause 
off thirty hands for the point as a whole, which was faultless and on Hal's part 
imaginative, anti-book. One of very few total inspired points from Incandenza, deLint's 
chart would show. Neither player's face moved as a couple people shouted for Hal. The 
basic ten-level R.A.S.U. 265 from the Universal Bleacher Co. sat right behind the court. At 
the start it was mostly staff and the A's who were running alongside when Thode 
brought Stice and Hal the directive to play. But the stands gradually filled as word got 
down to the locker rooms that The Darkness was playing 18's A-2 dead-even in the first 
set of something Schtitt had actually dispatched a scooter to order. The bleachers' 
E.T.A.s hunched forward with hands warmed in the crease between hamstrings and 
calves, or else gloved and layered and stretched out with their heads and bottoms and 
heels on three different levels, watching both sky and play. The lozenges of shadow 
from the court's mesh fences elongated as the sun wheeled southwest to west. Several 
sets of legs and sneakers hung swinging from the transom above. Mario allowed himself 
several reaction-shots from staff and partisans in the bleachers. Aubrey deLint spent the 
set with the punter's cathected profiler, who allegedly came to see Hal only about Orin 
but whom Charles Tavis won't let see Hal yet, even chaperoned, Tavis's reasons for the 
reticence too detailed for Helen Steeply to understand, probably, but she was watching 
from the Show-bleachers' top row, poised over a notebook, wearing a fuchsia ski cap 
with a rooster-comb top instead of a pompom top, blowing into her fist, her weight 
making the bleacher below her bow and inclining deLint oddly toward her. For the 
spectators not perched on the transom overhead, the players looked waffle-cut by the 
chain-link fencing. The green windscreens that wrecked spectation were used only in 
the spring in the weeks right after the Lung's disassembly. DeLint hadn't stopped talking 
into the big lady's ear. 

All the E.T.A. players loved the Show Courts 6-9 because they loved to be watched, 
and also hated the Show Courts because the transom's crow's-nested shadow covered 
the north halves of the courts around noon and all through the P.M. wheeled around 
gradually east like some giant hooded shadowed moving presence, brooding. 
Sometimes just the sight of Schtitt's little head's shadow could make a younger kid on 
the Show Courts clutch and freeze. By Hal and Stice's seventh game, the sky was 
cloudless, and the transom's monolithic shadow, black as ink, gave everyone watching 
the fantods as it elongated along the nets, completely obscuring Slice when he followed 
a serve in. Another advantage of the Lung was that it afforded no overhead view, which 
was one more reason why staff waited as long as possible before its erection. There was 
no indication Hal even saw it, the shadow, hunched and waiting for Stice. 

The Darkness splayed out stiff on the deuce side of the center line, ratcheting slowly 
into his service motion. He overhit the first serve long and Hal angled it softly off-court, 
moving two steps in for the second ball. Stice hit his second serve as hard as he could 
again and netted it, and pursed his thick lips a little as he walked into the net's shadow 
to retrieve the ball, and Hal jogged over to the fence behind the next court to get the 
ball he'd angled over. DeLint was putting a pejorative hieroglyphic in a box on his chart 
marked STICE. 



At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, 
Ennet House live-in Staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping 
mask, his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room's ceiling. 

Four-odd clicks to the northwest in the men's room of the Armenian Foundation 
Library, right near the onion-domed Watertown Arsenal, Poor Tony Krause hunched 
forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his knees 
and his face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various 
passages and personae of time. 

M. M. Pemulis and J. G. Struck, wet-haired after their P.M. runs, had blarneyed their 
way past the library-attendant at the B.U. School of Pharmacy 2.8 clicks down 
Commonwealth on Comm, and Cook St. and were seated at a table in Reference, 
Pemulis's yachting cap pushed way back to accommodate his rising eyebrows, licking his 
finger to turn pages. 

H. Steeply's green sedan with its neuralgiac full-front Nunhagen ad on the side sat in 
an Authorized Guest parking spot in the E.T.A. lot. 

Between appointments, 266 in an office whose west windows yielded no view of the 
match, Charles Tavis had his head mashed up against the upholstered seat-rail of his 
sofa, his arm under the gray-and-red ruffle and sweeping back and forth for the 
bathroom scale he keeps under there. 

Avril Incandenza's whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval 
unknown. 


At just this moment M.S.T., Orin Incandenza was once again embracing a certain 
'Swiss' hand-model before a wall-width window in a rented suite halfway up a different 
tall hotel (from before) in Phoenix AZ. The win-dowlight was fiery with heat. Way below, 
tiny cars' roofs glared so bright with reflected light their colors were obscured. 
Pedestrians hunched and sprinted between different areas of shade and refrigeration. 
The cityscape's glass and metal twinkled but seemed to sag — the whole vista looked 
somehow stunned. The cool air through the room's vent whispered. They'd put down 
their glasses of ice and come together upright and embraced. The embrace was not like 
a hug. There was no talking — the only sound was the vent and their breath. Orin's linen 
knee probed the deltoid fork of the hand-model's parted legs. He let the 'Swiss' woman 
grind against the muscular knee of his good leg. They got so close no light shone 
between them, and ground together. Her lids fluttered; his closed; their breath became 
somehow coded. Again the concentrated tactile languor of the sexual mode. Again they 
stripped each other to the waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they didn't 
have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs the same way 
over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported her 
like that, the left hand horned with old callus at the small of her satiny back, and bore 
her. 


Sometimes it's hard to believe the sun's the same sun over all different parts of the 



planet. The NNE sun was at this same moment the color of hollandaise and gave off no 
heat. Between points, both Hal and Slice switched their sticks to their right hands and 
clamped their left hands tight under their arms to keep from losing sensation in the chill. 
Stice was double-faulting more than his average because he was trying to get enough on 
his second serve to follow it credibly to net. DeLint estimated he was charting Stice at 
one double-fault per 1.3 games, and his a./d.f. ratio 267 was an undistinguished .6, but 
he, deLint, told Helen Steeply of Moment, spread way out next to him on the third row 
from the top and using Gregg shorthand, deLint told this Ms. Steeply that Stice was 
nevertheless wise to crank the second serve and eat the occasional double-fault. Stice 
wound up to serve so stiff, his motion so sprocketed and serial, that the journalist told 
deLint Stice looked to her as if he'd learned to serve by studying still photos of the 
motion's different stages, no offense intended. There was none of real highspeed 
motion's liquid flow until the very end, when Stice pivoted toward the net and seemed 
to sort of fall out into the court, his tennis racquet whirling behind his back and 
snapping upward to impact the yellow ball hanging at just the height of his maximum 
reach, and there was a solid pock as this Stice cracked it flat into Orin's brother's body, 
handcuffing Hal at such speeds the ball's movement presented only as afterimage, the 
creamy retinal trail of something too fast to track. Hal's awkward return had too much 
slice, and floated, and Stice hurtled forward to volley it chest-high, blocking it acute into 
open court for a clean winner. There was mild applause. DeLint invited Helen Steeply to 
note that The Darkness really won that point on the serve itself. Hal Incandenza walked 
to the fence to retrieve the ball, impassive, wiping his nose against his sweatshirt's 
sleeve; ad-in. Hal was up 5-4 in the first and had saved three ads off Stice's fifth service 
game, two off double-faults; but deLint still maintained Stice was wise. 

'Hal's got to the point in the last year here where a kid's only real chance is to totally 
press, attack at all times, whale the serve, haul ass to the net, assume the aggressor 
role.' 

'Does Herr Schtitt wear eye makeup?' Helen Steeply asked him. 'I was noticing.' 

'You stay back against this Hal kid, you try to out-think him and move him around, he'll 
yank you back and forth and chew you up and spit you out and step on the remains. 
We've spent years getting him to this point. Nobody stays back and out-controls 
Incandenza anymore.' 

Pretending to flip to a fresh page, Helen Steeply dropped her pen, which fell into the 
bleachers' struts and supports and clattered as only something dropped into a system of 
metal bleachers can clatter. The prolonged noise made Stice take some extra bounces 
before he served. He bounced the ball several times, leaning forward, lined up splayed 
and violently sideways. He went into his odd segmented windup; Helen Steeply 
produced another pen from the pocket of her fiberfill parka; Stice cracked it flat down 
the center, aiming for an ace on the service lines' T. It went by Hal unplayable and 
literally too close to call. There are no linesmen for internal E.T.A. matches. Hal looked 
down the line at where the thing hit and skidded, pausing before indicating his call, the 
hand to his cheek indicating deliberation. He shrugged and shook his head and laid a 
hand out flat in the air before him to signify to Slice he was calling the serve good. This 
meant game Stice. The Darkness was walking toward the net, kneading his neck, looking 



at where Hal was still standing. 

'We can go on and play two, 1 Stice said. 'Didn't see it neither.' 

Hal was coming in closer to Stice because he was going to the net-post for his towel. 
'Not your job to see it.' He looked unhappy and tried to smile. 'You hit it too hard to see, 
you deserve the point.' 

Stice shrugged and nodded, chewing. 'You take the next gimme then.' He sliced two 
balls soft so they ended their roll down near the opposite baseline, where Hal could use 
them to serve. The Darkness still made huge man-dibular chewing faces on-court even 
though he hadn't been allowed to chew gum in play since he accidentally inhaled gum 
and had to be Heimliched by his opponent in the semis of last spring's Easter Bowl. 

'Ortho's saying how the next debatable call goes immediately to Hal; they don't take 
two,' deLint said, darkening in half-squares on the two charts. 

'Take two?' 

'Play a let, babe. Do it over. Two serves: one point.' Aubrey deLint was a lightly 
pockmarked man with thick yellow hair in an anchorman's helmety style and a 
hypertensive flush, and eyes, oval and close-set and lightless, that seemed like a second 
set of nostrils in his face. 'Do a whole lot of sports at Moment do you?' 

'So they're being sporting,' Steeply said. 'Generous, fair.' 

'We inculcate that as a priority here,' deLint said, gesturing vaguely at the space 
around them, head bent to his charts. 

'They seem like friends.' 

'The angle here for Moment might be the good-friends-off-the-court-and-remorseless- 
pitiless-foes-on-court angle.' 

'I mean they seem like friends even playing,' Helen Steeply said, watching Hal dry off 
his leather grip with a white towel as Stice jumped up and down in place back at his 
deuce corner, one hand in his armpit. 

DeLint's laugh sounded to Steeply's keen ear like the laugh of a much older and less fit 
man, the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair on his 
gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer to know 
who he was. 'Don't kid yourself, babe,' de Lint got out. The Vaught twins on the bleacher 
below looked up and around and pretended to shush him, the left mouth grinning, 
deLint with that bad cold-eyed shard of a smile back at them as Hal Incandenza bounced 
the ball three times and went into his own service motion. 

Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel 
twenty-six meters below the Show Courts. 

Steeply's face looked as if the journalist were trying to think of pithy images for a 
motion as unexceptional and fluid as Hal Incandenza's serve. At the start a violinist 
maybe, standing alert with his sleek head cocked and racket up in front and the hand 
with the ball at the racket's throat like a bow. The down-together-up-together of the 
downswing and toss could be a child making angels in the snow, cheeks rosy and eyes at 
the sky. But Hal's face was pale and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow extending 
only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter. The service motion's 
middle might be a man at a precipice, falling forward, giving in sweetly to his own 
weight, and the serve's terminus and impact a hammering man, the driven nail just 



within range at the top of his tiptoed reach. But all these were only parts, and made the 
motion seem segmented, when the smaller crew-cutted jowly boy was the one with the 
stuttered motion, the man of parts. Steeply had played tennis only a couple times, with 
his wife, and had felt ungainly and simian out there. The punter's discourses on the 
game had been lengthy but not much use. It was unlikely that any one game figured 
much in the Entertainment. 

Hal Tncandenza's first serve was a tactically aggressive shot but not immediately 
identifiable as such. Stice wanted to serve so hard he could set himself up to put the ball 
away on the next shot, up at net. Hal's serve seemed to set in motion a much more 
involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive. His 
first serve hadn't Stice's pace, but it had depth, plus a topspin Hal achieved with an 
arched back and faint brushing action over the back of the ball that made the serve 
curve visibly in the air, egg-shaped with spin, to land deep in the box and hop up high, 
so that Stice couldn't do more than send back a deep backhand chip from shoulder- 
height, and then couldn't come in behind a return that'd been robbed of all pace. Stice 
moved to the baseline's center as the chip floated back to Hal. Hal's pivot moved him 
right so he could take it on the forehand, 268 another looper dripping with top, right back 
in the same corner he'd served to, so that Stice had to stop and sprint back the same 
way he'd come. Stice drove this backhand hard down the line to Hal's forehand, a 
blazing thing that made the audience inhale, but as the samizdat's director's other son 
glided a few strides left Steeply could see that he now had a whole open court to hit 
cross-court into, Stice having hit so hard he'd backpedalled a bit off the shot and was 
now scrambling to get back out of the deuce corner, arid Hal hit the flat textbook drive 
cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly so, and the diagonal of the 
ball kept it travelling out wide after it hit Stice's ad sideline, carrying it away from the 
boy in black's outstretched racquet, and for a second it looked as if Stice at a dead run 
might get his strings on the ball, but the ball stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, still 
travelling at a severe cross-court diagonal, and it passed Slice's racquet half a meter past 
its rim, and Slice's momentum carried him almost halfway into the next court. Stice 
slowed to a jog to go retrieve the ball. Hal stood slightly hipshot on the ad side, waiting 
for Stice to get back and let him serve again. DeLint, whose peripheral vision's acuity 
and disguise was an E.T.A. legend, observed the big journalist chew her nib for a second 
and then put down nothing more than the Gregg ideogram for pretty, shaking her 
fuchsia cap. 

'Wasn't that pretty,' he said blandly. 

Steeply rooted for a hankie. 'Not exactly.' 

'Hal's in essence a torturer, if you want his essence as a player, instead of a straight- 
out killer like Stice or the Canadian Wayne,' deLint said. 'This is why you don't stay back 
or play safe against Hal. This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep you trying, 
running. He yanks you around. Always two or three shots ahead. He won that point on 
the deep forehand after the serve — the second he had Stice wrong-footed you could 
see the angle open up. Though the serve set the whole thing up in advance, and without 
the risk of much pace on it. The kid doesn't need pace, we've helped him find.' 

'When might I get a chance to talk to him?' 



'Incandenza took a lot of bringing along. He didn't used to quite have the complete 
game to be able to do this. Slice the court up into sections and chinks, then all of a 
sudden you see light through one of the chinks and you see he's been setting up the 
angle since the start of the point. It makes you think of chess.' 

The journalist blew her red nose.' "Chess on the run.'" 

'Nice term.' 

Hal went into his service motion to the ad court. 

'Do the students play chess here?' 

A mirthless chuckle. 'No time.' 

'Do you play chess?' 

Stice hit a backhand winner off Hal's second serve; mild applause. 

'I don't have time to play anything,' deLint said, filling in a square. 

You could tell by the sound that the other boy's racquet was strung tighter than Hal's. 

'When do I get to sit down with Hal directly?' 

'I don't know. I don't think you do.' 

The journalist's rapid head-movement reconfigured the flesh of her neck. 'Pardon 
me?' 

'It's not my decision. My guess is you don't. Dr. Tavis didn't already tell you?' 

'I really couldn't tell what he was telling me.' 

'We've never had a kid here interviewed. The Founder let you guys on the grounds, 
versus Tavis this is an exception your even getting in.' 

'I'm here for background only, for your alumnus, the punter.' 

DeLint was making his lips look like he was whistling even though no whistling-sound 
was emerging. 'We've never let somebody do any kind of interview on a kid here while 
he's still in training and inculcation.' 

'Does the student have some sort of say in who he talks to and why? What if the boy 
wants to chat with me about his brother's transition from tennis to football?' 

DeLint kept his concentration on the match and the chart in a way that was supposed 
to let you know you had very little of his attention. 'Talk to Tavis about it.' 

'I was in there for over two hours.' 

'You pick up how to do questions with him after a while. Tavis you have to back into a 
Yes-No corner where you can finally say I need a Yes or a No. It takes about twenty 
minutes if you're sharp. This is your whole business, getting answers out of people. The 
answer's not for me to officially say, but I'm guessing a No. The Boston press guys come 
around after a big event, they get match results and physical stats and hometowns and 
nothing more.' 

'Moment is a national magazine for and about exceptional people, not some 
sportswriter with a cigar and a deadline.' 

'It's a command-decision, babe. I'm not in command. I know they teach us to teach 
that this place is about seeing instead of being seen.' 

'I'm here only for the human-interest perspective of a talented boy on his talented 
brother's bold transition to a major sport where he's shown himself to be even more 
talented. One exceptional brother on another. Hal is not the profile's focus.' 

'Get Tavis in the right corner and he'll tell you about seeing and being seen. These 



kids, the best of them are here to learn to see. Schtitt's thing is self-transcendence 
through pain. These kids —' gesturing at Stice running madly up for a drop-volley that 
stopped rolling well inside the service line; mild applause — 'they're here to get lost in 
something bigger than them. To have it stay the way it was when they started, the game 
as something bigger, at first. Then they show talent, start winning, become big fish in 
their ponds out there in their hometowns, stop being able to get lost inside the game 
and see. Fucks with a junior's head, talent. They pay top dollar to come here and go 
back to being little fish and to get savaged and feel small and see and develop. To forget 
themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the 
eyes are off them. They didn't come here to get read about as some soft-news item or 
background. Babe.' 

DeLint read Steeply's expression as some kind of tic. The tiniest tuft of nostril-hair 
protruded from one of her nostrils, which deLint found repellent. She said, 'Were you 
ever written about, as a player?' 

DeLint smiled coolly at his charts. 'Never had the sort of ranking or promise this 
issue'd even come up for me.' 

'But some of these do. Hal's brother did.' 

DeLint felt along his lip's outline with his pencil, sniffed. 'Orin was OK. Orin was 
essentially a one-trick pony as a player. And between you and me and the fence he was 
kind of a head-case. His game left here on the downswing. Now his little brother's got a 
future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho. Wayne for sure. A couple of the girls — Kent, 
Caryn and Sharyn here,' indicating the Vaught-apparition below them. 'The really gifted 
ones, the ones that make it out of here still on the upswing, if they get to the Show — ' 

'Meaning professional you mean.' 

'In the Show they'll get all they want of being made into statues to be looked at and 
poked at and discussed, and then some. For now they're here to get to be the ones who 
look and see and forget getting looked at, for now.' 

'But even you call it "The Show." They'll be entertainers.' 

'You bet your ass they will be.' 

'So audiences will be the whole point. Why not also prepare them for the stresses of 
entertaining an audience, get them used to being seen?' 

The two boys were at the near net-post, Stice blowing his nose into a towel. DeLint 
made kind of a show of putting his clipboard down. 'Assume wrongly for a second that I 
can speak for the Enfield Academy. I say you do not get it. The point here for the best 
kids is to inculcate their sense that it's never about being seen. It's never. If they can get 
that inculcated, the Show won't fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget 
everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only them and 
want only them and the game's incidental to you, for you it's about entertainment and 
personality, it's about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they'll never be 
slaves to the statue, they'll never blow their brains out after winning an event when 
they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or 
profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you 
chew them up, it's what you do.' 

'We chew statues?' 



'Whether you mean to or no. You, Moment, World Tennis, Self, InterLace, the 
audiences. The crowds in Italy fucking literally. It's the nature of the game. It's the 
machine they're all dying to throw themselves into. They don't know the machine. But 
we do. Gerhardt's teaching them to see the ball out of a place inside that can't be 
chewed. It takes time and total focus. The man's a fucking genius. Profile Schtitt, if you 
want to profile somebody.' 

'And I'm not going to be allowed even to ask the students what it looks like, this inside 
chew-proof place. It's a secret place.' 

Hal mishit a second serve and it flew off his frame and way down to where the girls 
were sending each other squeaks and lobs, and Stice had now broken him to go up 6-5, 
and the murmurs in the bleachers were like a courtroom at an unpleasant revelation. 
DeLint rounded his lips and made a kind of bovine sound in Ortho Stice's direction. Hal 
chipped his balls out along the baseline and made some small adjustments in his cross- 
hatched strings as he walked around for the side-change. A couple of the nastier kids 
applauded Hal's mishit a little. 

'Get sardonic with me all you want. I already said it's not my command-decision. I 
wouldn't get sardonic with Tavis, though.' 

'But if it were. Your command.' 

'Lady, if it was me you'd be pressing your nose between the bars of the gate down 
there is as far in as you'd get. You're coming into a little slice of space and/or time that's 
been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys 
come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets 
hit, doesn't even wear pads. A one-trick pony. Why not John Wayne? A more dramatic 
story, geopolitics, privation, exile, drama. A better player than Hal even. A more 
complete game. Aimed like a fucking missile at the Show, maybe the Top Five if he 
doesn't fuck up or burn down. Wayne's your ideal food-group. Which is why we'll keep 
you off him as long as he's here.' 

The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear 
and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. 'Carved out of what, though, this 
place?' 


From the Desk of Helen Steeply 
Contributing Editor 
Moment Magazine 
13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd. 
Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2 

Mr. Marlon K. Bain 
Saprogenic Greetings, Inc. 
BPL-Waltham Bldg. 

1214 Totten Pond Road 
Waltham, MA, 021549872/4. 
November Y.D.A.U. 



Dear Mr. Bain: 

In Phoenix on other business, it has been my good fortune to meet your adolescent 
friend, Mr. Orin J. Incandenza, and to have become intrigued with the possibilities of a 
profile of the Incandenza family and its accomplishments in not only sports but wide- 
ranging topics such as independent film circa metropolitan Boston, past and present. 

I am writing to ask for your cooperation in contacting you with questions which you 
could answer in writing, as I am informed by Mr. Orin Incandenza you dislike to meet 
people outside your home and office. 

I am hoping to hear from you in response to this request at your earliest convenience. 
Etc. etc. etc. 


Saprogenic Greetings* 

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU 
*a proud member of the ACME Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, 
Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises 
Ms. Helen Steepley 
And So On 
November Y.D.A.U. 

Dear Ms. Steepley: Fire away. 

V.D., MK Bain 

Saprogenic Greetings/ACME 


From the Desk of Helen Steeply 
Contributing Editor 
Moment Magazine 
13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd. 

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2 
Mr. MK Bain 

Saprogenic Greetings Inc. 

BPL-Waltham Bldg. 

1214 Totten Pond Road 
Waltham, MA, 021549872/4. 

November Y.D.A.U. 

Dear Mr. Bain: 

Q, Q, Q (Q, Q[Q], Q, Q, Q), Q, Q (Q), Q, Q. 269 


Carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite and generic morphic crud — at 
more or less the same time the hilltop's bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted 
level for tennis — are E.T.A.'s abundant tunnels. There are access tunnels and hallway 
tunnels, with rooms and labs and Pump Room's Lung-nexus off both sides, utility tunnels 
and storage tunnels and little blunt off-tunnels connecting tunnels to other tunnels. 



Maybe about sixteen different tunnels in all, in a shape that's more generally ovoid than 
anything else. 

11/11, 1625h., LaMont Chu, Josh Gopnik, Audern Tallat-Kelpsa, Philip Traub, Tim 
('Sleepy T.P.') Peterson, Carl Whale, Kieran McKenna — the bulk of the ambulatory sub- 
14 male Eschatonites — plus ten-year-old Kent Blott — are 26 meters directly below the 
Hal/Darkness match's Show Court with Glad Handle-Tie 270 trashbags and B.P. low- 
diffusion compact mercuric flashlights. Plus Chu has a clipboard with a pen attached to 
its clamp with twine. The sounds of competitive sneaker-movement and spectatorial 
bleacher-squeaks on the surface, travelling down through meters of compacted crud 
and polymerized cement tunnel-ceiling w/ parget-layer, sound rather like the stealthy 
dry scuttle of rodents, vermin. And this heightens the excitement that's part of why 
they're really down here. 

One part of the reason they're down here is that small U.S. boys seem to have this 
fetish for getting down in the enclosed fundaments underneath things — tunnels, caves, 
ventilator-shafts, the horrific areas beneath wooden porches — rather the way older 
U.S. boys like great perspectival heights and spectacular views encompassing huge 
swaths of territory, this latter fetish accounting for why E.T.A.'s hilltop site is one of its 
trump-cards in the recruiting war with Port Washington and other Eastern-seaboard 
academies. 

Another part is a semi-punitive shit detail in which certain players — judged to have 
been involved in the recent Eschaton nonstrategic-combat debacle, but who are 
uninjured 271 and not in the much severer hot water that the Big Buddies on the scene 
are in — have been punitively remanded below ground in P.M. shifts on what's 
supposed to constitute an unpleasant chore, to scout out the tunnelled route the TesTar 
All-Weather Inflatable Structures Corp.'s professional guys will have to take as they haul 
out from the Lung-Storage Room the fiberglass struts and crosspieces and 
dendriurethane folds that compose the Lung, for erection of the Lung, when the E.T.A. 
administration finally decides that the late-faII weather has gone beyond character¬ 
building and become an impediment to development and morale. This will be soon. 
Because the prorectors live in rooms off the larger tunnels and F. D. V. Harde's Physical 
Plant and Maintenance guys have their offices and supplies down here, and because Dr. 
James Incandenza's old optics and editing facilities are down here off one of the main 
tunnels and get used for Leith/Ogilvie classes in entertainment production and for 
optical science tutorials etc., and because a couple of the secondary and off-tunnels are 
used for temporary storage by departing seniors who can't tote eight or more years' 
worth of accumulated stuff in one post-graduate load — especially if they jet off to 
some novitiate-pro Satellite circuit for the summer, because that means air travel, two 
bags plus gear, max — some of the tunnels become badly littered in the warm season 
with trash-type material. And sometimes there's bulky-possession-type overflow from 
the little curved storage tunnels off the prorectors' hallway. Smaller kids are perfect for 
recons into low narrow tunnels partly blocked with dross, and even though it's no secret 
around E.T.A. that the smaller boys spend a fair amount of time down in the tunnels 
anyway, a retributive aspect is lent to this recon-detail by making the kids take down 
Handle-Tie trashbags to clear away littered exam papers and lab-handouts, calculator- 



batteries and banana peels and Kodiak smokeless-tobacco tins and spirals of synthetic- 
gut racquet-string, and Maintenance guys' hideous cigar-butts — Sleepy T.P. finds two 
bright Trojan wrappers just off the prorectors' hallway-tunnel, and then a couple meters 
farther along the floor the vermiform gleam of an actual condom, and there's some 
high-register debate about whether it's a used condom or not, and poor old Kent Blott is 
finally put in charge of picking it up and putting it in a trashbag, just in case it's a used 
condom — and empty boxes of complimentary corporate gear, and full boxes of faggy 
or poorly-absorbent gear nobody wants, and Habitant can-wrappers, and senior trunks 
and dorm-sized fridgelettes, etc.; and also to move whatever boxes they can heft, clear 
them out of the TesTar guys' access-route into the Lung-Storage and Pump Rooms; and 
LaMont Chu is supposed to note the location of any boxes or objects too bulky for them 
to move out of the way, and beefy custodial guys will be dispatched to handle them as 
they see fit. 

This is why a fair number of the smaller E.T.A. males don't see Stice take a set off Hal 
Incandenza and nearly beat him, is that they were remanded down here by Neil 
Hartigan right after post-conditioning showers. 

As noted already, they don't much mind it, being down here, now in one of the child- 
size-diametered off-tunnels between the prorectors' hallway and the Lung-Storage 
Room. The Eschatonites are down here quite a lot anyway. In fact the sub-14 E.T.A.s 
historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys' clubs, the Tunnel Club's 
unifying raison d'etre is kind of vague. Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating 
informally in the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each other in lies 
about their lives and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton 
(usually only about five a term); and the Club's only formal activity is sitting around with 
a yellowed copy of Robert's Rules endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can 
and can't join the Tunnel Club. A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club's least vague raison 
d'etre has to do with exclusion. The vital No-Girls exclusion is the only ironclad part of 
the Tunnel Club's charter. 272 With the exception of Kent Blott, every boy down here on 
this detail is an Eschatonite and a member of the Tunnel Club. Kent Blott, ineligible for 
Eschaton because he's a humanities-type kid and hasn't even taken quadrivial Algebra 
yet, and excluded from the Club under every incarnation of the eligibility requirements 
thus far, is down here solely because he was heard to maintain at lunch that he was in 
the north part of the main tunnel between the Comm.-Ad. locker rooms and the 
subterranean laundry room this A.M., short-cutting back to his room in West House 
after drills and a sauna, and claimed to have espied — scuttling out of his mercuric light 
toward one of the secondary tunnels to Subdorms C and D and the East Courts and this 
same general tunnel-area they're now in — to have sighted what was either a rat or, he 
said, what looked even more like a Concavitated feral hamster. So the Eschatonites are 
also enthusiastic to be down here for potential rodent-recon, checking out Blott's claim, 
and they've brought what's either a very nervous or very excited Blott down with them, 
so they can trace the possible routes Blott said he saw the rodent maybe take, filling 
their Glad Handle-Ties and noting heavy items along the way, and also so they can 
immediately encircle and discipline Kent Blott if it turns out he was yanking people's 
chains. Plus they make Blott be the one to take full trashbags and tie their plastic 



handles together and drag them back to where the expedition started — the entrance 
to the large smooth main tunnel by the boys' sauna — since none of them enjoys 
dragging full trashbags solo through dark tunnels with the rodential squeaking of match 
play and spectation far above. Chu holds a penlight in his teeth and writes heavy stuff 
down. They've filled several bags and gotten the lighter shit stacked off back enough to 
create a narrow route almost all the way to the Pump Room, around which Room hangs 
a strange sweet stale burny smell that none of them can place. The applause as Hal 
Incandenza barely takes the first set above sounds down here like faraway rain. The off- 
tunnel's dark as a pocket, but warm and dry, and there's surprisingly little dust. Ducts 
and coaxials running along the low ceiling make Whale and Tallat-Kelpsa have to crouch 
as they walk Point, clearing boxes and trying unsuccessfully to move fridgelettes back 
out of the way. There are several pockets of small but heavy dorm-size Maytag 
fridgelettes, the kind of thing no graduate takes with him, panelled in dark wood-grain 
plastic, some of them old models with three-prong plugs instead of chargers. Some of 
the empty fridgelettes have been indifferently scrubbed out and have their doors 
partway open and smell stale. Most of Chu's inventory for beefy-adult removal are 
either fridgelettes or locked trunks full of what sound like magazines and eight-year 
accumulations of pennies. The muffled rodential squeak of sneakers far overhead 
excites the Tunnel Club boys and puts them on edge. Philip Traub keeps making little 
squeaky noises and secretly tickling the back of people's necks, causing enormous 
excitement and much stopping and starting and tightly-enclosed whirling around, until 
Kieran McKenna captures Traub tickling Josh Gopnik in the bright beam of his P.B. light 
and Gopnik punches Traub in the radial nerve, and Traub clutches his arm and weeps 
and says he's quitting and going topside — Traub's the youngest kid here except for 
Blott and is a probationary second-string launcher in most Eschatons — and they have 
to stop and let Chu note and mark two discarded fridgelettes while Peterson and Gopnik 
try to distract and amuse Traub into staying and not retreating back up to Nwangi and 
making a high-pitched stink. 

Discarded fridgelettes, empty boxes, immovable and complexly-address-labelled 
trunks, used athletic tape and Ace bandages, the occasional empty Visine bottle (which 
Blott stashes in his sweatshirt-pouch, for Mike Pemulis's next contest). Optics I & II lab 
reports, broken ball machines and stray tennis balls too dead even for the 
repressurization machine, broken or discarded TP cartridges of stroke-analysis filmings 
or worn-out entertainments, an anomalous set of parfait glasses, fruit peels and 
AminoPal energy-bar-wrappers that the Club itself had left down here after meetings, 
discarded curls of grip and tensile string, several incongruous barrettes, several old 
broadcast televisions some older kids used to like to keep around to watch the static, 
and, along the seam of wall and floor, brittle limb-shaped husks of exfoliated Pledge, ex¬ 
panses of arm and leg already half-decayed into fragrant dust — this comprising the 
bulk of the crud down here, and the kids don't much mind scanning and inventorying 
and bagging it, because their minds are diverted by something else very exciting, a kind 
of possible raison d'etre for the Club itself, unless Blott had been tweaking their Units, in 
which case look out Blott, is the consensus. 

Gopnik to a sniffling Traub, while Peterson shines his flashlight on the clipboard for 



Chu: 'Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere that Mary went, 
the lights became erratic.' 

Carl Whale pretends to be immensely fat and moves along the wall with a blimpish 
splay-legged waddle. 

Peterson to Traub, while Gopnik holds the light: 'Eighteen-year-old top-ranked John 
Wayne / Had sex with Herr Schtitt on a train / They had sex again/And again and 
again/And again and again and again,' which the slightly older kids find more 
entertaining than Traub does. 

Kent Blott asks why a wispy-dicked blubberer like Phil gets to be in the Tunnel Club 
while his own applications get turned down, and Tallat-Kelpsa cuts him short by doing 
something to him in the dark that makes Blott shriek. 

It's utterly dark except for the dime-sized discs of their low-diffusion B.P.s, because 
they've left the tunnels' strings of bare overhead bulbs off, because Gopnik, who's 
originally from Brooklyn and knows from rodents, says only a complete booger-eating 
moron would do rat-reconnaissance in the light, and it seems reasonable to assume that 
feral hamsters, also, have a basically ratty attitude toward light. 

Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that's lying 
on its side up next to one wall, and Blott tries and barely lifts it, and pules, and Chu 
marks the oven down for the adults to lift and tells Blott to drop it, which invitation Blott 
takes literally, and the crash and tinkle infuriate Gopnik and McKenna, who say that 
scanning for rodents with Blott is like fly-fishing with an epileptic, which cheers Traub up 
quite a bit. 

Feral hamsters — bogey-wise right up there with mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived 
wraiths, carnivorous flora, and marsh-gas that melts your face off and leaves you with 
exposed gray-and-red facial musculature for the rest of your ghoulish-pariah life, in 
terms of late-night hair-raising Concavity narratives — are rarely sighted south of the 
Lucite walls and ATHSCME'd checkpoints that delimit the Great Concavity, and only once 
in a blue moon anywhere south of like the new-border burg of Methuen MA, whose 
Chamber of Commerce calls it 'The City That Interdependence Rebuilt,' and anyway 
pace Blott are hardly ever seen solo, being the sort of rapacious locust-like mass- 
movement creature that Canadian agronomists call 'Piranha of the Plains.' An 
infestation of feral hamsters in the waste-rich terrain of metro Boston, to say nothing of 
the clutter-tunnelled E.T.A. grounds, would be an almost grand-scale public-health 
disaster, would cause simply no end of adult running-in-circles and knuckle-biting, and 
would consume megacalories of displaced pre-adolescent stress for the E.T.A. players. 
Every ear-cocked eye-peeled bag-toting kid in the off-tunnel this afternoon is hoping 
hamster in a big way, except for Kent Blott, who's hoping simply and fervently for some 
sort of rodential sighting or scat-sample that'll keep him from being disciplinarily hung 
upside-down in a lavatory stall to shriek until a staff-member finds him. He reminds the 
Tunnel Clubbers that it's not like he'd claimed he espied the thing actually heading in 
this direction, he'd only seen the thing scuttling in a way that seemed to suggest a 
tendency or like probability of heading in this direction. 

One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of a load 
of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor in a fannish 



pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the cartridge-cases' sharp edges put 
holes in their Glad bags, and Blott is dispatched with three bags of cartridges and fruit 
rinds, each only about half full, back to the lit vestibule outside the Comm.-Ad. tunnel's 
start, where a serious pile of bags is starting to pile fragrantly up. 

Plus a confirmed feral-hamster sighting, Chu and Gopnik and 'S.T.P.' Peterson have 
agreed, could well distract the Headmaster's office from post-Eschaton reprisals against 
Big Buddies Pemulis, Incandenza and Axford, whom the Club's Eschatonite faction 
doesn't want to see reprised against, particularly, though the consensus is nobody 
would much mind seeing the malefic Ann Kittenplan hung out to dry in a serious way. 
Plus hamster-incursions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large 
and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the 
thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the 
carefully arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in 
mid-September and has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit — feral 
hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can't eat but feel 
compelled to fuck with anyway, somehow — and so ease the communal near-hysteria 
the objects have caused among aboriginal blue-collar staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike. 
Which would make the Tunnel Club guys something like heroes, fore-seeably. 

They move along the tunnel, their mercuric lights Xing and separating and forming 
jagged angles, colored faintly pink. 

But even a confirmed rat would be a coup. Dean of Academic Affairs Mrs. Inc has a 
violent phobic thing about vermin and waste and insects and overall facility hygiene, 
and Orkin men with beer-bellies and playing cards with naked girls in high-heeled shoes 
on the backs (McKenna's claim) spray the bejeesus out of the E.T.A. grounds twice a 
semester. None of the younger E.T.A. boys — who have the same post-latency fetish for 
vermin they have about subterranean access and exclusive Clubs — none of them has 
ever once gotten to see or trap a rat or roach or even so much as a lousy silverfish 
anyplace around here. So the unspoken consensus is that a hamster'd be optimal but 
they'd settle for a rat. Just one lousy rat could give the whole Club a legit raison , an 
explicable reason for congregating underground — all of them are a bit uneasy about 
liking to congregate underground for no good or clear reason. 

'Sleeps, you think you could lift that and carry it?' 

'Chu man I wouldn't even get up next to whatever that is much less touch it.' 

Blott's footfalls and tuneless whistling can be heard from far away, returning, and the 
distant squeak of overhead sneakers. 

Gopnik stops and his light pans, playing on faces. 'OK. Somebody farted.' 

'What's this up next to it. Sleeps?' Chu backing up to widen his light's beam on 
something broad and squat and dark. 

'Could I get some lights over here on this you guys?' 

'Because did somebody go ahead and cut one in this little unventilated space?' 

'Chu, it's a room fridge, that's all.' 

'But it's bigger than the room fridges.' 

'But it's not as big as a real fridge.' 

'It's in-between.' 



'I do smell something, though, Gop, I admit.' 

'There is a smell. If somebody farted, speak up.' 

'Otherwise it's a smell.' 

'Don't try to describe it.' 

'Sleeps, that's no human fart I've ever smelled.' 

'It's too powerful for a fart.' 

'Maybe Teddy Schacht was having an attack and staggered down here just to cut one.' 
Peterson trains his light on the midsized brown fridge. 'You don't possibly think—' 

Chu says 'No way. No way.' 

'What?' Blott says. 

'Don't even think it,' Chu says. 

'I don't even think any kind of mammal could fart that bad, Chu.' 

Peterson's looking at Chu, both of their faces pale in the mercuric light. 'No way 
somebody'd graduate and leave and put their fridge down here without taking the food 
out.' 

Blott goes 'Is that the smell?' 

'Was this Pearson's fridge last year?' 

Sleepy T.P. turns around. 'Who smells a, like, a like decay-element?' 

Lights on the tunnel ceiling from upraised hands. 

'Quorum on decay-type odor.' 

'Should we check?' Chu says. 'Blott's hamster might be in there.' 

'Gnawing on something unspeakable, maybe.' 

'You mean open it?' 

'Pearson had a bigger than usual fridge.' 

"Open it?' 

Chu scratches behind his ear. 'Me and Gop'll light it up, Peterson opens it.' 

'Why me?' 

'You're closest. Sleeps. Hold your breath.' 

'Jesus. Well back off up here so I can jump way back if anything like flies out.' 

'Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?' 

'Happy to back way, way off,' says Carl Whale, his light receding. 

'Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.' 

'This could explain rodent-attraction and then some.' 

'Now look out... ready? ... hummph.' 

'Owl Get off!' 

'Put the light ov— oh my God.' 

'Eeeeeeeyu.' 

'Hhhhwwwww.' 

'Oh my God.' 

'Bllaaaaarrr.' 

'Such a smell I'm smelling!' 

'There's mayonnaise! He left mayonnaise in there.' 

'Why the bulge in the top of the lid?' 

'The ballooning carton of orange juice!' 



'Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.' 

'So why's that sandwich-meat moving?' 

'Maggots?' 

'Maggots!' 

'Shut it! Sleeps! Kick it shut!' 

'This right here is exactly as close as I'm ever getting to that fridge ever again, Chu.' 
'The smell's expanding!' 

'I can smell it from here!': Whale's tiny distant voice. 

'I'm not enjoying this at all.' 

'This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.' 

'What're maggots?' 

'Should we just run really fast the other way?' 

'Second that.' 

'This is probably what the rat or hamster smelled,' Blott ventures. 

'Run!' 

High receding voices, bobbing lights. Whale's light way out front. 


After Stice and Incandenza split the first two sets and Hal dashed into the locker room 
at the break to put Collyrium-brand eyewash in eyes that were bothering him and deLint 
made warped crashing sounds on the tiers as he walked down the bleachers and over to 
have a word with Stice, who was squatting against the net-post holding his left arm up 
like a scrubbed surgeon and applying a towel to the arm, deLint's place up next to Helen 
Steeply was taken by female prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, freshly showered, long¬ 
faced, a non-U.S. citizen, a tall Quebecer former Satellite pro in rimless specs and a 
violetish ski cap just enough of a shade away from the journalist's hat to make the 
people behind them pretend to shield their eyes from the clash. The putative 
newshound introduced herself and asked Poutrincourt who the heavy-browed kid was 
at the end of the top bleacher behind them, hunched over and gesturing and speaking 
into his empty fist. 

'James Troeltsch of Philadelphia is better to leave alone to play the broadcaster to 
himself. He is a strange and unhappy,' Poutrincourt said, her face long and cavern¬ 
cheeked and not terribly happy-looking itself. Her slight shrugs and way of looking 
elsewhere while speaking were not unlike Remy Marathe's. 'When we hear you are the 
journalist for shiny perfumed magazines of fad and trend we are told be unfriendly, but 
me, I think I am friendly.' Her smile was rictal and showed confused teeth. 'My family's 
loved ones also are large of size. It is difficult to be large.' 

Steeply's pre-assignment decision was to let all size-references pass as if there was 
some ability to screen out any reference to size or girth, originating possibly in 
adolescence. 'Your Mr. deLint certainly held himself aloof.' 

'DeLint, when we prorectors are suggested to do a thing, he asks to himself only: how 
can I perfectly do this thing so the superiors will smile with pleasure at deLint.' 
Poutrincourt's right forearm was almost twice the size of her left. She wore white 
sneakers and a Donnay warmup of a deep glowing neutron-blue that clashed hideously 



with both their caps. The circles beneath her eyes were also blue. 

'Why the instructions to be unfriendly?' 

Poutrincourt always nodded for a while before she replied to anything, as if things had 
to go through various translation-circuits. She nodded and scratched at her long jaw, 
thinking. 'You are here to make publicity a child player, one of our etoiles, 273 and Dr. 
Tavis, he is how you say quantified — ' 

'Quarantined. Suspicious. Guarded.' 

'No...' 

'Confused. Torn. In a quandary.' 

'Quandary is how. Because this is a good place, and Hal is good, better since before 
the present, perhaps now he is etoile.' A shrug, long arms akimbo. Hal reemerged from 
Comm.-Ad. and, ankle-brace or no, displayed a slow loose thoroughbred trot past the 
pavilion and bleachers and to the gate in #2.'s southern fence, acting as if unwatched by 
people in bleachers, and tapped two of his big-headed tennis racquets together to listen 
for the strings' pitch, exchanging some neutral words with deLint, who was standing 
with Stice at the edge of the transom's shadow, Stice breaking into a half-laugh at 
something, twirling his racquet and walking back to serve as Hal retrieved a ball along 
the north fence. Both players' racquets had large heads and thick frames. Thierry 
Poutrincourt said 'And by nature who does not wish the shiny attention, that the 
magazines with cologne on their pages say this is etoile, Enfield Tennis Academy it is 
good?' 

'I'm here to do a soft inoffensive profile on his brother, with Hal mentioned only as 
part of an American family exceptional in several respects. I don't see what's 
quandariacal for Dr. Tavis about this.' The tiny plump officious man who seemed to have 
a phone tucked under his chin at all times, the kind of frenzied over-cooperation that's a 
technical interviewer's worst nightmare for an interrogation; the little man's monologue 
had done to Steeply's brain kind of what a flashbulb does to your eyes, and if he'd 
explicitly denied him access to the brother then the denial had been slipped in after he'd 
worn Steeply down. 

There was the slight shaken-saw wobble of bleachers as deLint walked back up, 
stacked charts against his chest like a schoolgirl's books, his smile at the Quebecois 
player in his seat as if he'd never met her before, settling in heavily on Steeply's other 
side, glancing down at where the profiler'd bracketed notes on the possible sounds a 
string-hit ball sounds like in cold air: cut, king, ping, pons, pock, cop, thwa, thwat. 

The samizdat Entertainment's director's other son chipped a return that caught the 
tape and sat there a moment and fell back. 

"Veux gue nous nous parlons en frangais? Serait plus facile, ga?' This invitation 
because Poutrincourt's eyes had gone hooded the minute the deLint person joined 
them. 

Poutrincourt's shrug was blase: Francophones are never impressed that anyone else 
can speak French. 'Very well then look:' she said (Poutrincourt did, in Quebecois), 
'pubescent stars are nothing new to this sport. Lenglen, Rosewall. In A.D. 1887 a fifteen- 
year-old girl won Wimbledon, she was the first. Evert in the semifinals of the US Open at 
sixteen, '71 or '2. Austin, Jaeger, Graff, Sawamatsu, Venus Williams. Borg. Wilander, 



Chang, Treffert, Medvedev, Esconja. Becker of the A.D. ' 80 s. Now this new Argentinean 
Kleckner.' 

Steeply lit a Flanderfume that made deLint's face spread with distaste. 'You compare it 
is like gymnastics, figure skating, competitive to-swim.' 

Poutrincourt made no comment on Steeply's syntax. 'Just so, then. Good.' 

Steeply was adjusting the long peasant skirt and crossing legs so he was inclined away 
from deLint, gazing at a kind of translucent mole on Poutrincourt's long cheek. 
Poutrincourt's thick rimless specs were like a scary nun's. She looked more male than 
anything, long and hard and breastless. Steeply tried to exhale away from everyone. 
'The world-plateau tennis not being required to have neither the size and muscle of the 
hockey nor the basketball nor the American football, for example.' 

Poutrincourt nodded. 'But yes, nor the millimetric precision of your baseball's hitting, 
nor how the Italians say the senza errori, the never-miss consistency, that keeps the 
golfers from true mastery until they have thirty or more years.' The prorector switched 
for just a moment to English, possibly for deLint's benefit: 'Your French is Parisian but 
possible. Me, mine is Quebecois.' 

Steeply now got to give that same sour Gallic shrug. 'You're saying to me serious 
tennis doesn't need of an athlete anything already adolescents do not possess, if they 
are exceptional for it.' 

'The medicinists of sports science know well what top tennis requires,' Poutrincourt 
said, back in French. 'Too well, which are the agility, the reflexes , 274 the short-range 
speed, the balance, some coordination between the hand and the eye, and very much 
endurance. Some strength, with particular importance for the male. But all these are 
achievable by the period of puberty, for some. But yes, but wait,' she said, putting a 
hand on the notebook as Steeply started to pretend to inscribe. 'The thing you have put 
as the question to me. This is why the quandary. The young players, they have the 
advantage in psyche, also.' 

'The edge of mentality,' Steeply said, trying to ignore the boy speaking into his hand 
several seats over. DeLint seemed to be ignoring everything around him, engrossed in 
the match and his statistics. The Canadian prorector's hands moved in small circles out 
front to indicate engagement in the conversation. Americans' conversational hands sit 
like lumps of dough most of the time, Remy Marathe had pointed out once. 

'But yes, so, the formidable mental edge that their psyches are still not yet adult in all 
ways — therefore, so, they do not feel the anxiety and pressure in the way it is felt by 
adult players. This is every story of the teenager appearing from no location to upset the 
famous adult in professional play — the ephebic, they do not feel the pressure, they can 
play with abandon, they are without fear.' A cold smile. Sunlight blazed on her lenses. 
'At the beginning. At the beginning they are without pressure or fear, and they burst 
from seemingly no location onto the professional stage, instant etoiles, phenomenal, 
fearless, immunized to pressure, numb to anxiety — at first. They seem as if they are 
like the adult players only better — better in emotion, more abandoned, not human to 
the stress or fatigue or the airplaning without end, to the publicity.' 

'The English expression of the child in the store of candy.' 

'Seemingly unfeeling of the loneliness and alienation and everyone wants a thing from 



the etoile.' 

'The money, also.' 

'But it is soon you start to see the burning out which the place like ours is hoping to 
prevent. You remember Jaeger, burned out at sixteen, Austin at twenty. Arias and 
Krickstein, Esconja and Treffert, too injured to play on by their late teenage years. The 
much-promising Capriati, the well-known tragedy. Pat Cash of Australia, fourth on earth 
at eighteen, vanished by the twenties of age.' 

'Not to be mentioning the large money. The endorsings and appearings.' 

'Always so, for the young etoile. And now worse in today, that the sponsors have no 
broadcasting to advertise with. Now the ephebe who is famous etoile, who is in 
magazines and the sports reports aux disques, he is pursued to become the Billboard 
Who Walks. Use this, wear this, for money. Millions thrown at you before you can drive 
the cars you buy. The head swells to the size of a balloon, why not?' 

'But can pressure be far behind the back?' Steeply said. 

'Many times the same. Winning two and three upset matches, feeling suddenly so 
loved, so many talking to you as if there is love. But always the same, then. For then you 
awaken to the fact that you are loved for winning only. The two and three wins created 
you, for people. It is not that the wins made them recognize something that existed 
unrecognized before these upset wins. The from-noplace winning created you. You must 
keep winning to keep the existence of love and endorsements and the shiny magazines 
wanting your profile.' 

'Enter the pressure,' Steeply said. 

'Pressure such as one could not imagine, now that to maintain you must win. Now 
that winning is the expected. And all alone, in the hotels and the airplanes, with any 
other player you could speak to of the pressure to exist wanting to beat you, wanting to 
be exist above and not below. Or the others, wanting from you, and only so long as you 
play with abandon, winning.' 

'Hence the suicides. The burn-out. The drugs, the self-indulging, the spoilage.' 

'What is the instruction if we shape the ephebe into the athlete who can win fearlessly 
to be loved, yet we do not prepare her for the time after fear comes, no?' 

'Therefore the terrible pressure here. They are being tempered. Oven-toughened.' 

Hal served wide and this time followed it in, the serve, taking a stutter-step at the 
service line. Slice's body seemed to elongate as he reached and got the stick up over the 
return, driving a forehand. Hal volleyed it too short and took a couple steps off the net 
as Stice came in, winding up for an easy pass. Hal guessed a direction and started to his 
left, and The Darkness chipped a lob right over him and hit the heel of his hand against 
his strings as Hal gave it up halfway back, Stice not rubbing it in but exhorting himself. 
Hal's sweat was way heavier than the Kansan's, but Slice's face was almost maroon with 
flush. Each player twirled his stick in his hand as Hal walked back to retrieve the ball. 
Stice took his position in the deuce court, pulling up his socks. 

'Still smart for Hal to follow the serve in once a game or so,' deLint said into Steeply's 
ear. 

And irritating throughout was the heavy-browed red-nostriled kid James Troeltsch at 
the very end of the top bleacher, speaking into his fist, coming at the fist from first one 



angle and then another, pretending to be two people: 

'Incandenza the controller. Incandenza the tactician. 

'Rare tactical lapse for Incandenza, following the serve in when he's just finally started 
establishing control from the baseline. 

'Have a look at Incandenza standing there waiting for Ortho Stice to finish futzing with 
his socks so he can serve. The resemblance to statues of Augustus of Rome. The regal 
bearing, the set of the head, the face impassive and emanating command. The chilly 
blue eyes. 

'The chilly reptilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim. 

'The Halster's been having some trouble controlling his volleys. 

'Personally, Jim, I think he'd be better off with his old midsized graphite stick than that 
large head the creepy Dunlop guy got him to switch to. 

'Stice being the younger player out there, he's grown up with the extra-large head. A 
large head is all The Darkness knows. 

'You could say Stice was born with a large head, and that Incandenza's a man who's 
adapted his game to a large head. 

'Hal's career dating back to before your polycarbonate resins changed the whole 
power-matrix of the junior game, too, Jim. 

'And what a day for tennis. 

'What a day for family fun of all kinds. 

This Bud's for the Whole Family. It's the Bud Match of the Week. Brought to you. 

'Incandenza even reported to have modified his grip, all to accommodate the large 
head. 

'And by the Multiphasix family of fine graphite-reinforced polycarbonate resins, Ray. 

'Jim, Ortho Stice — impossible to even visualize Stice without his trusty large head. 

'It's all they know, these kids.' 

DeLint hiked back onto an elbow on the tier above and told James Troeltsch to 
regulate the volume or he was going to take a personal interest in seeing Troeltsch 
suffer. 

Hal bounced the ball three times, tossed, rocked farther back on the toss, and 
absolutely crunched the serve, spinless and wickedly angled out wide, Stice grotesquely 
off-balance, lunging too far and hitting the backhand cramped, down the line and 
shallow. Hal moved in to the service line for it, hunched and with his stick cocked up 
behind him, looking somehow insectile. Stice stood in the middle of the baseline 
awaiting pace and was helpless when Hal shortened the stroke and dribbled it at an 
angle cross-court, barely clearing the net and distorted with backspin and falling into the 
half-meter of fair space the acuteness of the angle allowed. 

'Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain,' Poutrincourt said in English. 

Hal aced Stice down the center to go up either 2-1 or 3-2 in the third. 

'The thing you want to know about Hal, babe, is he's got a complete game,' deLint said 
as the boys changed ends of the court, Stice holding two balls out before him on the 
face of his racquet. Hal went to the towel again. The children along the bottom tier were 
leaning left and then right in tandem, amusing themselves. The apparition with the lens 
and metal pole was gone, overhead. 



'What you want to know, watching juniors at this level, 1 deLint says, still back on an 
elbow so his upper body was out of sight and he was just legs and a voice in Steeply's 
cold ear. 'They all have different strengths, areas of the game they're better at, and you 
can drown in profiling a match or a player in terms of the different strengths and the 
number of individual strengths.' 

'I am not here to profile the boy,' Steeply said, but in French again. 

DeLint ignored him. 'It's not just the strengths or the number of strengths. It's do they 
come together to make a game. How complete is a kid. Has he got a game. Those kids at 
lunch you got to meet.' 

'But not speak to.' 

'The kid in the idiotic hat, Pemulis, Mike's got great, great volleys, he's a natural at net, 
great, great hand-eye. Mike's other strength is he's got the best lob in East Coast juniors 
bar none. These are his strengths. The reason both of these kids you're looking at out 
here right now can beat the living shit out of Pemulis is Pemulis's strengths don't give 
him a complete game. Volleys're an offensive shot. A lob's a baseliner's weapon, 
counterpuncher. You can't lob from the net or volley from the baseline.' 

'He says Michael Pemulis's abilities cancel each other out,' 275 Poutrincourt said in the 
other ear. 

DeLint made the small salaam of iteration. 'Pemulis's strengths cancel each other out. 
Now Todd Possalthwaite, the littler kid with the bandage on his nose from the soap-and- 
shower-slipping thing, Possalthwaite's also got a great lob, and while Pemulis'd take him 
right now on pure age and power Possalthwaite's the technically superior player with 
the better future, because Todd's built a complete game out of his lob.' 

'This deLint is wrong,' Poutrincourt said in Quebecois, smiling rictally across Steeply at 
deLint. 

'Because Possalthwaite won't come in to net. Possalthwaite hangs back at any cost, 
and unlike Pemulis he works to develop the groundstrokes to let him stay back and draw 
the other guy in and use that venomous lob.' 

'Which means at fourteen his game, it will never change or grow, and if he grows 
strong and wishes to attack he will never be able,' Poutrincourt said. 

DeLint displayed so little curiosity about what Poutrincourt inserted that Steeply 
wondered if he had some French on the sly, and made a private ideogram to this effect. 
'Possalthwaite's a pure defensive strategist. He's got a gestalt. The term we use here for 
a complete game is either gestalt or complete game.' 

Stice aced Hal out wide on the ad court again, and the ball got stuck in an intersticial 
diamond in the chain-link fencing, and Hal had to put his stick down and use both hands 
to force the thing out. 

'Maybe for your article, though, the poop on this kid, the punter's brother — Hal can't 
lob half as good as even Possalthwaite, and compared to Ortho or Mike his net-play's 
pedestrian. But unlike his brother when he was here, see, Hal's strengths have started 
to fit together. He's got a great serve, a great return of serve, and great, great 
groundstrokes, with great control and great touch, great command of touch and spin; 
and he can take a defensive player and yank the kid around with his superior control, 
and he can take an attacking player and use the guy's own pace against him.' 



Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair, 
and then at the last possible second it veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds 
as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more 
surprised than Hal did. The punter's brother's face registered nothing as he stood at the 
ad corner, adjusting something on his strings. 

'But perhaps one does attain this, to win. Imagine you. You become just what you 
have given your life to be. Not merely very good but the best. The good philosophy of 
here and Schtitt — I believe this philosophy of Enfield is more Canadian than American, 
so you may see I have prejudice — is that you must have also — so, leave to one side for 
a moment the talent and work to become best — that you are doomed 276 if you do not 
have also within you some ability to transcend the goal, transcend the success of the 
best, if you get to there.' 

Steeply could see, off in the parking lot behind the hideous bulging neo-Georgian cube 
of the Community and Administration Building, several small boys carrying and dragging 
white plastic bags to the nest of dumpsters that abutted the pines at the parking lot's 
rear, the children pale and wild-eyed and conferring among themselves and casting 
anxious looks across the grounds at the crowd behind the Show Court. 

'Then,' Poutrincourt said, 'and for the ones who do become the etoiles, the lucky who 
become profiled and photographed for readers and in the U.S.A. religion make it, they 
must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it, or 
they are doomed. We see this in experience. One sees this in all obsessive goal-based 
cultures of pursuit. Look at the Japonois, the suicide rates of their later years. This task 
of us at the Enfield is more delicate still, with the etoiles. For, you, if you attain your goal 
and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your 
entire existence, your raison de faire, 277 so, then, one of two things we see will happen.' 

Steeply had to keep breathing on the pen to keep the point thawed. 

'One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining 
the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life "OK" 
as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face 
this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning 
when you get it, and you are impaled by shock. We see suicides in history by people at 
these pinnacles; the children here are versed in what is called the saga of Eric 
Clipperton.' 

'With two p's?' 

'Just so. Or the other possibility of doom, for the etoiles who attain. They attain the 
goal, thus, and put as much equal passion into celebrating their attainment as they had 
put into pursuing the attainment. This is called here the Syndrome of the Endless Party. 
The celebrity, money, sexual behaviors, drugs and substances. The glitter. They become 
celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed 
the culture-of-goal's hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you 
cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.' 

'Our best boy is better than Hal, you'll see him play tomorrow if you want, John 
Wayne. No relation to the real John Wayne. A fellow compatriot of Terry here.' Aubrey 
deLint was sitting back up beside them, the cold giving his pitted cheeks a second flush. 



two feverish harlequin ovals. 'John Wayne's got a gestalt because Wayne's simply got 
everything, and everything with him's got the sort of pace that a touch-artist and thinker 
like Hal just can't handle.' 

'This was the Founder's philosophy, too, of doom, the punter Incandenza's father, who 
also I am being told dabbled in filming?' Steeply asked the Canadian. 

Poutrincourt's shrug could have meant too many things to note. 'I came after. M. 
Schtitt, his different goal for the etoiles is to walk between these.' Nor did Steeply quite 
notice the woman's shifts between dialects. 'To map out some path between needing 
the success and mockery-making of the success.' 

DeLint leaned in. 'Wayne's got everything. Hal's strength has become knowing he 
doesn't have everything, and constructing a game as much out of what's missing as 
what's there.' 

Steeply pretended to arrange the cap but was really adjusting the wig. 'It all sounds 
awfully abstract for something so physical.' 

Poutrincourt's shrug pushed her glasses slightly up. 'It is contradictory. Two selves, 
one not there. M. Schtitt, when the Academy Founder died...' 

'The punter's father, who dabbled in films.' Steeply's raglan sweater had been his 
wife's. 

Again nodding blandly, Poutrincourt: 'This academic Founder, M. Schtitt tells that this 
Founder was a student of types of sight.' 

DeLint said 'Wayne's only possible limits being also his strength, the tungsten-steel will 
and resolve, the insistence on imposing his game and his will on his man, totally 
unwilling to change the pace of his game if he's not doing good. Wayne's got the touch 
and the lobs to hang back on an off-day, but he won't — if he's down or things aren't 
going his way, he just hits harder. His pace is so overwhelming he can get away with 
being uncompromising about attack against North American juniors. But in the Show, 
which Wayne'll go pro maybe as soon as next year, in the Show flexibility is more 
important, he'll find. What do you call, a humility.' 

Poutrincourt was looking at Steeply almost too carelessly, it almost seemed. 'The 
studying was not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and 
what one sees. He translated this numerously across different fields, M. Schtitt tells.' 

The son described his father as quote "genre-dysphoric." 

Poutrincourt cocked her head. 'This does not sound like Hal Incandenza.' 

DeLint sniffed meatily. 'But Wayne's gestalt's chief edge over Hal is the head. Wayne is 
pure force. He doesn't feel fear, pity, remorse — when a point's over, it might as well 
have never happened. For Wayne. Hal actually has finer groundstrokes than Wayne, and 
he could have Wayne's pace if he wanted. But the reason Wayne is Three continentally 
and Hal's Six is the head. Hal looks just as perfectly dead out there, but he's more 
vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally. Hal remembers points, senses trends in a 
match. Wayne doesn't. Hal's susceptible to fluctuations. Discouragement. Set-long 
lapses in concentration. Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, 
like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.' 

The Troeltsch person said 'Holy crow.' 

'So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways,' Thierry Poutrincourt said 



quietly, in nearly accentless English, as if to herself. 

'This emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting being more commonly a female 
thing. Schtitt and I think it's a will issue. Susceptible wills are more common to the top 
girls here. We see it in Longley, we see it in Millie Kent and Frannie Unwin. We don't see 
this forgetful will in the Vaughts, or in Spodek, who you can watch if you want.' 

The Troeltsch person said 'Could we see that again, Ray, do you think?' 

Steeply was looking at the side of Poutrincourt's face as deLint on the other side was 
saying 'But the one we see this most in is Hal.' 


14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


The Man o' War Grille on Prospect: Matty sat in the hot clatter of the Portuguese 
restaurant with his hands in his lap, looking at nothing. A waiter brought his soup. The 
waiter had bits of either bloodstain or soup on his apron, and for no discernible reason 
wore a fez. Matty ate his soup without once slurping. He'd been the neat eater in the 
family. Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and today he was twenty-three. 

The Man o' War Grille is on Prospect Street in Cambridge and its front windows 
overlook the heavy foot traffic between Inman and Central Squares. As Matty waited for 
his soup he'd seen across the restaurant and out the front's glass a bag-lady-type older 
female in several clothing-layers lift her skirts and lower herself to the pavement and 
move her scaggly old bowels right there in full view of passersby and diners both, then 
gather all her plastic shopping bags together and walk stolidly out of view. The pile of 
bowel movement sat there on the pavement, steaming slightly. Matty'd heard the 
college kids at the next table say they didn't know whether to be totally illed or totally 
awed. 

A big rangy kid, with a big sharp face and tight short hair and a smile and a shave-twice 
jaw since he was fourteen. Now balding smoothly back from a high clear forehead. A 
permanent smile that always seemed like he was trying not to but just couldn't help it. 
His Da always formerly saying to Wipe it off. 

Inman Square: Little Lisbon. The soup has bits of calamari that make the muscles in his 
face flex, chewing. 

Now two Brazilians in bell bottoms and tall shoes along the sidewalk across the 
window over the diners' heads, what might be a brewing street-fight, one walking 
forward and one walking backward, facing off as they move, each missing the dollop of 



bowel-movement on the walk, speaking high-volume street-Portuguese muffled by 
windows and hot clatter, but each looking around and then pointing at his own chest 
like: 'You saying this shit to me?'Then the forward man's sudden charge carrying them 
both past the window's right frame. 

Matty's Da'd come over on a boat from Louth in Lenster in 1989. Matty'd been three 
or four. Da'd worked on the Southie docks, coiling lengths of rope as big around as 
phone poles into tall cones, and had died when Matty was seventeen, of pancreatic 
complaints. 

Matty looked up from the roll he was dipping in the soup and saw two underweight 
interracial girls moving across the window, one a nigger, neither even looking at the shit 
everyone's stepping around; and then a few seconds behind them Poor Tony Krause, 
who because of the trousers and cap Matty didn't even recognize as Poor Tony Krause 
until he'd looked back down and then up again: Poor Tony Krause looked godawful: 
sucked-out, hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready, his face's skin the greenish white of 
extreme-depth marine life, looking less alive than undead, identifiable as poor old Poor 
Tony only by the boa and red leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his 
throat's hollow as he walked, that way Equus Reese always said always reminded him of 
black-and-white-era starlets descending curved stairs into some black-tie function, 
Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into 
pocket after pocket of space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening and awesome given 
Krause's spectral mien, passing across the Grille's window, his eyes either on or looking 
right through the two skinny girls plodding ahead of him, following them out of the 
window's right-hand side. 

His Da'd begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten. A fook in t'boom. Matty 
had complete recall of the whole thing. He'd seen sometimes where persons that had 
unpleasant things happen to them as children blocked the unpleasantness out in their 
mentality as adults and forgot it. Not so with Matty Pemulis. He remembered every inch 
and pimple of every single time. His father outside the little room Matt and Micky slept 
in, late at night, the cat's-eye sliver of lit hallway through the crack in the door Da'd 
opened, the door on well-oiled hinges opening with the implacable slowness of a rising 
moon. Da's shadow lengthening across the floor and then the man his very self weaving 
in behind it, crossing the moonlit floor in darned socks and that smell about him that 
later Matty'd know was malt liquor but at that age he and Mickey called something else, 
when they smelled it. Matty lay and pretended to sleep; he didn't know why tonight he 
pretended not to know the man was there; he was afraid. Even the first time. Micky just 
five. All the times were the same. Da drunk. Tacking across the bedroom floor. A certain 
stealth. Managing somehow never to break his neck on the toy trucks and tiny cars 
scattered on the floor, left there that first time by accident. Sitting on the edge of the 
bed so his weight changed the bed's angle. A big man smelling of tobacco and 
something else, his breath always audible when drunk. Sitting on the edge of the bed. 
Shaking Matty 'awake' to the point where Matty'd have to pretend to wake up. Asking if 
he'd been asleep, sleeping, there, was he. Tenderness, caresses that were somehow just 
over the line from true ethnic-lrish fatherly affection, the emotional largesse of a man 
without a Green Card who daily broke his back for his family's food. Caresses that were 



in some vague way just over the line from that and from the emotional largesse of 
something else, drunk, when all the rules of mood were suspended and you never knew 
from minute to minute whether you were to be kissed or hit — impossible to say how or 
even know how they were just over those lines. But they were, the caresses. 
Tenderness, caresses, low soft oversweet hot bad breath, soft apologies for some flash 
of savagery or discipline from the day. A way of cupping the pillow-warm cheek and jaw 
in the hollow of the hand, the huge pinkie finger tracing the hollow between throat and 
jaw. Matty'd shrink away: shy are we sone scared are we? Matty'd shrink away even 
after he knew the shrinking fear was part of what brought it on, for Da'd get angry: who 
are we scared of, then? Then who are we, a sone, to be scared so of our own Da? As if 
the Da that broke daily his back were nothing more than a. Can't a Da show his son 
some love without being taken for a. As if Matty could lie here with his food inside him 
under bedding he'd paid for and think his Da were no better than a. Is it a fookin you're 
scared of, then. You think a Da what comes in to speak to his sone and holds him as a Da 
has nought on his mind but a fook? As if the sone were some forty-dollar whore off the 
docks? As if the Da were a. Is that what you take me for. Is that what you take me for 
then. Matty shrinking back into a flattening pillow the Da'd paid for, the springs of the 
convertible bed singing with his fear; he shook. Why then so then I've a mind to give you 
just what you're thinking t'fear. Take me for. Matty knew early on that his being afraid 
fueled the thing somehow, made his Da want to. He was unable not to be afraid. He 
tried and tried, cursed himself for a coward and deserving, all but calling his father a. It 
was years before he snapped to the fact that his Da'd have fooked him in t'boom no 
matter what he'd done. That the event was laid out before the first slim line of doorlight 
broadened, and whatever Matty'd felt or betrayed made no difference. An advantage to 
not blocking it out is you can snap to things later, with maturer perspective; you can 
come to see no sone on the planet could in any way ask for that, regardless. At a certain 
later age he started lying there when his Da shook him and pretended to sleep on, even 
when the shakes got to where his teeth clacked together in a mouth that wore the slight 
smile Matty'd decided truly sleeping people's faces always wore. The harder his father 
shook him, the tighter Matty'd shut his eyes and the more set the slight smile and the 
louder the rasps of the cartoon snores he alternated with exhaled whistles. Mickey over 
in the cot by the window always silent as a tomb, on his side, face to the wall and 
hidden. Never a word between them about anything more than the chances of being 
kissed v. hit. Finally Da'd grab both his shoulders and flip him over with a sound of 
disgust and frustration. Matty thought just the smell of the fear was maybe enough to 
deserve it, until (later on) he got some maturer perspective. He remembered the oval 
sound of the cap coming off the jar of petroleum jelly, that special stone-in-pond plop of 
a Vaseline cap (not Child-Proof even in an era of Child-Proof caps), hearing his Da 
muttering as he applied it to himself, feeling the ice-cold awful cold finger between him 
as his Da smeared the stuff roughly around Matty's rosebud, his dark star. 

It was only the maturer perspective of years and experience that let Matty find 
something to be thankful for, that the Da'd at least used a lube. The origins of the big 
man's clear familiarity with the stuff and its nighttime use not even adult perspective 
could illuminate, let Matty snap to, still, now, at twenty-three. 



One hears, say, cirrhosis and acute pancreatitis and thinks of the subject clutching his 
middle like an old film's gutshot actor and slumping quietly over to eternal rest with lids 
shut and face composed. Matty's Da'd died choking on aspirated blood, a veritable 
fountain of the darkest possible blood, Matty coated a spray-paint-russet as he held the 
man's yellow wrists and Mum lumbered off down the ward in search of a crash-cart 
team. Particles aspirated so terribly fine, like almost atomized, so that they hung in the 
air like the air itself over the cribbed bed as the man expired, cat-yellow eyes wide open 
and face screwed into the very most godawful rictusized grin of pain, his last thoughts (if 
any) unknowable. Matty still toasted the man's final memory with his first shot, 
whenever he indulged. 278 


11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


First thing after supper Hal drops around to Schtitt's room off the Comm.-Ad. lobby to 
go through the motions of getting some input on just what had gone so terribly wrong 
against Stice. Also to get maybe some kind of bead on why he'd had to play The 
Darkness publicly in the first place, so close to the WhataBurger. I.e. like what the 
exhibition might have signified. This endless tension among E.T.A.s about how the 
coaches are seeing you, gauging your progress — is your stock going up or down. But A. 
deLint's the only one in there, working on some sort of oversized spreadsheetish chart, 
lying prone and shirtless on the bare floor with his chin in his hand and a pungent Magic 
Marker, and says Schtitt has gone off on the cycle somewhere after confections, but to 
sit down. Presumably meaning in a chair. So Hal's subjected to several minutes of 
deLint's take on the match, complete with stats out of the prorector's head. DeLint's 
back is pale and constellated with red pits of old pimples, though the back's nothing 
compared to Struck's or Shaw's back. There's a cane chair and a wood chair. DeLint's 
liquid-crystal laptop screen pulses grayly on the floor next to him. Schtitt's room's overlit 
and there's no dust anywhere, not even in the very corners. Schtitt's sound system's 
lights are on but nothing's playing. Neither Hal nor deLint mentions Orin's profiler's 
presence in the match's stands, nor the big lady's long interchange with Poutrincourt, 
which had been conspicuous. Stice's and Wayne's names are at the top of the huge 
chart on the floor, but Hal's name isn't. Hal says he can't tell whether he'd made some 
sort of basic tactical error or whether he just wasn't quite up to snuff this afternoon or 
what. 



'You just never quite occurred out there, kid, 1 deLint apprises him. He has regressed 
certain figures to back this up, this nonoccurrence. His choice of words chills Hal to the 
root. 

After which, during what's supposed to be mandatory P.M. Study Period, and despite 
the three chapters of Boards-prep his Boards-prep schedule calls for, Hal sits alone up in 
Viewing Room 6, the bad leg out along the couch in front of him, flexing the bad ankle 
idly, holding the other leg's knee to his chest, squeezing a ball but with the hand he 
doesn't play with, chewing Kodiak and spitting directly into an unlined wastebasket, his 
expression neutral, watching some cartridges of his late father's entertainments. Any¬ 
one else looking at him in there tonight would call Hal depressed. He watches several 
cartridges all in a row. He watches The American Century as Seen Through a Brick and 
Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell and then part of Valuable Coupon Has Been 
Removed , which is maddening because it's all a monologue from some bespectacled 
little contemporary of Miles Penn and Heath Pearson who was almost as ubiquitous as 
Reat and Bain in Himself's work but whose name right now Hal can't for the life of him 
recall. He watches parts of Death in Scarsdale and Union of Publicly Hidden in Lynn and 
Various Small Flames and Kinds of Pain. The Viewing Room has insulated panelling 
behind the wallpaper and is essentially soundproof. Hal watches half of the 'Medusa v. 
Odalisgue' thing but takes it out abruptly when people in the audience start getting 
turned to stone. 

Hal tortures himself by imagining swarthy leering types threatening to torture various 
loved ones if Hal can't come up with the name of the kid in Valuable Coupon and Low- 
Temperature Civics and Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat. 

There are two cartridges on V.R. 6's glass shelves of Himself getting interviewed in 
various arty Community-Access-cable-type forums, which Hal declines to watch. 

The lights' slight flicker and subtle change in the pressure of the room is from the 
E.T.A. furnaces kicking on way down in the tunnels below Comm.-Ad. Hal shifts uneasily 
on the couch, spitting into the wastecan. The very faint smell of burnt dust is also from 
the furnace. 

A minor short didactic one Hal likes and runs twice in a row is Wave Bye-Bye to the 
Bureaucrat. A bureaucrat in some kind of sterile fluorescent-lit office complex is a 
fantastically efficient worker when awake, but he has this terrible problem waking up in 
the A.M., and is consistently late to work, which in a bureaucracy is idiosyncratic and 
disorderly and wholly unacceptable, and we see this bureaucrat getting called in to his 
supervisor's pebbled-glass cubicle, and the supervisor, who wears a severely dated 
leisure suit with his shirt-collar flaring out on either side of its rust-colored lapels, tells 
the bureaucrat that's he's a good worker and a fine man, but that this chronic tardiness 
in the A.M. is simply not going to fly, and if it happens one more time the bureaucrat is 
going to have to find another fluorescent-lit office complex to work in. It's no accident 
that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure, and 
the bureaucrat leaves his supervisor's cubicle duly shaken. That night he and his wife go 
through their Bauhaus condominium collecting every alarm clock they own, each one of 
which is electric and digital and extremely precise, and they festoon their bedroom with 
them, so there are like a dozen timepieces with their digital alarms all set for 0615h. But 



that night there's a power failure, and all the clocks lose an hour or just sit there blinking 
OOOOh. over and over, and the bureaucrat still oversleeps the next A.M. He wakes late, 
lies there for a moment staring at a blinking 0000. He shrieks, clutches his head, throws 
on wrinkled clothes, ties his shoes in the elevator, shaves in the car, blasting through red 
lights on the way to the commuter rail. The 0816 train to the City pulls in to the station's 
lower level just as the crazed bureaucrat's car screeches into the station's parking lot, 
and the bureaucrat can see the top of the train sitting there idling from across the open 
lot. This is the very last temporally feasible train: if the bureaucrat misses this train he'll 
be late again, and terminated. He hauls into a Handicapped spot and leaves the car 
there at a crazy angle, vaults the turnstile, and takes the stairs down to the platform 
seven at a time, sweaty and bug-eyed. People scream and dive out of his way. As he 
careers down the long stairway he keeps his crazed eyes on the open doors of the 0816 
train, willing them to stay open just a little longer. Finally, filmed in a glacial slo-mo, the 
bureaucrat leaps from the seventh-to-the-bottom step and lunges toward the train's 
open doors, and right in mid-lunge smashes headlong into an earnest-faced little kid 
with thick glasses and a bow-tie and those nerdy little schoolboy-shorts who's tottering 
along the platform under a tall armful of carefully wrapped packages. Kerwham, they 
collide. Bureaucrat and kid both stagger back from the impact. The kid's packages go 
flying all over the place. The kid recovers his balance and stands there stunned, glasses 
and bow-tie askew. 279 The bureaucrat looks frantically from the kid to the litter of 
packages to the kid to the train's doors, which are still open. The train thrums. Its 
interior is fluorescent-lit and filled with employed, ontologically secure bureaucrats. You 
can hear the station's PA announcer saying something tinny and garbled about 
departure. The stream of platform foot-traffic opens around the bureaucrat and the 
stunned boy and the litter of packages. Ogilvie'd once lectured for a whole period on 
this kid's character as an instance of the difference between an antagonist and a 
deuteragonist in moral drama; he'd mentioned the child-actor's name over and over. 
Hal tries whacking himself just over the right eye several times, to dislodge the name. 
The film's bureaucrat's buggy eyes keep going back and forth between the train's open 
doors and the little kid, who's looking steadily up at him, almost studious, his eyes big 
and liquid behind the lenses. Hal doesn't remember who played the bureaucrat, either, 
but it's the kid's name that's driving him bats. The bureaucrat's leaning away, inclined 
way over toward the train doors, as if his very cells were being pulled that way. But he 
keeps looking at the kid, the gifts, struggling with himself. It's a clear internal-conflict 
moment, one of Himself's films' very few. The bureaucrat's eyes suddenly recede back 
into their normal places in his sockets. He turns from the fluorescent doors and bends to 
the kid and asks if he's OK and says it'll all be OK. He cleans the kid's spectacles with his 
pocket handkerchief, picks the kid's packages up. About halfway through the packages 
the PA issues something final and the train's doors close with a pressurized hiss. The 
bureaucrat gently loads the kid back up with packages, neatens them. The train pulls 
out. The bureaucrat watches the train pull out, expressionless. It's anybody's guess what 
he's thinking. He straightens the kid's bow-tie, kneeling down the way adults do when 
they're ministering to a child, and tells him he's sorry about the impact and that it's OK. 
He turns to go. The platform's mostly empty now. Now the strange moment. The kid 



cranes his neck around the packages and looks up at the guy as he starts to walk away: 

'Mister?' the kid says. 'Are you Jesus?' 

'Don't I wish,' the ex-bureaucrat says over his shoulder, walking away, as the kid shifts 
the packages and frees one little hand to wave Bye at the guy's topcoat's back as the 
camera, revealed now as mounted on the 0816's rear, recedes from the platform and 
picks up speed. 

Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat remains Mario's favorite of all their late father's 
entertainments, possibly because of its unhip earnestness. Though to Mario he always 
maintains it's basically goo, Hal secretly likes it, too, the cartridge, and likes to project 
himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat's character on the leisurely drive home 
toward ontological erasure. 

As a kind of weird self-punishment, Hal also plans to subject himself to the horrific Fun 
with Teeth and Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators, then finally to one of Himself's 
posthumous hits, a cartridge called Blood Sister: One Tough Nun that he'd always found 
kind of gratuitously nasty and overwrought, but which Hal has no idea that this piece of 
entertainment actually germinated out of James 0. Incandenza's one brief and 
unpleasant experience with Boston AA, in the B.S. mid-'90s, when Himself lasted two 
and a half months and then drifted gradually away, turned off by the simplistic God-stuff 
and covert dogma. Bob-Hopeless, Hal spits way more than is his norm, now, and also 
likes having the wastecan right nearby in case he might throw up. That afternoon he'd 
had zilch in the way of a kinesthetic sense: he couldn't feel the ball on his stick. His 
nausea has nothing to do with watching his father's cartridges. For the last year his 
arm's been an extension of his mind and the stick an extension of the arm, acutely 
sensitive. Each of the cartridges is a carefully labelled black diskette; they're all signed 
neatly out on the clipboard by the egg-shaped glass bookshelf and are loaded in the 
cueing slots and waiting to drop, in order, and be digitally decoded. 


14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


P. T. Krause: N. Cambridge: that infamous deceptive post-seizure feeling of well-being. 
That broken-fever, reversal-of-fortune-type highhearted feeling after a neuroelectric 
event. Poor Tony Krause awoke in the ambulance lizardless and continent and feeling 
right as rain. Lay there and flirted with the blue-jawed paramedic leaning over him, 
certain bawdy entendres on expressions like vital signs and dilation until the paramedic 



radioed ahead to Cambridge City's E. Room to cancel the crash-cart. Manipulated his 
skinny arms in a parodic Minimal Mambo, lying there. Fiddle-de-dee'd the paramedic's 
warning that post-seizure feelings of well-being were notoriously deceptive and 
transient. 

And then also the little-mentioned advantage to being destitute and in possession of a 
Health Card that's expired and not even in your name: hospitals show you a kind of 
inverted respect; a place like Cambridge City Hospital bows to your will not to stay; they 
all of a sudden defer to your subjective diagnostic knowledge of your own condition, 
which post-seizure condition you feel has turned the corner toward improvement: they 
bow to your quixotic will: it's unfortunately not a free hospital but it is a free country: 
they honor your wishes and compliment your mambo and say Go with God. 

It's a good thing you can't see what you look like, though. 

And the serendipity of Cambridge City Hospital being just an eight-block stroll east on 
Cambridge St. and then south on Prospect, through mentholated autumn air, through 
Inman Square and up to Antitoi Entertainment, maybe the one last place where a 
renewed, post-seizure, on-the-diagnostic-upswing if still slightly shaky young gender- 
dysphoric might yet expect a bit of kindness, pharmacological credit, since the affairs of 
Wo and Copley Library and heart. 

The big brick cake of the hospital behind Krause in purple twilight. The brisk click of his 
heels on pavement, boa semi-formally loose on his shoulders and down beneath each 
arm, hand holding red leather collar closed at the throat, head up and staying that way 
on its own, steady eyes meeting with blase dignity the eyes of whoever passes. The 
dignity of a man risen by will from the ashes of Withdrawal and now on the upswing and 
with places to go and potentially considerate Canadians to see. A charming and 
potentially once again in the not-too-distant future gorgeous creature with the renewed 
wherewithal to now meet the eyes of Inman Sq. pedestrians veering sharply away from 
the residual smells of men's room stall and subway vomit, the ashes from which he's 
been rescued and risen once again, feeling righter than rain. A rind of moon hanging 
cocked above a four-spired church. And the emergent stars are yo-yos, you feel, after a 
seizure: Poor Tony feels as if he could cast them out, draw them in again at will. 

The way Poor Tony Krause, Lolasister, and Susan T. Cheese became mercenary 
adjuncts to something dour Bertraund Antitoi had invited them to call the "Front- 
Contre-O.N.A.N.isme"'\Nas that, for a heavily cut bundle to split six ways, Lolasister, 
Susan T. Cheese, P. T. Krause, Bridget Tenderhole, Equus Reese, and the late Stokely 
('Dark Star') McNair had had to wear identical red leather coats and auburn wigs and 
spike heels and go and hang around the lobby of Harvard Square's Sheraton 
Commander Hotel with six mannish-looking women in the same wigs and coats while an 
androgynous Quebecer insurgent who filled out h/his red leather coat in a way that 
made Bridget Tenderhole dig his nails into his palms in sheer green envy came through 
the Commander's revolving Lucite doors and strode purposefully into the crowded 
Epaulet Ballroom and threw foul semi-liquid violet waste from a souvenir miniature 
waste-displacement barrel in the face of the Canadian Minister of Inter-O.N.A.N. Trade, 
who was addressing the U.S. press from a leaf-shaped rostrum. The decoys were then 
required to mill hysterically in the lobby, all twelve of them, and then hit the revolving 



doors and disperse in a dozen different vectors as the androgynous waste-wielding 
Quebecer legged it out of the Epaulet Ballroom and lobby pursued by white-suited men 
with earplugs and Cobray M-ll subautomatics, so the security guys'd see identical 
epicene figures high-heeling it away in different directions and get fuddled about who to 
chase. Susan T. Cheese and Poor Tony'd met the Antitoi Bros. — only one of whom 
could or would speak, and who'd been in charge of the diversionary aspects of the 
Sheraton Commander operation, and had clearly been subordinate to still other 
Quebecers of way higher I.Q. — Krause and S.T.C. had met them at Inman Square's 
Ryle's Tavern, which had Gender-Dysphoric Night every second Wednesday, and 
attracted comely and unrough trade, and which Poor Tony passed now (Ryle's), just 
after the Man o' War Grille, now only a block or so from the Antitois' glass-and-novelty- 
shop front, feeling not so much quite ill again as just deeply tired, after only five or so 
blocks — that post-fever, sleep-for-a-week-type cellular fatigue — and is debating with 
himself about whether to have a go at the purses of the two young and unstriking 
women walking just a few steps ahead, both of their purses hanging only by the 
flimsiest of evening-gown-width straps from slumped shoulders, the duo interracial, 
rare and disquieting in metro Boston, the black girl talking a click a minute and the white 
one not responding, her weary stolid plod and air of inattention fairly begging for a 
purse-snatch, both of them with an air about them of routine victimization, the sort of 
demoralized lassitude Poor Tony felt always guaranteed a minimum of protest or 
pursuit — though the white girl wore formidable-looking running shoes under her tartan 
skirt. So intent was Poor Tony Krause on the logistics and implications of the possible 
purses dangled as if by God right before him — how different to hit the Antitois' 
doorstep with liquid assets, to request a transaction rather than bare charity, more 
almost a social call than a contemptible Withdrawn snivel for compassion — so intent as 
he sidestepped an impressive pile of dog-droppings and passed across the broad 
windows of the Man o' War that he never saw his old former crewmate Mad Matty 
Pemulis, a sure source of compassion, looking up and out and down and back up, aghast 
in recognition of what Poor Tony has come through the corridor to resemble. 


Geoffrey Day's noted the way most of the male residents of Ennet House have special 
little cognomens for their genitals. E.g. 'Bruno,' 'Jake,' 'Fang' (Minty), 'The One-Eyed 
Monk,' 'Fritzie,' 'Russell the Love Muscle.' He speculates this could be a class thing: 
neither he nor Ewell nor Ken Erdedy have named their Units. Like Ewell, Day enters a 
certain amount of comparative-class data in his journal. Doony Glynn called his penis 
'Poor Richard'; Chandler Foss confessed to the moniker 'Bam-Bam.' Lenz had referred to 
his own Unit as 'the Frightful Hog.' Day would die before admitting he missed either 
Lenz or his soliloquies about the Hog, which had been frequent. The penis in question 
had been that curious two or three shades darker than the rest of Lenz that people's 
penises sometimes are. Lenz had brandished it at his roommates whenever he wished 
to emphasize a point. It had been short and thick and blunt, and Lenz described the Hog 
as a primo example of what he called the Polish Curse, viz. undistinguished length but 
sobering circumference: 'Easy on the bottom but tears hell out of the sides, brother.' 



This had been his description of the Polish Curse. A surprising amount of Day's Recovery 
Journal is filled with quotations from R. Lenz. Lenz's discharge had moved the tax- 
attorney Tiny Ewell up into the 3-Man room with Day. Ewell was the one man here with 
whom a conversation of anything remotely approaching depth could be held, so Day 
was nonplussed when he found himself, after a couple long nights, almost missing Lenz, 
his obsession with time, his patter, his way of leaning up against the wall upside-down in 
his briefs, or brandishing the Hog. 

And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue: Some 
psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who've gotten so dependent 
on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned 
they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul's core systems — 
these persons know firsthand that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression.' 
One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia 280 or simple melancholy. It's 
a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to 
things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at 
night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist 
finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging 
there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all 
of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of 
depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and... well, 
depressing. Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical 
abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. 
Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, 
joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract 
ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still 
speak about happiness and meaning et al, but she has become incapable of feeling 
anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about 
them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes 
an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the 
world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in 
the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify. 

It's worth noting that, among younger E.T.A.s, the standard take on Dr. J. 0. 
Incandenza's suicide attributes his putting his head in the microwave to this kind of 
anhedonia. This is maybe because anhedonia's often associated with the crises that 
afflict extremely goal-oriented people who reach a certain age having achieved all or 
more than all than they'd hoped for. The what-does-it-all-mean-type crisis of middle- 
aged Americans. In fact this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all. In fact the 
presumption that he'd achieved all his goals and found that the achievement didn't 
confer meaning or joy on his existence says more about the students at E.T.A. than it 
says about Orin's and Hal's father: still under the influence of the deLint-like carrot-and- 
stick philosophies of their hometown coaches rather than the more paradoxical 
Schtitt/Incandenza/Lyle school, younger athletes who can't help gauging their whole 
worth by their place in an ordinal ranking use the idea that achieving their goals and 
finding the gnawing sense of worthlessness still there in their own gut as a kind of 



psychic bogey, something that they can use to justify stopping on their way down to 
dawn drills to smell flowers along the E.T.A. paths. The idea that achievement doesn't 
automatically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstraction, rather 
like the prospect of their own death — 'Caius Is Mortal' and so on. Deep down, they all 
still view the competitive carrot as the grail. They're mostly going through the motions 
when they invoke anhedonia. They're mostly small children, keep in mind. Listen to any 
sort of sub-16 exchange you hear in the bathroom or food line: 'Hey there, how are 
you?' 'Number eight this week, is how I am.' They all still worship the carrot. With the 
possible exception of the tormented LaMont Chu, they all still subscribe to the delusive 
idea that the continent's second-ranked fourteen-year-old feels exactly twice as 
worthwhile as the continent's #4. 

Deluded or not, it's still a lucky way to live. Even though it's temporary. It may well be 
that the lower-ranked little kids at E.T.A. are proportionally happier than the higher- 
ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small children) know it's more invigorating to 
want than to have, it seems. Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion. 

Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a 
speciaIly-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it 
wasn't because of standard U.S. anhedonia. Hal himself hasn't had a bona fide intensity- 
of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be 
like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to 
satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull, as a human being — 
but in fact he's far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is 
the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, 
and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there's pretty much nothing 
at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she 
hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is 
lonely. 

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and 
internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification 
of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that 
most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and 
then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on 
how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and 
cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so- 
called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where 
we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded 
encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear 
any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to 
inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a 
young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. 
And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and 
unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naivete on this continent (at least since the 
Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. 0. 
Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that 



naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is 
the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it's natural that Himself's 
dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that 
cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes 
privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind 
of fear of being really human, since to be really human fat least as he conceptualizes it) 
is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally 
pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite- 
right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and 
froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, 
probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal 
self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty 
mask, anhedonia. 281 

The American Century as Seen Through a Brick's main and famous key-image is of a 
piano-string vibrating — a high D, it looks like — vibrating, and making a very sweet 
unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes into the frame, a blunt 
moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail- 
corners, small and unlined, clearly an infantile thumb, and as it touches the piano string 
the high sweet sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is excruciating. 
Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following, we're back 
at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high sweet sound recommences, 
extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the volume increases, now with 
something rotten about it underneath, there's something sick-sweet and overripe and 
potentially putrid about the one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the 
sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few 
seconds we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing 
and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up. 

Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn't the worst 
kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of 
the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical 
depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity 
for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always 
feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names 
— anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more 
authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the 
thing itself, knows it simply as It. 

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a 
sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of 
conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most 
elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which 
the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and 
malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates 
around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical 
unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the 



self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly 
indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we 
associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or 
keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. 

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert 
could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels 
like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in 
such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability 
To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time 
attending to anything except that pain, 282 a clinically depressed person cannot even 
perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting 
her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for 
one. 

The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially 
lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in 
pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer 
who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are 
circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, 
is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or 
measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically 
depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none 
of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain 
circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside 
party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received 
from within. 

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so 
out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not 
square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom 
Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a 
trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no 
mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a 
great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at 
the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. 
The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close 
enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring 
the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and 
yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have 
personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond 
falling. 

But and so the idea of a person in the grip of It being bound by a 'Suicide Contract' 
some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house makes her sign is simply absurd. 
Because such a contract will constrain such a person only until the exact psychic 
circumstances that made the contract necessary in the first place assert themselves, 
invisibly and indescribably. That the well-meaning halfway-house Staff does not 



understand Its overriding terror will only make the depressed resident feel more alone. 

One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at Newton- 
Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his fifties. He was a civil 
engineer whose hobby was model trains — like from Lionel Trains Inc., etc. — for which 
he erected incredibly intricate systems of switching and track that filled his basement 
recreation room. His wife brought photographs of the trains and networks of trellis and 
track into the locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering 
from psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had had no 
reason to disbelieve him. He was stocky and swart with thinning hair and hands that he 
held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago he had slipped on a patch of 3-ln-l- 
brand oil from his model-train tracks and bonked his head on the cement floor of his 
basement rec room in Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was 
depressed beyond all human endurance, and stayed that way. He'd never once tried 
suicide, though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife 
was very devoted and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day. She was very 
devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily Mass when he was not 
institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job and his hobby. He went to work 
regularly, taking medical leaves only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to 
trust himself, or when there was some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted 
him to try. They'd tried Tricyciics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin- 
Reuptake Inhibitors, 283 the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They'd scanned his 
lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not even high- 
amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are 
beyond human aid. The man's case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of 
this man going to work and to Mass and building miniaturized railroad networks day 
after day after day while feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was 
simply beyond her ability to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew this man 
and his wife must be possessed of a courage way off any sort of known courage-chart. 
But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at the idea of the 
squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in the silence of his wood- 
panelled rec room, the silence total except for the sounds of the track being oiled and 
snapped together and laid into place, the man's head full of poison and worms and 
every cell in his body screaming for relief from flames no one else could help with or 
even feel. 

The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a place on 
Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurgery where they 
supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the 
brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The man's fondest dream was anhedonia, 
complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was 
the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man's life enough meaning for him to 
hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from 
the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and she him. He 
went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while she 
prayed or did that devout thing with beads. 



The couple had gotten Kate Gompert's mother's address and had sent Kate an Xmas 
card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that 
she was in their prayers and wishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert doesn't know 
whether Mr. Ernest Feaster's limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved 
anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of 
locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of 
times, which the present was not. 


14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


Ms. Ruth van Cleve's first day off new residents' three-day House Restriction. Allowed 
now to hit meetings outside Enfield if accompanied by some more senior resident the 
Staff judges safe. Ruth van Cleve in spike heels walking alongside a psychotically 
depressed Kate Gompert on Prospect just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, a little 
after 2200h., yammering nonstop. 

Ruth van Cleve is shaping up to be excruciating for Kate Gompert to be around. Ruth 
van Cleve hails from Braintree on the South Shore, is many kilos underweight, wears 
brass-colored lipstick, and has dry hair teased out in the big-hair fashion of decades 
past. Her face has the late-stage lce 284 -addict's concave long-jawed insectile look. Her 
hair is a dry tangled cloud, with tiny little eyes and bones and projecting beak 
underneath. Joelle v.D.'d said it almost looked like Ruth van Cleve's hair grew her head 
instead of the other way around. Kate Gompert's hair is butcher-block cut and has 
recognizable color, at least. 

Kate Gompert hasn't slept in four nights, and her slumped progress up the Prospect 
sidewalk resembles the lazy tack of a boat in no rush. Ruth van Cleve talks nonstop into 
her right ear. It's around 2200h. on Saturday and the sodium streetlights keep going off 
and then on again with a stuttered hum, some connection in them loose somewhere. 
Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and drunks who live in the streets around Inman 
Square also crowd the sidewalk's edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of passersby 
in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem-artists) just 
heads that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in 
disconnected floating heads. In doorways by shops are incomplete persons in 
wheelchairs with creative receptacles where limbs should be and hand-lettered 
invitations to help them. 



An oral narrative begins to emerge. Ms. Ruth v.C. has been remanded to Ennet House 
by D.S.S. and Family Court after her newborn baby was discovered in a Braintree MA 
alley swaddled in WalMart advertising circulars whose Harvest Moon Value Specials had 
expired 11/01, a Sunday. Ruth van Cleve had rather unshrewdly left the hospital I.D. 
bracelet with its D.O.B. and her own name and Health Card # on the discarded infant's 
wrist. The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator, attached to 
machines and tapering off the Clonidine 285 it received for in-utero addictions to 
substances Kate Gompert can only speculate about. 286 The father of Ruth van Cleve's 
child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional 
Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as 
operating a pharmaceutical company without a license. 

What's remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward 
without any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in 
front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she's moving 
forward, her whole self, when all she's capable of concentrating on is one foot and then 
the other foot. Heads glide by in the darkened windows. Some of the Latino males in the 
vicinity do a kind of sexual checking-out as they pass — even though underweight and 
dry-haired and kind of haggish, Ruth van Cleve's manner and attire and big hair 
broadcast that she's all about sexuality and sex. 

A negative thing about opting for recovery in NA instead of AA is availability and 
location of meetings. In other words fewer NA meetings. On a Saturday night you could 
stand on the roof of Ennet House in Enfield and be hard-pressed to spit in any direction 
without hitting some AA venue nearby. Whereas the closest Saturday-P.M. NA meeting 
is N. Cambridge's Clean and Serene Group, infamous for cross-talk and chair-throwing, 
and the thing's Beginner's Mtng. goes from 2000 to 2100h. and the regular from 2100 to 
2200h., purposely late, to offset the Saturday-night jones so many drug addicts suffer 
weekly, Saturday still being the week's special mythic Party-Night even for persons who 
long ago ceased to be able to do anything but Party 24 / 7 / 365 . But from Inman Square 
back to Ennet House is a ghastly hike — hoof up Prospect to Central Sq. and take the 
Red Line all the way to Park Street station and then the maddening Green Line B Train 
forever west on Comm. Ave. — and it's now after 22l5h., meaning Kate Gompert has 75 
minutes to get herself and this hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering 
newcomer beside her back for Curfew. Ruth van Cleve's chatter is as listener-interest- 
independent as anything Kate Gompert's heard since Randy Lenz got invited to ingest 
Substances and abuse animals elsewhere, and left, which was who knows how many 
days or weeks ago. 

The two move in and out of cones of epileptic light from fluttering street-lamps. Kate 
Gompert is trying not to shudder as Ruth van Cleve asks her if she knows someplace you 
can pick up a good toothbrush cheap. Kate Gompert's entire spiritual energy and 
attention are focused on first her left foot and then her right foot. One of the heads she 
does not see, floating in the windows with her own unrecognizable head and Ruth van 
Cleve's cloud of hair, is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony Krause, 
who's several steps behind them and matching their slightly serpentine course step for 
step, eyeing string purses he imagines contain more than just train-fare and NA 



Newcomers' keychains. 


The vaporizer chugs and seethes and makes the room's windows weep as Jim 
Troeltsch inserts a pro-wrestling cartridge in the little TP's viewer and dons his tackiest 
sportcoat and wet-combs his hair down smooth so it looks toupeeish and settles back 
on his bunk, surrounded by Seldane-bottles and two-ply facial tissue, preparing to call 
the action. His roommates have long since seen what was coming, and screwed. 

Standing on tiptoe in Subdorm B's curved hallway, using the handle of an inverted 
tennis racquet whose vinyl cover he can absently zip and unzip as he moves the handle 
around, Michael Pemulis is gently raising one of the panels in the drop-ceiling and 
shifting it on its aluminum strut, the panel, changing its lie on the strut from square¬ 
shaped to diamond-shaped, being careful not to let it fall. 

Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in the 
unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white, lips barely moving and making no sound. 

Coach Schtitt and Mario tear-ass downhill on W. Commonwealth on Schtitt's old 
BMW, bound for Evangeline's Low-Temperature Confections in Newton Center, right at 
the bottom of what usually gets called Heartbreak Hill, Schtitt intense-faced and leaning 
forward like a skier, his white scarf whipping around and whipping Mario's face, in the 
sidecar, as Mario too leans way forward into their downhill flight, preparing to whoop 
when they bottom out. 

Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at 
once, secures from Information the phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business 
address on East Tucson AZ's Blasted Expanse Blvd., then begins to dial, using the stern of 
a blue felt pen to stab at the console's keys. 


'AIYEE!' cries the man, rushing at the nun, wielding a power tool. 

The tough-looking nun yells 'AIYEE!' right back as she kicks at him expertly, her habit's 
skirts whipping complexly around her. The combatants circle each other warily in the 
abandoned warehouse, both growling. The nun's wimple is askew and soiled; the back 
of her hand, held out in a bladish martial-art fist, displays part of a faded tattoo, some 
wicked-clawed bird of prey. The cartridge opens like this, in violent medias res, then 
freezes in the middle of the nun's leaping kick, and its title. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, 
gets matte-dissolved in and bleeds lurid blood-colored light down into the performance 
credits rolling across the screen's bottom. Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin have 
come in uninvited and joined Hal in V.R. 6 and are curled up against the arms of the 
room's other recumbency, their feet touching at the soles, Boone eating unauthorized 
frozen yogurt from a cylindrical carton. Hal's turned the rheostat down low, and the 
film's title and credits make their faces glow redly. Bridget Boone extends the 
confection-carton over in Hal's direction in an inviting way, and by way of declining Hal 
points to the lump of Kodiak in his cheek and makes a display of leaning out to spit. He 
appears to be studying the scrolling credits very closely. 

'So what is this?' Fran Unwin says. 



Hal looks over at her very slowly, then even more slowly raises his right arm and 
points around the tennis ball he's squeezing at the monitor, where the cartridge's 50- 
point title is still trickling redly over the credits and frozen scene. 

Bridget Boone gives him a look. 'What's up your particular butt?' 

'I'm isolating. I came in here to be by myself.' 

She has this way that gets to Hal of digging the chocolate yogurt out with the spoon 
and then inverting the spoon, turning the spoon over, so that it always enters her mouth 
upside-down and her tongue gets to contact the confection immediately, without the 
mediation of cold spoon, and for some reason this has always gotten under Hal's skin. 

'So then you should've locked the door.' 

'Except there aren't locks on the V.R. doors, 287 as you quite well know.' 

Round-faced Frannie Unwin says 'Sshhh.' 

Then too sometimes Boone plays with the laden spoon, makes it fly around in front of 
her face like a child's plane before inverting it and sticking it in. 'Maybe this is partly 
because this is a public room, for everybody, that your thinking person probably 
wouldn't choose to isolate in.' 

Hal leans over to spit and lets the spit hang for a while before he lets it go, so it hangs 
there slowly distending. 

Boone withdraws the clean spoon just as slowly. 'No matter how sullen and pouty that 
person is over that person's play or near-loss in full view of a whole crowd that day, I 
hear.' 

'Bridget, I forgot to tell you I saw that Rite Aid's having an enormous clearance on 
emetics. If I were you I'd scoot right over.' 

'You are vile.' 

Bernadette Longley sticks her long boxy head in the door and sees Bridget Boone and 
says 'I thought I heard you in here' and comes in uninvited with Jennie Bash in tow. 

Hal whimpers. 

Jennie Bash looks at the large screen. The cartridge's theme-music is female-choral 
and very heavy and ironic on the descants. Bernadette Longley looks at Hal. 'You know 
there's a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and a very 
determined expression.' 

Boone banks the spoon back and forth absently. 'He's isolating. He won't respond and 
is spitting extra repulsively to get across the point.' 

Jennie Bash says 'Haven't you got a huge paper due for Thierry tomorrow? There was 
moaning coming from Struck and Shaw's room.' 

Hal packs chew down with his tongue. 'Done.' 

'Figures,' Bridget Boone says. 

'Done, redone, formatted, printed, proofed, collated, stapled.' 

'Proofed to within its life,' Boone says, barrel-rolling the spoon. Hal can tell she's done 
a couple one-hitters. He's looking straight at the wall's screen, squeezing the ball so hard 
his forearm keeps swelling to twice its size. 

'Plus I hear your best friend in the whole world did something really funny today,' 
Longley says. 

'She means Pemulis,' Fran Unwin tells Hal. 



Bridget Boone makes dive-bomber sounds and swoops the spoon around. 

'Sounds like too good a story not to save and let my craving for it build and build until 
finally it's like I have to hear it or die right on the spot.' 

'What is up his butt?' Jennie Bash asks Fran Unwin. Fran Unwin's a sort of hanuman- 
faced girl with a torso and trunk about twice as long as her legs, and a scuttly, vaguely 
simian style of play. Bernadette Longley wears knee-length candy-cane trousers and a 
sweatshirt with the fleecy inside out. All the girls are now in socks. Hal notes that girls 
always seem to slip out of their shoes when they assume any kind of spectatorial 
posture. Eight empty white sneakers now sit mute and weird at various points, slightly 
sunk in carpet pile. No two of the shoes face quite the same exact direction. Male 
players, on the other hand, tend to leave the footwear on when they come in and sit 
down somewhere. Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself at home. Males, 
when they come in somewhere and sit down, project an air of transience. Remain suited 
up and mobile. It's the same whenever Hal comes in and sits down someplace where 
people are already gathered. He's aware that they sense he's somehow there only in a 
very technical sense, that he's got an air of moment's-notice readiness to leave about 
him. Boone extends her carton of TCBY 288 toward Longley in an inviting way, even tilting 
it invitingly back and forth. Longley puffs her cheeks and blows air out with a fatigued 
sound. At least three different smells of cologne and skin-cream struggle for primacy in 
here. Bridget Boone's free LA Gear shoes are both on their sides from the force of 
having been almost kicked off her feet. Hal's spit makes a sound against the bottom of 
the wastebasket. Jennie Bash has bigger arms than Hal. The Viewing Room is redly dim. 
Bash asks Unwin what they're watching. 

Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, one of Himself's few commercial successes, wouldn't 
have made near the money it made if it hadn't come out just as InterLace was starting 
to purchase first-run features for its rental menus and hyping the cartridges with one¬ 
time Spontaneous Disseminations. It was the sort of sleazy-looking shocksploitation film 
that would have had a two-week run in multiplex theaters 8 and above and then gone 
right to the featureless brown boxes of magnetic-video limbo. Hal's critical take on the 
film is that Himself, at certain dark points when abstract theory-issues seemed to 
provide an escape from the far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true 
or entertaining cartridges, had made films in certain commercial-type genre modes that 
so grotesquely exaggerated the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic 
metacinematic parodies on the genres: 'sub/inversions of the genres,' cognoscenti taken 
in were wont to call them. The metacinematic-parody idea itself was aloof and over- 
clever, to Hal's way of thinking, and he's not comfortable with the way Himself always 
seemed to get seduced by the very commercial formulae he was trying to invert, 
especially the seductive formulae of violent payback, i.e. the cathartic bloodbath, i.e. 
the hero trying with every will-fiber to eschew the generic world of the stick and fist and 
but driven by unjust circumstance back to the violence again, to the cathartic final 
bloodbath the audience is brought to applaud instead of mourn. Himself's best in this 
vein was The Night Wears a Sombrero, a Langesque metaWestern but also a really good 
Western, with chintzy homemade interior sets but breathtaking exteriors shot outside 
Tucson AZ, an ambivalent-but-finaliy-avenging-son story played out against dust-colored 



skies and big angles of flesh-colored mountain, plus with minimal splatter, shot men 
clutching their chests and falling deliciously sideways, all hats staying on at all times. 
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun was a supposedly ironic lampoon of the avenging-cleric 
splatter-films of the late B.S. '90s. Nor did Himself make any friends on either side of the 
Concavity, trying to shoot the thing in Canada. 

Hal tries to imagine the tall slumped tremulous stork-shape of Himself inclined at an 
osteoporotic angle over digital editing equipment for hours on end, deleting and 
inserting code, arranging Blood Sister: One Tough Nun into subversive/inversion, and 
can't summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling as he 
patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the thing's metasilliness, to have nothing 
really felt going on. 289 

Jennie Bash has left V.R. 6's door agape, and Idris Arslanian and Todd ('Postal Weight') 
Possalthwaite and Kent Blott all drift in and sit Indian-style in a loose hemisphere on the 
thick carpet between the girls' recumbency and Hal's recumbency, and are more or less 
considerately quiet. They all keep their sneakers on. Postal Weight's nose is a massive 
proboscoid bandaged thing. Kent Blott wears a sportfisherman's cap with an extremely 
long bill. That queer faint smell of hot dogs that seems to follow Idris Arslanian around 
begins to insinuate itself into the room's colognes. He isn't wearing the rayon 
handkerchief as a blindfold but does have it tied around his neck; no one asks him about 
it. All the littler kids are consummate spectators and are sucked immediately into Blood 
Sister's unfolding narrative, and the older females seem to take some kind of psychic 
cue from the little boys and subside, too, and watch, until after a while Hal's the only 
person in the room who isn't 100% absorbed. 

The entertainment's uptake is that a tough biker-chick-type girl from the mean streets 
of Toronto is found O.D.'d, beaten up, molested, and robbed of her leather jacket 
outside the portcullis of a downtown convent and is rescued, nursed, befriended, 
spiritually guided, and converted — 'saved' is the weak entendre made much of in the 
first act's dialogue — by a tough-looking older nun who it turns out, she reveals (the 
tough older nun), had herself been hauled up out of a life of Harleys, narcotics-dealing 
and -addiction by an even tougher even older nun, a nun who had herself been saved by 
a tough ex-biker nun, and so on. The latest saved biker-chick becomes a tough and 
street-smart nun in the same urban order, and is known on the mean streets as Blood 
Sister, and wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido 
and is not to be fucked with, is the word on the streets. 

The motivational crux here being that almost this whole order of nuns is staffed by 
nuns who'd been saved from Toronto's mean, dead-end streets by other older tougher 
saved nuns. So, endless novenas later. Blood Sister eventually feels this transitive 
spiritual urge to go out and find a troubled adolescent female of her own, to 'save' and 
bring into the order, thereby discharging her soul's debt to the old tough nun who'd 
saved her. Through processes obscure (a Toronto troubled-but-savable-adolescent-girl- 
directory of some sort? Bridget Boone cuts wise). Blood Sister eventually takes on a 
burn-scarred, deeply troubled adolescent punker-type Toronto girl who is sullen and, 
yes, reasonably tough, but is also vulnerable and emotionally tormented (the girl's pink 
shiny burn-scarred face tends to writhe in misery whenever she thinks Blood Sister's not 



looking) by the terrible depredations she's endured as a result of her rapacious and 
unshakable addiction to crank cocaine, the kind you have to convert and cook up 
yourself, and with ether, which is highly combustible, and which people used before 
somebody found out baking soda and temperature-flux would do the same thing, which 
dates the film's B.S. time-period even more clearly than the tough tortured punk girl's 
violet stelliform coiffure. 290 

But so Blood Sister eventually gets the girl clean, by nurturing her through Withdrawal 
in a locked sacristy; and the girl becomes less sullen by degrees that almost have audible 
clicks to them — the girl stops trying to dicky the lock of the sacramental-wine cabinet, 
stops farting on purpose during matins and vespers, stops going up to the Trappists who 
hang around the convent and asking them for the time and other sly little things to try 
to make them slip up and speak aloud, etc. A couple times the girl's face writhes in 
emotional torment and vulnerability even when Blood Sister's looking. The girl gets a 
severe and somewhat lesbianic haircut, and her roots establish themselves as softly 
brown. Blood Sister, revealing biceps like nobody's business, beats the girl at arm¬ 
wrestling; they both laugh; they compare tattoos: this marks the start of a brutally 
drawn-out Getting-to-Know-and-Trust-You montage, a genre-convention, this montage 
involving Harley-rides at such speeds that the girl has to keep her hand on Blood Sister's 
head to keep B.S.'s wimple from flying off, and long conversational walks filmed at wide- 
angle, and protracted and basically unwinnable games of charades with the Trappists, 
plus some quick scenes of Blood Sister finding the girl's Marlboros and dildo-facsimile 
lighter in the wastebasket, of the girl doing chores unsullenly under B.S.'s grudgingly 
approving eye, of candle-lit scripture-study sessions with the girl's finger under each 
word she reads, of the girl carefully snipping the last bits of split violet ends from her 
soft brown hair, of the more senior tough nuns punching Blood Sister's shoulder 
approvingly as the girl's eyes start to get that impending-conversion gleam in them, 
then, finally, of Blood Sister and the girl habit-shopping, the girl's burned lantern jaw 
and hairless Promethean brow frozen in a sunlit montage-climax shot under a novitiate 
wimple's gull-wings — all accompanied by — no kidding — 'Getting to Know You,' which 
Hal imagines the Stork justified to himself as subversively saccharine. This all takes 
about half an hour. Bridget Boone, of the Indianapolis archdiocese, begins to declaim 
briefly on Blood Sister: One Tough Nun's ironic anti-Catholic subthesis — that the 
deformed addicted girl's 'salvation' here seemed simply the exchange of one will- 
obliterating 'habit' for another, substituting one sort of outlandish head-decoration for 
another — and gets pinched by Jennie Bash and shushed by just about everyone in the 
room but Hal, who could pass for asleep except for the brief lists to port over the 
wastebasket, to spit, and in fact is experiencing some of the radical loss of concentration 
that attends THC-Withdrawal and is thinking about another, even more familiar J. 0. 
Incandenza cartridge even while he watches this one with the other E.T.A.s. This other 
attention-object is the late Himself's so-called 'inversion' of the corporate-politics genre, 
Low-Temperature Civics, an executive-suite soap opera filled with power plays, position- 
jockeyings, timid adulteries, martinis, and malignantly pretty female executives in 
elegant tight-fitting dress-for-successwear who eat their paunched and muddled male 
counterparts for political lunch. Hal knows that L-TC wasn't an inversion or lampoon at 



all, but derived right from the dark B.S. ' 80 s period when Himself had changed careers 
from government service to private entreprenurism, when a sudden infusion of patent- 
receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored, and Himself 
took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon- 
operas like Lorimar's Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada's Northwest coast, where 
he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room. 

What's intriguing but unknown to everyone in V.R. 6 is the way Boone's take on 
Himself's take on the substitution-of-one-crutch-for-another interpretation of 
substituting Catholic devotion for chemical dependence is very close to the way many 
not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange 
of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal 
shibboleths and robotic piety, an 'Attitude of Platitude,' and use this idea that it's still 
slavish dependence as an excuse to stop trying Boston AA, and to go back to the original 
slavish Substance-dependence, until that dependence has finally beaten them into such 
a double-bound desperation that they finally come back in with their faces hanging off 
their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their 
vacant grins. 

Some Substance-dependent persons, though, have already been so broken by the 
time they first Come In that they don't care about stuff like substitution or banality, 
they'll give their left nut to trade their original dependence in for robotic platitudes and 
pep-rally cheer. They're the ones with the gun to their head, the ones who stick and 
Hang. It remains to be determined whether Joelle van Dyne, whose first appearance in a 
James 0. Incandenza project occurred in this very Low-Temperature Civics , is one of 
these people who've come into AA/NA shattered enough to stick, but she's starting to 
I.D. more and more with the Commitment speakers she hears who did come in 
shattered enough to know it's get straight or die. A click and a half straight downhill 
from E.T.A., Joelle is hitting the Reality Is For People That Can't Handle Drugs Group, a 
meeting of the NA-splinter Cocaine Anonymous , 291 mostly because the meeting's in the 
St. Elizabeth's Hospital Grand Rounds Auditorium, just a couple floors down from where 
Don Gately, whom she just got done visiting and mopping the massive unconscious fore¬ 
head of, is lying in the Trauma Wing in a truly bad way. CA meetings have a long 
preamble and endless little Xeroxed formalities they read aloud at the start, is one 
reason Joelle avoids CA, but the opening stuff is done by the time she gets down and 
comes in and gets some burnt urn-bottom coffee and finds an available seat. The only 
empty seats are in the meeting's back row — 'Denial Aisle,' the back rows are usually 
called — and Joelle is surrounded by catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their 
legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they're wearing every¬ 
thing they own. Plus there's the row of standing men — there's a certain hard-faced 
type of male in Boston fellowships who refuses ever to sit for meetings — standing 
behind the back row, legs set wide and arms crossed and talking to each other out the 
sides of their mouths, and she can tell the standing men are looking at her bare knees 
over her shoulder, making little comments about the knees and the veil. She thinks with 
fearful sentiment 292 of Don Gately, a tube down his throat, torn by fever and guilt and 
shoulder-pain, offered Demerol by well-meaning but clueless M.D.s, in and out of 



delirium, torn, convinced that certain men with hats wished him ill, looking at his room's 
semi-private ceiling like it would eat him if he dropped his guard. The big blackboard up 
on the stage says the Reality Is For People That Can't Handle Drugs Group welcomes 
tonight's Commitment speakers, the Freeway Access Group from Mattapan, which is 
deep in the colored part of Boston where Cocaine Anonymous tends to be most heavily 
concentrated. The speaker just starting in at the podium when Joelle sits down is a tall 
yellowish colored man with a weightlifter's build and frightening eyes, sloe and a kind of 
tannin-brown. He's been in CA seven months, he says. He eschews the normal CA 
drugologue's macho war-stories and gets right to his Bottom, his jumping-off place. 
Joelle can tell he's trying to tell the truth and not just posturing and performing the way 
so many CAs seem like they do. His story's full of colored idioms and those annoying 
little colored hand-motions and gestures, but to Joelle it doesn't seem like she cares that 
much anymore. She can Identify. The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious 
attraction at meetings, no matter what the color or fellowship. Even Denial Aisle and the 
standing men are absorbed by the colored man's story. The colored man says his thing is 
he'd had a wife and a little baby daughter at home in Mattapan's Perry Hill Projects, and 
another baby on the way. He'd managed to hang on to his menial riveter's-assistant job 
at Universal Bleacher right up the street from here in Enfield because his addiction to 
crank cocaine wasn't everyday; he smoked on your binge-type basis, mostly weekends. 
Hellacious, psychopathic, bank-account-emptying binges, though. Like getting strapped 
to a Raytheon missile and you don't stop till that missile stops, Jim. He says his wife had 
got temp work cleaning houses, but when she worked they had to put their little girl in a 
day-care that just about ate her day's pay. So his paycheck was like their total float, and 
his weekend binges with the glass pipe caused them no end of Financial Insecurity, 
which he mispronounces. Which brings him to his last binge, the Bottom, which, 
predictably, occurred on a payday. This check just had to go for groceries and rent. They 
were two months back, and there was not jack-shit in the house in the way of to eat. At 
a smoke-break at Universal Bleacher he'd made sure and bought just one single vial, for 
just a tensky, for a Sunday-night treat after a weekend of abstinence and groceries and 
quality time with his pregnant wife and little daughter. The wife and little daughter were 
to meet him after work right off the bus stop at Brighton Best Savings, right under the 
big clock, to 'help' him deposit the paycheck right then and there. He'd let his wife 
stipulate the meeting at the bank because he knew in a self-disgusted way even then 
that there was this hazard of paycheck-type incidents from binges he'd pulled in the 
past, and their Financial Insecurity was now whatever word's past the word deep shit, 
and he knew goddamn well he could not afford to fuck up this time. 

He says that's how he used to think of it to himself: fucking up. 

He didn't even make it to the bus after clocking out, he said. Two other Holmeses 293 in 
Riveting had three vials each, which vials they had, like, brandished at him, and he'd 
kicked in his one vial because two-and-a-third vials v. one thin-ass Sunday-night vial was 
only a fucking fool way out of touch with the whole seize-the-opportunity concept could 
pass that shit up. In short it was the familiar insanity of money in the pocket and no 
defense against the urge, and the thought of his woman holding his little girl in her little 
knit cap and mittens standing under the big clock in cold March dusk didn't so much get 



pushed aside as somehow shrink to a tiny locket-size picture in the center of a part of 
him he and the Holmeses had set out busily to kill, with the pipe. 

He says he never made the bus. They passed a bottle of rye around the old Ford 
Mystique one of the Holmeses profiled, and fired up, right in the car, and after he once 
fired up with $ in his pocket the fat woman with the little helmet with horns on it done 
already like fucking sang, Jim. 294 

The man's hands grip the sides of the podium and he rests his weight on his elbow- 
locked arms in a way that conveys both abjection and pluck. He invites the CAs to let's 
just draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the night's scene, which after the check¬ 
cashing stop got hazy with missile-exhaust anyhow; but so he finally did get home to 
Mattapan the next morning, Saturday morning, sick and green-yellow and on that mean 
post-crank slide, dying for more and willing to kill for more and yet so mortified and 
ashamed of having done fucked up (again) that just going up the elevator to their 
apartment was maybe the bravest thing he'd ever done, up to that point, he felt. 

It was like 0600 in the A.M. and they weren't there. There was nobody home, and in 
the sort of way where the place's emptiness pulsed and breathed. An envelope was slid 
under the door from the B.H.A., 295 not the salmon color of an Eviction Notice but a 
green Last Warning re: rent. And he went into the kitchen and opened up the fridge, 
hating himself for hoping there was a beer. In the fridge was a jar of grape jelly near- 
empty and a half a can of biscuit mix, and that, plus a sour empty-fridge odor, was all, 
Jim. A little plastic jar of labelless Food-Bank peanut butter so empty its insides had 
knife-scrapes on the sides and a little clotted box of salt was all there was in the whole 
rest of the kitchen. 

But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he 
said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic 
rind of the peanut butter's safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket's tall pile. The 
little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of 
his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could see they must 
have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries and 
rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose¬ 
faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of 
biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but still 
seeing his little girl's face. They'd ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed 
down with tapwater and a grimace. 

Their apartment was six floors up in Perry Hill's Bldg. 5. The window didn't open but 
could be broke through with a running start. 

He didn't kill himself, though, he says. He just got up and walked out. He didn't leave 
his wife a note. Not nothing. He went and walked the whole four clicks to Shattuck 
Shelter in Jamaica Plain. He felt like for sure they'd of been better off without him, he 
said. But he said he didn't know why but he didn't kill himself. But he didn't. He figures 
there was some God-involvement, sitting there on the floor. He just decided to go to 
Shattuck and Surrender and get straight and never ever have his little girl's grimacing 
face in his hung-over head ever again, James. 

And Shattuck Shelter — by coincidence — that usually had a waiting list every March 



until it got warm, they'd just kicked out some sorry-ass specimen for defecating in the 
shower, and they took him, the speaker. He asked for a CA Meeting right away. And a 
Shattuck Staff guy called somebody Afro-American with a lot of clean recovered time, 
and the speaker got taken to his first CA Meeting. That was 224 days ago tonight. That 
night, when the colored CA Crocodile dropped him off back at the Shattuck — after he'd 
wept in front of other colored men at his first meeting and told men he didn't know 
from shit about the big clock and glass pipe and paycheck and the biscuits and his little 
girl's face — and after he come back to the Shattuck and got buzzed through and the 
buzzer sounded for supper, it turned out — by coincidence — that the Saturday-night 
Shattuck supper was coffee and peanut butter sandwiches. It was the end of the week 
and the Shelter's donated food had run out, they only had PB on cheap-ass white bread 
and Sunny Square instant coffee, the cheap shit that doesn't even quite dissolve all the 
way. 

He's got your autodidactic orator's way with emotional dramatic pauses that don't 
seem affected. Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her 
fingernail and chooses consciously to believe it isn't affected, the story's emotive drama. 
Her eyes feel sandy from forgetting to blink. This always happens when you don't expect 
it, when it's a meeting you have to drag yourself to and are all but sure will suck. The 
speaker's face has lost its color, shape, everything distinctive. Something has taken the 
tight ratchet in Joelle's belly and turned it three turns to the good. It's the first time 
she's felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing. No matter if 
Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she can't show him the face. It's 
the first time in a long time — tonight, 11/14—Joelle's even considered possibly 
showing somebody the face. 

After the pause the speaker says all the other sorry motherfuckers in the Shattuck 
Shelter in there started in to bitching about what was this shit, peanut butter 
sandwiches for fucking supper. The speaker says how whatever he silently thanked for 
just that particular sandwich he held and chewed, washing it down with gritty Sunny 
Square coffee, that thing became his Higher Power. He's now seven-plus months clean. 
Universal Bleacher let him go, but he's got steady work at Logan, pushing a third-shift 
mop, and a Holmes on his crew's also in the Program — by coincidence. His pregnant 
wife, it turned out, had gone to a Unwed Mothers Shelter with Shantel, that night. She 
was still in there. D.S.S. still wouldn't let him appeal his wife's Restraining Order and see 
Shantel, but he got to talk to his little girl on the phone just last month. And he's now 
straight, from Giving Up and joining the Freeway Access Group and getting Active and 
taking the voluntary suggestions of the Fellowship of Cocaine Anonymous. His wife was 
due to have her baby around Xmas. He said he didn't know what was going to happen to 
him or his family. But he says he has received certain promises from his new family — 
the Freeway Access Group of Cocaine Anonymous — and so he had certain hope-type 
emotions about the future, inside. He didn't so much conclude or make obligatory 
reference to Gratitude or any of that usual shit as grip the lectern and shrug and say 
he'd started feeling just last month that the choice he made on the kitchen floor was the 
right choice, personally speaking. 

Entertainment-wise, things take a rapid turn for the splattery once the tough girl 



Blood Sister seemed to have saved is found bluely dead in her novitiate's cot, her habit's 
interior pockets stuffed with all kinds of substances and paraphernalia and her arm a 
veritable forest of syringes. Tight shot of B.S., face working purply, staring down at the 
ex-ex-punker. Suspecting foul play instead of spiritual recidivism. Blood Sister, 
disregarding first the Other-Cheek pieties and then the impassioned pleas and then the 
direct orders of the Vice-Mother Superior — who happens now to be the tough nun 
who'd saved Blood Sister, way back — begins reverting to her former Toronto-mean- 
street pre-salvation tough-biker-chick ways: de-mufflering her Harley Hawg, hauling an 
age-faded stud-covered leather bike-jacket out of storage and squeezing it over her 
pectoral-swollen habit, unbandaging her most lurid tattoos, shaking down former altar 
boys for information, flipping off motorists who get in her bike's way, meeting old 
street-contacts in dim saloons and tossing back jiggers with even the most cirrhotic of 
them, beating, bludgeoning, akido-ing, disarming thugs of power tools, avenging the 
desalvation and demapping of her young charge, determined to prove that the girl's 
death was no accident or backslide, that Blood Sister had not failed with the soul she'd 
chosen to save to discharge her own soul's debt to the tough old Vice-Mother Superior 
who'd saved her. Blood Sister, so far back. Several thuggish stuntmen and countless 
liters of potassium thiocyanate 296 later, the truth does out: the novitiate girl had been 
murdered by the Mother Superior, the order's top and toughest nun. This M.S. is the 
nun who'd saved the Vice-M.S. who'd saved Blood Sister, meaning, ironically, that the 
evidence Blood Sister needs to prove that her salvation-debt really was discharged is 
also evidence inimical to the legal interests of the tough nun to whom Blood Sister's 
own saviour is obligated, so Blood Sister gets increasingly tortured and ill-tempered as 
evidence of the Mother Superior's guilt accretes. In one scene she says fuck. In another 
she swings a censer like a mace and brains an old verger who's one of the Mother 
Superior's stooges, knocking his toothless head clean off. Then, in Act III, a veritable orgy 
of retribution follows the full emergence of the sordid truth: it seems that the tough old 
Vice-Mother Superior, viz. the nun who'd saved Blood Sister, had in fact not been saved, 
truly, after all — had in fact, during 20+ years of exemplary novena-saying and wafer¬ 
baking, been suffering a kind of hidden degenerative recidivist soul-rot, and had 
resumed, the Vice-M.S., at about the time Blood Sister had donned the habit of full 
nunhood, had not only resumed Substance-dependence but had started actually dealing 
in serious weights of whatever at the time was most profitable (which after 20+ years 
had changed from Marseillese heroin to Colombian freebaseable-grade Bing Crosby) to 
support her own hidden habit, covertly operating a high-volume retail operation out of 
the order's Community Outreach Rescue Mission's little-used confessionals. This nun's 
superior, the top tough Mother Superior nun, stumbling onto the drug-operation after 
the now-demapped verger informed her that a suspicious number of limousines were 
discharging gold-chained and not very penitent-looking persons into the order's 
Community Outreach Rescue Mission, and disastrously unable to summon the pious 
humility to accept the fact that she'd failed, it seemed, at truly and forever saving the 
ex-dealer whose salvation the Mother Superior required to discharge the debt to the 
now-retired octogenarian nun who'd saved her — this Mother Superior herself is the 
one who murdered Blood Sister's ex-punk novitiate, to silence the girl. What emerges is 



that Blood Sister's addicted punk-girl's Substance-copping venue, when she was Out 
There pre-salvation, had been nothing other than the Vice-Mother Superior's infamous 
Community Outreach Rescue Mission. In other words, the nun who'd saved Blood Sister 
but had herself been secretly unsaved had been the tough girl's Bing-dealer, is why the 
tough non-Catholic girl'd been so mysteriously adept at the Confiteor. The order's 
Mother Superior had figured that it was only a matter of time before the girl's 
conversion and salvation reached the sort of spiritual pitch where her guarded silence 
broke and she told Blood Sister the seamy truth about the nun she (Blood Sister) 
thought had saved her (Blood Sister). So she (the Mother Superior) had eliminated the 
girl's map — ostensibly, she (the Mother Superior) told her lieutenant, the Vice-Mother 
Superior, to save her (the Vice-Mother Superior) from exposure and excommunication 
and maybe worse, if the girl weren't silenced. 297 

This narratively prolix and tangled stuff all gets explicated at near-Kabuki volume 
during an appalling free-for-all in the office of the Mother Superior who hadn't saved 
the Vice-M.S. who'd saved Blood Sister, with the two senior nuns — who'd been tough 
and unsaved back in the Ontarian days when men were men and so were drug-addicted 
bike-chicks — teaming up and kicking Blood Sister's ass, the fight-scene a blur of swirling 
habitements and serious martial arts against the spot-lit backdrop of the wall's huge 
decorative mahogany crucifix, with Blood Sister giving a good account of herself but still 
getting her wimple beat in and finally, after several whirling kicks to the forehead, 
starting to bid adieu to her corporeal map and commend herself to the arms of God; 
until the unsaved recidivist Vice-Mother Superior nun who'd saved Blood Sister, wiping 
blood from her eyes after a head-butt and seeing the Mother Superior about to 
decapitate Blood Sister with the souvenir Champlain-era tomahawk the Huron nun 
who'd been saved by the original founder of the Toronto tough-girl-saving order had 
used to decapitate Jesuit missionaries before she (the tough Huron nun) had been 
saved, seeing the tomahawk raised with both arms before the normally pious-eyed old 
Mother Superior's face — a face now rendered indescribable in aspect by the absence of 
humility and the passion for truth-silencing that add up to pure and radical evil — seeing 
now the upraised hatchet and demonized face of the M.S., the unsaved Vice-nun has a 
moment of epiphanic anti-recidivist spiritual clarity, and averts Blood Sister's demapping 
by leaping across the office and cold-cocking the Mother Superior with a large 
decorative mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn't even be 
named, the object's symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe. 
Now Blood Sister has the Champlain-era hatchet, and the unsaved nun who'd saved her 
has an unnamed object whose mahogany's no match for a hatchet, and they stand 
facing each other over the prone Mother Superior's puddle of skirts, chests heaving, and 
the Vice-M.S. has a writhing expression under her askew wimple like Go ahead, make 
the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought had saved you but 
ultimately couldn't even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian circuit or 
whatever. They stare at each other for countless frames, the office wall behind them 
cruciformly pale where the unnamed object'd hung. Then Blood Sister shrugs in 
resignation and drops the tomahawk, and turns and with an ironic little obeisance walks 
out the Mother Superior's office door and through the little sacristy and over the altar 



and down the little convent nave (bike boots echoing on the tile, emphasizing the 
silence) and out the big doors whose tympanum overhead is carved with a sword and a 
ploughshare and a syringe and a soup-ladle and the motto CONTRARIA SUNT 
COMPLEMENTA , the heaviness of which makes Hal cringe so severely it's Boone who has 
to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for. 298 On-screen, we're still following the tough 
nun (or ex-nun). The fact that the hatchet she resignedly dropped fetched the prone 
Mother Superior a pretty healthy knock is presented as clearly accidental... because she 
(Blood Sister) is still walking away from the convent, moving emphatically and in a 
gradually deepening focus. Limping toughly eastward into the twittering Toronto dawn. 
The cartridge's closing sequence shows her astride her Hawg on Toronto's meanest 
street. About to lapse? Backslide back into her tough pre-saved ways? It's unclear in a 
way that's supposed to be rich: her expression is agnostic at best, but the huge sign of a 
discount Harley-muffler outlet juts just at the horizon she's roaring toward. The closing 
credits are the odd lime-green of bugs on a windshield. 

It's hard to tell whether Boone and Bash's applause is sarcastic. There's that post¬ 
entertainment flurry of changed positions and stretched limbs and critical sallies. Out of 
nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill. Possalthwaite says he and the Id-man brought 
Blott in to speak to Hal about something disturbing they encountered during their 
disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels that P.M. Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang 
on, flipping through cartridge cases to see whether Low-Temperature Civics is up here. 
All the cases are clearly labelled. 


The apparition receded, the red of its coat shrinking against the swinging view of 
Prospect St. and pavement and dumpsters and looming storefronts, Ruth van Cleve on 
its lurid tail and receding also, screaming bits of urban argot that became less faint than 
swallowed. Kate Gompert held her hurt head and heard it roar. Ruth van Cleve's pursuit 
was slowed by her arms, which were waving around as she screamed; and the 
apparition was swinging their purses to clear a path on the sidewalk before it. Kate 
Gompert could see pedestrians leaping out into the street way up ahead to avoid 
getting clocked. The whole visual scene seemed tinged in violet. 

A voice under a storefront awning right nearby somewhere said: 'Seen it!' 

Kate Gompert leaned over again and held the part of her head that surrounded her 
eye. The eye was palpably swelling shut, and her whole vision was queerly violet. A 
sound in her head like a drawbridge being drawn up, implacable trundle and squeaks. 
Hot watery spit was flooding her mouth, and she kept swallowing against nausea. 

'Seen it? Bet your ever-living goddamn life I seen it!' A kind of gargoyle seemed to 
detach itself from a storefront hardware display and moved in, its motions oddly jerky, 
as in a film missing frames. 'Seen the whole thing!' it said, then repeated it. 'I'm a 
witness!' it said. 

Kate Gompert put her other arm out against the lightpost and hauled herself mostly 
upright, looking at it. 

'Witnessed the whole godfdamn thing,' it said. In the eye that wasn't swelling shut the 
thing resolved violetly into a bearded man in an army coat and a sleeveless army coat 



over that coat, spittle in his beard. One eye had a system of exploded arteries in it. He 
shook like an old machine. There was a smell involved. The old man got right up close, 
looming in, so that pedestrians had to curve out around both of them together. Kate 
Gompert could feel her pulse in her eye. 

'Witness! Eyewitness! The whole thing!' But he was looking someplace else, like more 
around at people passing. 'Seen it? I'm him!' Not clear who he was shouting at. It wasn't 
her, and the passersby were paying that studious, urban kind of no-attention as they 
broke and melted around them at the lightpost and then reformed. Kate Gompert had 
the idea that supporting herself against the lightpost would keep her from throwing up. 
Concussion is really another word for a bruised brain. She tried not to think about it, 
that the impact had maybe sent one part of her brain slamming against her skull, and 
now that part was purply swelling, mashed up against the inside of her skull. The 
lightpost she held herself up with was what had hit her. 'Fellow? I'm your fellow. 
Witness? Saw it all!' And the old fellow was holding a trembling palm up just under Kate 
Gompert's face, as if he wanted it thrown up into. The palm was violet, with splotches of 
some sort of possible fungal decay, and with dark branching lines where the pink palm¬ 
lines of people who don't live in dumpsters usually are, and Kate Gompert studied the 
palm abstractly, and the weather-bleached GIGABUCKS 299 ticket on the pavement below 
it. The ticket seemed to recede into a violet mist and then move back up. Pedestrians 
barely glanced at them and then looked studiously elsewhere: a drunk-looking pale girl 
and a street bum showing her something in his hand. 'Witnessed the whole thing being 
committed,' the man remarked to a passerby with a cellular on his belt. Kate Gompert 
couldn't summon the juice to tell him to go screw. That's the way it was said down here 
in the real city. Go Screw, with a deft little thumb-gesture. She couldn't even say Go 
Away, though the smell involved in the man made it worse, the nausea. It seemed 
terribly important not to vomit. She could feel her pulse in the eye the pole had hit. As if 
the strain of vomiting could aggravate the spongy purpling of the part of her brain the 
pole had bruised. The thought made her want to vomit in this horrid palm that wouldn't 
stay still. She tried to reason. If the man had witnessed the whole thing then how could 
he think she'd have change to put in his hand. Ruth van Cleve had been listing some of 
her baby's jailed father's wittier aliases when Kate Gompert had felt a hand strike her 
back and close around the strap of her purse. Ruth van Cleve had cried out as the 
apparition of just about the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen 
crashed forward between them, knocking them apart. Ruth van Cleve's vinyl purse's 
strap gave right away, but Kate Gompert's thin but densely macrame'd strap held 
around her shoulder and she was pulled wrenchingly forward by the womanly ap¬ 
parition's momentum as it tried to sprint up Prospect St., and the red hag-like figure was 
yanked wrenchingly back as the quality Filene's all-cotton French-braidedly macrame'd 
purse-strap held, and Kate Gompert had got a whiff of something danker than the 
dankest municipal sewage and a glimpse of what looked like a five-day facial growth on 
the hag's face as street-tough Ruth van Cleve got a grip on her/his/its red leather coat, 
proclaiming the thief a son of a mafun ho. Kate Gompert was staggering forward, trying 
to get her arm out of the strap's loop. They all three moved forward together this way. 
The apparition spun itself violently around, trying to shake off Ruth van Cleve, and 



her/its spin with her purse took the strap-attached Kate Gompert (who didn't weigh 
very much) out around in a wide circle (she'd had a flashback of reminiscence back to 
Crack-the-Whip at the Wellesley Hills Skating Club's rink's 'Wee Blades' Toddler Skating 
Hour, as a child), gaining speed; and then a rust-pocked curbside lightpost rotated 
toward her, also gaining speed, and the sound was somewhere between a bonk and a 
clang , and the sky and the sidewalk switched places, and a violet sun exploded outward, 
and the whole street turned violet and swung like a clanging bell; and then she was 
alone and purseless and watching the two recede, both seeming to be shrieking for 
help. 


14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


A disadvantage of your nasally ingested cocaine being that at a certain point 
somewhere past the euphoric crest — if you haven't got the sense left to stop and just 
ride the crest, and instead keep going, nasally — it takes you into regions of almost 
interstellar cold and nasal numbness. Randy Lenz's sinuses were frozen against his skull, 
numb and hung with crystal frost. His legs felt like they ended at the knees. He was 
trailing two very small-sized Chinese women as they lugged enormous paper shopping 
bags east on Bishop Allen Dr. under Central. His heart sounded like a shoe in the Ennet 
House basement's dryer. His heart was beating that loud. The Chinese women scuttled 
at an amazing rate, given their size and the bags' size. It was c. 2212:30-40h., smack in 
the middle of the former Interval of Issues-Resolution. The Chinese women didn't walk 
so much as scuttle with a kind of insectile rapidity, and Lenz was heart-pressed to both 
keep up and seem to casually saunter, numb from the knee down and the nostril back. 
They made the turn onto Prospect St. two or a few blocks below Central Square, moving 
in the direction of Inman Square. Lenz followed ten or thirty paces behind, eyes on the 
twine handles of the shopping bags. The Chinese women were about the size of fire 
hydrants and moved like they had more than the normal amount of legs, conversing in 
their anxious and high-pitched monkey-language. Evolution proved your Orientoid 
tongues were closer to your primatal languages than not. At first, on the brick sidewalks 
of the stretch of Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central, Lenz had thought they might 
be following him — he'd been followed a great deal in his time, and like the well-read 
Geoffrey D. he knew only too well thank you that the most fearsome surveillance got 
carried out by unlikely-looking people that followed you by walking in front of you with 



small mirrors in their glasses' temples or elaborate systems of cellular communicators 
for reporting to the Command Center — or else also by helicopters, also, that flew too 
high to see, hovering, the tiny chop of their rotors disguised as your own drumming 
heart. But after he'd had success at successfully shaking the Chinese women twice — 
the second time so successfully he'd had to tear-ass around through alleys and vault 
wooden fences to pick them up again a couple blocks north on Bishop Allen Dr., 
scuttling along, jabbering — he'd settled down in his conviction about who was trailing 
who, here. As in just who had the controlling discretion over the general situation right 
here. The ejection from the House, which the ejection had at first seemed like the kiss of 
a death sentence, had turned out to maybe be just the thing. He'd tried the Straight On 
Narrow and for his pains had been threatened and dismissively sent off; he'd given it his 
best, and for the most part impressively; and he had been sent Away, Alone, and at least 
now could openly hide. R. Lenz lived by his wits out here, deeply disguised, on the 
amonymous streets of N. Cambridge and Somerville, never sleeping, ever moving, hiding 
in bright-lit and public plain sight, the last place They would think to find him. 

Lenz wore fluorescent-yellow snowpants, the slightly shiny coat to a long-tailed tux, a 
sombrero with little wooden balls hanging off the brim, oversize tortoise-shell glasses 
that darkened automatically in response to bright light, and a glossy black mustache 
promoted from the upper lip of a mannequin at Lechmere's in Cambridgeside — the 
ensemble the result of bold snatch-and-sprints all up and down the nighttime Charles, 
when he'd first gone Overground northeast from Enfield several-odd days back. The 
absolute blackness of the mannequin's mustache — very securely attached with 
promoted Krazy Glue and made even glossier by the discharge from a nose Lenz can't 
feel running — gives his pallor an almost ghostly aspect in the sombrero's portable 
shade — another both advantage and disadvantage of nasal cocaine is that eating 
becomes otiose and optional, and one forgets to for extended periods of time, to eat — 
in his gaudy pastiche of disguise he passes easily for one of metro Boston's homeless 
and wandering mad, the walking dead and dying, and is given a wide berth by all 
comers. The trick, he's found, is to not sleep or eat, to stay up and moving at all times, 
alert in all six directions at all times, heading for under the cover of T-station or enclosed 
mall whenever the invisible rotors' cardiac chop betrayed surveillance at altitude. 

He'd got quickly familiarized with Little Lisbon's networks of alleys and transoms and 
back trash-lots, and its (dwindling) population of feral cats and dogs. The area was 
fertile in overhead clocks of banks and churches, dictating movements. He carried his 
Browning X444 Serrated in its shoulder-holster strapped inside his one sock just above 
the spats of the formal footwear he'd taken off the same A Formal Affair, Ltd. sidewalk 
display as the tux's coat. His lighter was in a fluorescent zip-uppable slash pocket; 
quality trashbags were plentiful in dumpsters and Land Barges stopped at lights. The 
James Principles of the Gifford Lectures, its razored-out receptacled heart now quite a 
bit closer to empty than Lenz would be comfortable thinking about directly, he had in 
his hand tucked up under one formal arm. And the Chinese women scuttled 
centipedishly abreast, their mammoth shopping bags held in a right hand and left, 
respective, so the bags were side by side between them. Lenz was closing the gap 
behind them, but gradually and with no little nonchalant stealth, considering it was hard 



to walk stealthily when one couldn't feel one's feet, and when one's eyeglasses dark¬ 
ened automatically whenever one went under a streetlight and then took their time 
lightening up again, after, so that no less than two of Lenz's vital sensory street-senses 
were disorientated; but he still managed both stealth and nonchalance both. He had no 
clue how he really looked. Like many of the itinerant mad of metro Boston, he tended to 
confuse a wide berth with invisibility. The shopping bags looked heavy and impressive, 
their weight making the Chinese women lean in slightly toward each other. Call it 
2214:10h. The Chinese women and then Lenz all passed a gray-faced woman squatting 
back between two dumpsters, her multiple skirts hiked up. Vehicles were packed 
bumper-flush all along the curb, with myriad double parking also. The Chinese women 
passed a man lined up at the curb with a toy bow and arrows, and when the glasses 
undarkened Lenz could see him as well as he passed also — the guy wore a rat-colored 
suit and was shooting a suction-cup arrow at the side of a For Lease building and then 
going up and drawing a miniature chalk circle on the brick around the arrow, and then 
another circle around that circle, and etc., as in a what's the word. The women paid him 
no Orientoid mind. The suit's string tie was also brown in tone, unlike a rat's tail. His 
wall's chalk was more pinkish. One of the women said something high-pitched, like an 
exclamation to the other. Your monkey-languages' exclamatories have an explosive 
ricocheting sound to them. As in a component of boing to every word. A window up 
across the street was producing The Star-Spanned Banner all this time. The man had a 
string tie and fingerless little gloves, and he stepped back from the wall to examine his 
pink circles and almost collided with Lenz, and they both looked at each other and shook 
their heads like Look at this poor son of an urban bitch I'm on the same street with. 

It was universally well known that your basic Orientoid types carried their earthly sum- 
total of personal wealth with them at all times. As in on their person while they scuttled 
around. The Orientoid religion prohibited banks, and Lenz had seen mammoth double¬ 
width twine-handled shopping bags in too many tiny Chinese women's hands not to 
have deducted that the Chinese female species of Oriental used shopping bags to carry 
their personal wealth. He felt the energy required for the snatch-and-sprint increasing 
now with each stride, drawing nonchalantly closer, able now to distinguish different 
patterns in the clear like plastic flags they wrapped their little hair in. The Chinese 
women. His heartrate speedened to a steady warming gallop. He began to feel his feet. 
Adrenaline about what would shortly occur dried his nose and helped his mouth stop 
moving around on his face. The Frightful Hog was not and never numb, and now it 
stirred in the snowpants slightly with excitement of wits and the thrill of the hunt. Far 
from cutting-edge surveillance: the shoe was on the other foot: the unwitting Oriental 
women had no idea who they were dealing with, behind them, no idea he was back 
there surveilling them and closing the nonchalant gap, stumbling only slightly after each 
streetlight's light. He was in total control of this situation. And they did not even know 
there was a situation. Bull's-eye. Lenz straightened the mustache with one finger and 
gave a tiny little Yellow-Brick-Road stutter-skip of pure controlling glee, his adrenaline 
invisible for all to see. 

There were two ways of going, and Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were prepared 
to pursue both these. Less better was the indirect route: surveillance and infiltrating the 



surviving associates of the Entertainment's auteur , its actress and rumored performer, 
relatives — if necessary, taking them and subjecting them to technical interview, leading 
with hope to the original auteur's cartridge of the Entertainment. This had risks and 
exposures and was held abeyant until the directer route — to locate and secure a 
Master copy of the Entertainment on their own — had been exhausted. It was this way 
that thus they were now still here, in the Antitois 1 shop of Cambridge, to — comme on 
dit — be turning all the stones. 


14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


The secret to sprinting in high heels. Poor Tony Krause knew, was to run on one's toes, 
inclined way forward, with so much forward momentum that one stayed well up on her 
toes and the heels never came into play. Evidently the wretched Creature behind him 
knew this trade-secret too. They careered up Prospect, the Creature's clutching hand 
just mm. away from the trailing boa. Poor Tony held the two purses together tucked 
away against his side like a football in U.S. football. Pedestrians moved artfully aside, 
long-practiced. Poor Tony saw the pedestrians' faces very clearly as his odor preceded 
him like a shock-wave. A man in a car coat made a smell-face and did a kind of artful 
veronica to let the two of them career past. Poor Tony's breath came in great ragged 
stitchy gasps. He had not banked on victim-pursuit. He felt the Creature's hand grope for 
purchase on the remains of his boa. The Donegal cap flew off and was not mourned. The 
Thing's own breathing was also ragged, but the obscenities she hurled still came from 
the diaphragm, with conviction and vigor. The other Thing had impacted a pole with a 
meaty sound Tony had shuddered to hear. His own father had struck himself about the 
head and shoulders as he grieved for his symbolically dead son. The moment after the 
impact and the strap gave way, Tony was up on his toes and in full flight, not banking on 
pursuit from the other one, this black Creature screaming and just off his tail. For the 
first couple blocks the Creature had shouted for Help and to Stop The Bitch , and Poor 
Tony, then with a decent lead, had countered by also yelling Help! and For God's Sake 
Stop Her, flummoxing any would-be citizens. An ancient trade-device among Harvard 
Square crews. But now the black Creature had closed to within mm., and now it had real 
hold of the boa as they careered breathing at full speed on their toes, and Krause 
unlooped the thing from his neck with a flourish and sacrificed the boa to the Thing, but 
the loathsome Creature's hand came right back, clutching at the air just over his leather 



collar, its ragged breath in his ear, cursing him. Poor Tony grieved in mid-stride at the 
thought that the Thing had doubtless just tossed the boa carelessly aside into the street 
or gutter. Their shoes' toes formed complex and variable rhythms on the pavement; 
sometimes their footfalls were in sync, then they were not. The Thing stayed agonizingly 
just behind. Bold-print signs for FRESH-KILLED CHICKEN and COMPLETE DESTRUCTION 
flashed past; Antitoi Entertainment was just over two long north-south blocks distant. 
Krause and pursuer both jay-ran through a gridlocked intersection. Poor Tony shouted 
Help! and Please! The hand and hissed breath just behind him was like one of those 
simply horrid dreams where something unimaginable is chasing you for km. after km. 
and just before its talons close on the back of your collar you wake up sitting bolt 
upright; except this horrid Creature's-clutching-hand-just-behind-him scenario went on 
and on, storefront and curb and leaping pedestrians all melting together at the 
periphery due right. Antitoi Ent.'s discreet back door was accessible by a parking alley 
that cut west off Prospect just before Broadway and went west to intersect a smaller 
and dumpster-lined north-south alley, one of whose dumpsters (in which Poor Tony had 
occasionally slept, when out late and short of train-fare) was within underhand-toss 
distance of the Canadian brothers' rear exit. Poor Tony, purses under arm and the other 
hand clamped tight to the wig, calculated that if he could get a reasonable lead on the 
Creature by the time they hit the smaller alley the dumpsters would keep It from seeing 
just which hopefully unlocked rear door P.T. sought basic human kindly refuge behind. 
He feinted around a bodega's sidewalk fruit display and shot a quick look back, hoping 
the Creature would crash itself ass-over-teakettle into the stacked fruit. It did not. It was 
still right there, breathing. Its stutter-step around two cardboard tiers of Cape 
cranberries was discouragingly deft. This Thing had all too clearly chased persons 
before. Its breath had a ragged implacability about it. It was all too clearly in this for the 
long haul. It was no longer shouting Stop or gutterish obscenities. Poor Tony's breaths 
felt flamish. It sounded as if he were weeping, almost. He tried to shout Help! and could 
not; he hadn't the breath to spare; black specks floated upward through his vision; only 
certain of the streetlamps worked; his heartbeat was zuckungzuckungzuckung. Poor 
Tony hurdled a queerly placed cardboard display for something wheelchaired and heard 
the Creature vault it also and land lightly on its toes. Its uppers were not straps and 
could not dig like the fine Aigners; Tony felt blood on his feet. The entrance to the 
parking alley west was between a Tax Preparer's and something else; it was right around 
here; Krause squinted; the black specks were tiny rings with opaque centers and floated 
upward through his sight like balloons, lazily; Poor Tony was post-seizure, infirm, not to 
mention Withdrawn; his breath came in stitches and half-sobs; he could barely stay on 
his toes; he had not consumed food since before the library's men's room stall, which 
was how many days; he scanned the blurred storefronts ripping past; an elderly person 
went down with a noise as the Creature stiff-armed him; somewhere a rape-whistle 
blew; the Tax Preparer's had the odd storefront announcement ON PARLE LE 
PORTUGAIS ICI. Its hand's finger knocked the rim of Tony's leather collar with each 
footfall until it moved up and Poor Tony could feel its fingers in the hair of the chignon 
he held clamped to his head with a hand. Poor Tony's father used to come home to 412 
Mount Auburn Street Watertown at the completion of a long day of cesareans and sit in 



a chair in the darkening kitchen, scratching at his head where his mask's green strings 
had dug into the head. Its doubtlessly luridly long-nailed fingers were twining for 
purchase in his wig's hair when they hit the Preparer's and Tony cut a sharp right, 
breaking a heel on the pivot but gaining several steps toward a lead as the Creature's 
momentum carried it past the alley's recessed mouth. Krause whimpered raggedly and 
flew west, up on his bloody toes, hearing his breath off both alley walls, negotiating 
broken glass and the homeless supine, hearing it back behind him several steps crying a 
tight-echoed Stop Motherfucking Stop!, with a supine person Krause vaulted lifting a 
decayed head from the alley floor to counter with: Go. 

Having traced — through the strenuous technical interview of the sartorially eccentric 
cranio-facial-pain-specialist, whom they had traced through the regrettably fatal 
technical interview of the young burglar 300 whose electrical-surge-tolerance proved 
considerably lower than that of his room's computer's machinery — having traced their 
best chances at a copy to the hapless Antitois' establishment, it had taken the A.F.R. 
then several days to find it there, the real Entertainment. 

A.F.R.'s U.S.A. cell's leader, Fortier, the son of a Glen Almond glass-blower, had 
allowed none of the mirrors to be broken or dismantled. In all other respects, the search 
had been methodical and thorough. It was a neat search and also orderly, with time 
taken. Because the viewer of the shop was visually dysfunctional, a consumer TP had 
been purchased and set up for volunteer viewing in the room of storage off the shop's 
back room. Each cartridge of the shop's exhaustive shelves was sampled by a volunteer, 
then discarded in one of the huge metal coffre d'amas in the alley outside the shop's 
rear door. A detail had been assigned to roll the extinguished Antitoi brothers in 
construction-plastic and place them in a room of storage off the back room. This was for 
hygienic purposes. A detail also had procured an oilskin windowshade for the front 
door's glass, also some printed signs which read CLOSED, ROPAS, and RELACHE. No 
person had knocked at the door after the first hours, thus. 

Quickly, on the first day, in a liquor box which was damp and smelled, they had found 
an example of the rival F.L.Q.'s tactical street-display cartridges, with its crudely 
stamped smiling face and the 'IL NE FAUT PLUS QU'ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR' 
embossed upon it. And young Tassigny, with characteristic valor, volunteered to be 
rolled into the room of storage and strapped in, in order to verify this, and Fortier 
allowed this. All had drunk the gesture of a toast to Tassigny and promised to look after 
his aged father and fur-traps, and M. Fortier had embraced the young volunteer and 
kissed both his face's cheeks as he was rolled in and fitted by M. BroullTme with EEG 
wires and strapped in before the viewer placed in the room of storage. 

Then the cartridge of the street-display turned out to be blank, void. Then another 
from this box, also wet: also blank. Two blanks. Done. D'accord. Fortier, philosophical, 
counselled against disappointment or damage from a frustration — he and Marathe had 
counselled all along that the F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment and the wheelchaired 
man were probably the hoax, instilling of terror only. The fact of the displays which 
featured wheelchairs, a smack to the testicles of A.F.R. — this was ignored. A.F.R. 
wanted only to repossess this copy of the Entertainment. As well, chiefly, now to 
determine: could this copy of DuPlessis itself be copied? This was the real objective: a 



Master cartridge. 301 Unlike the F.L.Q., les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents had no interest 
in blackmail or cartographic extortings for the Convexity's return. Not in re- 
Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N. or even its charter's dissolution. The A.F.R. were interested 
only in dealing the sort of testicular frappe to the underbelly of U.S.A. self-interests that 
would render Canada itself unwilling to face the U.S.A. retaliation for this — if A.F.R. 
could secure, copy, and disseminate the Entertainment, Quebec would be not so much 
allowed as required by Ottawa to secede, to face on its own the wrath of a neighbor 
struck down by its own inability to say 'Non' to fatal pleasures. 302 

Fortier bid the A.F.R. methodically to continue the search. Younger volunteers were 
rolled into the room of storage on a rotating basis to sample each set of cartridges. 
Aside from some bickering over the Portuguese pornography, the rotation proceeded 
with valor and care. The plastic-wrapped cadavers began to swell, but the plastic 
maintained hygienic conditions adequately for viewing samples of the many cartridges 
in the room of storage. The search and inventory proceeded in a painstaking and slow 
fashion. 

M. Fortier was required to absent himself for a period, in the search's middle, to help 
facilitate Southwest ops, the infiltration of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly 
(according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy. There 
was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an 
athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt this person may have borne responsibility for the 
razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A. The Americans' field-operative, jutting 
with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a bad odor. 

The nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with the solicitude that the weak 
substitute for respect. As if he were a sickly child, Fortier. Buses knelt, smooth ramps 
flanked steps, attendants pushed him aboard flights in full solicitous view of those 
standing upon legs. Fortier owned attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins whose 
interior circuitry was responsive to large-bundle neural stimuli from his stumps, which 
with metal crutches whose bracelets locked to his wrists allowed a sort of swirling 
parody of perambulation. But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and 
never for public transit. Fie preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional 
'sensitivity' to his 'right' of the 'equal access'; it honed the edge of his senses of purpose. 
Like all of them, Fortier was willing to sacrifice. 



14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily 
into obsessive worry, in sobriety. A few days before the debacle in which Don Gately got 
hurt, Joelle had begun to worry obsessively about her teeth. Smoking 'base cocaine eats 
teeth, corrodes teeth, attacks the enamel directly. Chandler Foss had explained all this 
to her at supper, showing her his corroded stumps. In her Latin cloth purse now she 
carried a traveller's brush and expensive toothpaste with alleged enamel-revitalizers 
and anti-corrosives. Several of the Ennet House residents who'd hit bottom with the 
glass pipe had no teeth or blackened and disintegrating teeth; the sight of Wade 
McDade's or Chandler Foss's teeth gave Joelle the fantods like nothing at meetings 
could. The toothpaste was only recently available over the counter and was a whole 
level of power and expense above standard smoker's polish. 

As she lies on her side beside Kate Gompert's empty bunk, her veil's selvage tucked 
secure between pillow and jaw, and Charlotte Treat also asleep across the lit room, 
Joelle dreams that Don Gately, unhurt and mid-South-accented, is ministering to her 
teeth. He is bibbed in dental white, humming softly to himself, his big hands deft as he 
plucks instruments from the gleaming chair-side tray. Her chair is dental and canted 
back, yielding her face up to him, her legs shut tight and stretching up and out before 
her. Dr. Don's eyes are abstractly kind, concerned for her teeth; and his thick fingers, as 
he inserts things to hold her open, are gloveless and taste warm and clean. Even the 
light seems sterilely clean. There is no assistant; the dentist is solo, leaning in above her, 
humming absent chords as he probes. His head is massive and vaguely square. In the 
dream she is concerned for her teeth and feels Gately shares her concern. She feels 
good that he makes no chitchat and probably doesn't know her name. There's very little 
eye-contact. He is completely intent on her teeth. He is there to help if possible, is his 
whole demeanor's message. His bib hangs by a necklace of tiny steel balls and could not 
be whiter, his head haloed with a strap and a polished metal disk attached to the strap 
just above his eyes, a tiny mirror of stainless steel, clean as the instruments' tray; and 
the dream's yielding and trustful quality of calm is undercut only by the view of her face 
in the halo's mirror, the disk like a third eye in Gately's broad clean forehead: because 
she can see her face, convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring, 
her face all bug-eyes and sunken cheeks, lampblack-smudges beneath the pop-eyes; and 
as the dentist's warm thick fingers gently draw her lips back she looks up into his head's 
mirror at long rows of all canine teeth, tapered and sharp, with then more rows of 
canines behind them, in reserve. The countless rows of the teeth are all sharp and 
strong and unblackened but tinged at the tips with an odd kind of red, as of old blood, 
the teeth of a creature that carelessly tears at meat. These are teeth that have been up 



to things she hasn't known about, she tries to say around the fingers. The dentist hums, 
probing. In the dream Joelle looks up into Don Gately's forehead's dental mirror's disk 
and is seized with a fear of her teeth, a terror, and as her spread mouth spreads farther 
to cry out in fear all she can see in the little round mirror are endless red-stained rows of 
teeth leading back and away down a pitch-black pipe, and the image of all these rows of 
teeth in the disk blots out the big dentist's good face as he probes with a hook and says 
he assures her that these can be saved. 

Then, by the time Fortier was able to return to the dismantled shop, they had located 
a third cartridge emblazed with the embossed smile and letters disclaiming need of 
happy pursuit, and, after some regretful losses, they had secured and verified it, the 
samizdat cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis. 

Fortier was told the story. The cell's young Desjardins had been taking his turn in the 
viewing rotation, seated with young Tassigny in the room of storage during the hours of 
early morning, sampling the dregs of unshelved entertainments found in kitchen-can 
waste bags in the same closet the Antitois' cadavers were swelling within. Desjardins 
had just moments before complained of the wasted time of cartridges scheduled for the 
coffre d'amas. 

Tassigny, who had been in the room of storage with Desjardins, then was saved by the 
need to leave this room to change the bag of his partial colostomy. But, Marathe 
reported, they had lost Desjardins, and the older and valued Joubet also, who rolled 
against orders into the room of storage to see why Desjardins had not been sending out 
the tapes for more tapes to sample. Both were lost. They had not lost more only 
because someone had thought to wake up BroullTme, whom Fortier had briefed with 
care on procedures for if the actual Entertainment was found by this viewing. But two 
were lost — Joubet the red-bearded workhorse, who loved to pop wheelies, and young 
Desjardins, so filled with the idealism and so young as to be still feeling the phantom 
pains in his stumps. Remy Marathe reported that the two had been made comfortable 
since their loss, allowed to remain in the locked room of storage and view the 
Entertainment again and again, silent behind the door except when the watch-detail 
reported the hearing of cries of impatience at the player's rewinder, to rewind. Marathe 
reported they had declined to come out for water or food, or Joubet — who was 
diabetique — for his insulin. M. BroullTme estimated that it would be a matter of hours 
now for Joubet, perhaps maybe one day or two days for Desjardins. Fortier had sadly 
said 'Bof and acceptingly shrugged: all knew the sacrifices that might have been 
required: all viewing details had taken their chances at random in the rotation of 
viewing. 

On Fortier's return, Marathe delivered also the expected bad news of the finding of it: 
there was no need yet for high-rpm hardware of duplication: the found copy was Read- 
Only. 303 

Philosophical, Fortier reminded the A.F.R. that they did now encouragingly know the 
Entertainment of such power did truly exist, for themselves, and could thus gird their 
courage and fortitude for the more indirect task of forfeiting hopes of securing a Master 
copy and instead striving to secure the original Master, the auteur's own cartridge, from 
which all Read-Only copies had presumably been copied. 



Thus, he said, now the more arduous and risky task of taking for technical interview 
known persons associated with the Entertainment and locating the original maker's 
duplicable Master copy. None of this would have been worthy of the risk had they not 
now determined, through the heroic sacrifices of Joubet and Desjardins, that the device 
for extending O.N.A.N.'s self-destructing logic to its final conclusion lay within their 
arduous grasp. 

Fortier gave numerous orders. The platoon of A.F.R. remained in the closed Anritoi 
Entertainent shop, behind their lingual window shade. Surveillance on the hated F.L.Q.'s 
bureau centrale, in the poorly disciplined house on Allston's Rue de Brainerd — this was 
suspended, the A.F.R. personnel pulled in and relocated to this commandeered Inman 
Square shop, where Fortier and Marathe and M. BroullTme coordinated phases of 
activity in this next more arduous and indirect phase, and reviewed tactics also. 

The deceased auteur's colleagues and relations were under consistent surveillance. 
Their concentration of place worked in the favor of this. An employee at the Academy of 
Tennis of Enfield had been recruited and joined the Canadian instructor and student 
already inside for closer work of surveillance. In the Desert, the redoubtable Mile. Luria 
P— was winning necessary confidences with her usual alacrity. An expensive source in 
the Subject's former department of the M.l.T. University had reported the En¬ 
tertainment's probable performer's last known employment — the small Cambridge 
radio station which Marathe and Beausoleil had pronounced Weee — where she had 
donned the defacing veil of O.N.A.N.ite deformity. 

Attentions were to be focused on the cartridge's performer and on the Academy of 
Tennis of the auteur's estate. The fact that the players of the Academy were to play a 
provincially-selected team from Quebec would have been easier to exploit had the 
A.F.R. possessed a tennis player of talent and lower extremities. Inquiries into the 
composition and travel of the Quebecois team were under way from sources at home in 
Papineau. 

On the day of Fortier's return also, the performer's radio program's technical engineer 
of radio had been acquired in a public but low-risk operation whose success had raised 
hopeful spirits for the acquisitions of more directly related persons to the Entertainment 
in this next phase. This person of U.S.A. radio had divulged all he professed to know 
under the mere descriptive threat of technical-interview procedures. Marathe, the best 
lay judge of Americans' veracity which the cell possessed, believed the veracity of the 
engineer; but nevertheless a formal technical interview had proceeded, justified in 
order to verify. The young and eruption-studded person's report remained consistent 
two levels past average U.S.A. endurance, the only variance involving several curious 
claims that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was defensive in bed. 

Today, Fortier himself, and Marathe, young Balbalis, R. Ossowiecke — all those with 
the better English — were thus now therefore making the rounds of all Substance- 
Difficulty-Rehabilitation facilities in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and demi-maisons 
within a 25-km. radius. Procedures for expanding the radius of inquiry by factors of two 
and three had been pre-formulated, teams assembled, lines rehearsed. Joubet and then 
Desjardins had succumbed and been transported north by van as well with the remains 
of the Antitois' remains. The U.S.A. student radio engineering person, the veracity of 



whose limited statements of the Subject's whereabouts BroullTme had verified to within 
+/— (.35) of assurance well before debriefing-levels incompatible with physical 
existence, had been allowed several hours to recover, then had become of service as 
the A.F.R.'s first Subject in field-tests of the samizdat cartridge's motivational range. The 
room of storage again was utilized for this. His head immobilized with some straps, the 
test Subject had viewed the Entertainment twice at gratis, without the application of 
any motivational inquiry. For inquiry into the degree of motivation the cartridge will 
induce, M. BroullTme had rolled himself blindfolded into the room of storage holding an 
orthopedic saw and informed the Subject of the test that, as of beginning now, each 
subsequent reviewing of the Entertainment now would have the price of one digit from 
the Subject's extremities. And handed the Subject the orthopedic saw in question, also. 
BroullTme's explanation to Fortier was that thus a matrix could be created to compute 
the statistical relation between (n) the number of times the Subject replayed the 
Entertainment and (t) the amount of time he took to decide and remove a digit for each 
subsequent (n +1) viewing. The goal was to confirm with statistical assurance the 
Subject's desire for viewing and reviewing as incapable of satiation. There could be no 
index of diminishing satisfaction as in the econometrics of normal U.S.A. commodities. 
For the samizdat Entertainment's allure to be macro-politically lethal, the ninth digit of 
extremities had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second. BroullTme, personally 
he had some skepticism about this. But this was BroullTme's function in his role in the 
cell: expertise in combination with skepticism de coeur. 

And then naturally also a wider range of field-test Subjects would then be required, to 
verify that this Subject's responses were not merely subjective and typical only of a 
certain sensibility of entertainment-consumer. The bus window yielded a faint and 
ghostly reflection of Fortier, and, through that faint view, the lights of urban life outside 
the bus. Somerville Massachusetts U.S.A.'s Phoenix House administrative person had 
listened to Fortier's delivery with shows of great compassion, then explained with 
patience that they were unable to admit addicted persons for whom English was the 
secondary language. D 'accord, though he was pretending disappointment. Fortier had 
been able to see the admitted addicts of Phoenix House holding a gathering in the room 
of living outside the office door: no person among them wore a veil of facial 
concealment, and so c'est pa. Four small teams were at this moment rolling through the 
streets and small streets and alleys of the unpleasant district of the Antitoi 
establishment, for the purpose of acquiring additional Subjects for M. BroullTme for the 
time when the Subject's digits were expended. The Subjects for suitability had to be 
passively undefended enough to be acquired publicly with quiet, yet not damaged in the 
brains or under the influence of the many of the district's intoxicant compounds. The 
A.F.R. were highly trained in patience and to be disciplined. 

The southbound bus, empty and (which he detested) fluorescently lit, climbs a thin hill 
off Winter Park, north Cambridge, heading for the Squares Inman and Central. Fortier 
looks out at the lights passing. He can smell snow coming; it soon will snow. He sees in 
his imagination two-thirds of NNE's largest urban city inert, sybaritically entranced, 
staring, without bodily movement, home-bounded, fouling their divans and the chairs 
which may recline. He sees the district of business's towers of buildings and luxury 



apartments striated as two of every three floors is darkened to lightless black. With here 
and there the vaguely blue flicker of expensive digital entertainment equipment 
flickering through darkened windows. He imagines M. Tine holding the hand holding the 
pen of President J. Gentle as the O.N.A.N.ite President signs declaring War. He imagines 
teacups clinking thinly beneath trembling hands in the interior sanctums of Ottawa's 
sanctum of power. He adjusts his sportcoat's lapel over his sweater and smooths the 
wiry hair that tends to bulge unsmoothly around the bare spot. He watches the back of 
the bus driver's neck as the driver stares straight ahead. 


Sure enough the Chinkette women had been strengthless and lightweight, flew aside 
like dolls, and their bags were indeed treasure-heavy, hard to heft; but as Lenz cut left 
down the north-south alley he could hold the bags by their twine handles out slightly 
before him, so their weight's momentum kind of pulled him along. The cruciform alleys 
through the blocks between Central and Inman in Little Lisbon were a kind of second 
city. Lenz ran. His breath came easy and he could feel himself from scalp to sole. Green 
and green-with-red dumpsters lined both walls and made the going narrow. He vaulted 
two sitting figures in khaki sharing a can of Sterno on the alley floor. He glided through 
the foul air above them, untouched by it. The sounds behind him were his footfalls' echo 
off dumpsters and fire-escapes' iron. His left hand ached nicely from holding both a 
bag's handle and his large-print volume. A dumpster up ahead had been hitched to an 
E.W.D. truck and just left to sit: probably quitting time. The Empire guys had an 
incredible union. In the recess of the hitch's bar a small blue light flickered and died. This 
was a dozen dumpsters up ahead. Lenz slowed to a brisk walk. His topcoat had slipped 
slightly off one of his shoulders but he had no free hand to fix it and wasn't going to take 
time to put a bag down. His left hand felt cramped. It was somewhere vague between 
2224 and 2226h. The alley was dark as a pocket. A tiny crash off somewhere south down 
the network of alleys was actually Poor Tony Krause rolling the steel waste-barrel that 
tripped up Ruth van Cleve. The tiny blue flame came on, hung still, flickered, moved, 
hung there, went back out. Its glow was dark blue against the back of the huge E.W.D. 
truck. Empire trucks were unstoppable, hitches were valuable but locked down with a 
Kryptonite device thing you needed welding stuff to cut through. From the recess of the 
hitch there were small sounds. When the lighter lit again Lenz was almost on them, two 
boys on the hitch and two squatting down by the hitch facing them, four of them, a fire- 
escape's pull-ladder distended like a tongue and hanging just above them. None of the 
boys was over like twelve. They used a M. Fizzy bottle instead of a pipe, and the smell of 
burnt plastic hung mixed with the sicksweet smell of overcarbonated rock. The boys 
were all small and slight and either black or spic, greedily hunching over the flame; they 
looked ratty. Lenz kept them in peripheral view as he strode briskly by, carrying his bags, 
spine straight and extruding dignified purpose. The lighter went out. The boys on the 
hitch eyed Lenz's bags. The squatting boys turned their heads to look. Lenz kept them in 
peripheral view. None of them wore watches. One of them wore a knit cap and watched 
steadily. He locked eyes with Lenz's left eye, made a gun of his thin hand, pretended to 
draw a slow bead. Like performing for the others. Lenz walked by with urban dignity. 



like he both saw them and didn't. The smell was intense but real local, of the rock and 
bottle. He had to veer out to miss the Empire truck's side mirror on its steel strut. He 
heard them say things as the truck's grille fell behind, and unkind laughter, and then 
something called out in a minority agnate he didn't know. He heard the lighter's flint. He 
thought to himself Assholes. He was looking for someplace empty and a bit more lit, to 
go through the bags. And cleaner than this one north-south alley here, which smelled of 
ripe waste and rotting skin. He would separate the bags' valuables from the 
nonvaluables and transfer the valuables to a single bag. He would fence the 
nonnegotiable valuables in Little Lisbon and refill the receptacle in his medical 
dictionary, and buy some attractiver shoes. The alley was devroid of cats and rodents 
both; he did not stop to reflect why. A rock or bit of brick courtesy of the junior crack- 
jockeys back there landed behind him and skittered past and rang out against 
something, and someone cried out aloud, a sexless figure lying back against a maybe 
duffel bag or pack against a dumpster, its hand moving furiously in its groin and its feet 
pointed out into the alley and turned out like a dead body's, its shoes two different 
shoes, its hair a clotted mass around its face, looking up over at Lenz going past in the 
faint start of light from a broader alley's intersection ahead, chanting softly what Lenz 
could hear as he stepped gingerly over the rot-smelling legs as 'Pretty, pretty, pretty.' 
Lenz whispered to himself 'Jesus what a lot of fucked-up ass-eating fucking losers.' 


'Our cult burned money for fuel.' 

'As in like currency.' 

'We used Ones. The Semi Divine One advocated thrift. We'd bring them to Him at the 
stove. There was one stove. We had to bring them to Him on our knees with no part of 
our feet could touch the floor. He sat by the stove in our blankets and fed it Ones. We 
got an extra slap if the currency was new.' 

'As in like crisp and new.' 

'It was a cleansing. Somebody always played a drum.' 

'Our cult's Divinely Chosen Leader drove a Rolls. In neutral. We pushed him wherever 
he was Called to like be at. He never turned it on. The Rolls. I got all muscled up.' 

'In summer then they made us slither on our bellies. We had to embrace our snake- 
nature. It was a cleansing.' 

'As in like slithering.' 

'Serious slithering. They took wire and bound our arms and legs.' 

'At least your wire wasn't barbed.' 

'I finally felt too cleansed to stay.' 

'Meaning over-pure, I can I.D. totally.' 

'It was too much love somehow to take.' 

'I'm like feeling the Identification all over, this is —' 

'Plus I was up to three bags a day, at the end.' 

'And then our Divinely Chosen's Love Squads made us chop wood with our teeth when 
it got cold. As in like subzero wintertime.' 

'Yours let you keep your teeth?' 



'Only the ones for gnawing. See?' 
'Sheesh.' 

'Just the ones for gnawing.' 


Remy Marathe sat veiled and blanket-lapped in the much crowded living room 
evening of this Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, the last demi-maison on 
his portion of the list for this day. The hills of upper Enfield, they were de I'infere of 
difficulty, but the demi-maison itself had a ramp. A person with authority was 
conducting interviews to fill some vacancies of recent time in the place's Office, of which 
its locked door was visible from this sitting. Marathe and others were invited to sit in the 
living room with a cup of unpleasant coffee. Urged to smoke if he liked. Everyone else 
was smoking. The living room smelled like an ashtray, and its ceiling was yellow like the 
fingers of long smokers. Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had 
been stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of them restless and loud. There 
were demi-maison patients viewing a cartridge of martial arts conflict, former patients 
and persons of the upper Enfield area cohabiting on the furniture, conversing. A 
damaged woman, also in a fauteuil de rollent like Marathe, slumped inutile next to the 
cartridge's viewer, while a male person of advanced pallor mimed the kicks and thrusts 
of martial arts at her motionless head, trying to force the woman to twitch or cry out. 
Also a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway. Other persons, 
presumably addicted, waiting in the room to seek admittance to the Recovery House. 
The room was loud and hot. Marathe could hear a person who will seek admittance 
vomiting in the shrubberies just outside the window. Marathe's chair was locked down 
next to a divan's arm and directly before a window. The window, one could wish it was 
open more than a crack, he felt. Upon the dull-colored carpet a tormented-appearing 
man scuttling like the crab while two hooligans in leather played a cruel game of 
jumping over him. Persons reading cartoon books and painting the nails of their 
extremities. A tall-haired woman brought her foot to her mouth to blow upon her toes. 
Another young girl seemed to remove her eye from her head and placed it in her mouth. 
No other in the room wore the veil of the Entertainment's performer's organization 
U.H.I.D. The smell of the U.S.A. cigarettes permeated his veil and made Marathe's eyes 
water, and he thought of vomiting also. Two additional windows were open, but the 
room lacked all air. 

During the time of his sitting, several persons approached Marathe, but they would 
say to him only the whispers 'Pet the dogs' or 'Make sure and pet the dogs.' This 
idiomatic expression was not in Marathe's knowledge of U.S.A. idiom. 

Also one person approached of a face whose skin seemed that it was rotting away 
from him in some way and asked him if he, Marathe, was court-ordered. 

Marathe was one of few persons not smoking. He noted that none of the room's 
persons appeared to regard the cheesecloth veil he wore over his face as unusual or 
curious or to be questioned. The old sportcoat he wore over a turtleneck sweater of 
Desjardin's made Marathe more formally dressed than other of the applicants for 
treatment. Two of the Ennet House demi-maison current patients wore neckties. 



however. Marathe kept pretending to sniff; he did not know why. He sat up next to a 
divan of false velour at whose end beside him two women who had sought previous 
treatment of addiction in religious cults were meeting and speaking together of their 
unenjoyable existences when in cults. 

To whomever approached, Marathe carefully recited the introductory lines he and M. 
Fortier quickly had developed: 'Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking 
residential treatment for addiction, desperately.' Persons' responses to his introductory 
lines were difficult to interpret. One of the older two men in neckties who had 
approached, he had clapped a hand to his soft face's cheek and responded 'How 
extraordinarily nice for you,' in which Marathe could detect sarcasm. The two women of 
cult experience were inclined closely toward each other upon the divan. They touched 
each other's arms several times in a kind of excitement as they conversed. When they 
laughed in delight they seemed to chew at the air. One's laughter involved also a 
snorting noise. A clatter and two shrieks: these came from one end of the dining room, 
in the demi-maison's floor plans a large kitchen. 

The sounds were then followed by a roiling cloud of steam, with repeated obscenities 
from unseen persons. A bald large black man in a white cotton undershirt's laughing 
became coughing that would not cease. The two patients in neckties and the girl whose 
eye could be removed spoke together intensively and also audibly at the end of one 
other divan. 

'But consider this quality of portability with respect to, say, a car. Is a car portable? 
With respect to a car it's more as though I'm portable.' 

'They're portable when they're on one of them semis where they got new cars stacked 
on with prices in the windows like a good couple dozen on them semis that swing all to 
fuck all over 1-93 and make you think the cars are going to start falling out all over the 
road when you're wanting to try and pass.' 

The plump one who had been ironic toward Marathe, he was nodding: 'Or, say, too, 
with respect to a tow truck or wrecker, if you suffer a breakdown. One might be in a 
position to say that a deactivated car can be quote portable, but that with respect to a 
functional car it is I who am portable.' 

The girl's nod caused the particular eye to wheel queasily in the socket of it. 'I'll buy 
that. Day.' 

'If we're jot-and-titiling with all possible precision regarding portable, that is.' 

The other man continually rubbed at his shine of the shoes with a facial tissue, causing 
his necktie to touch the floor. 

These conversers formed this triad on an unevenly sloped divan of leather-colored 
plastic across the room, which was now more airless yet from the roiling steam from the 
kitchen, infiltrating. Directly facing Marathe in a yellow chair against the wall by these 
conversers' divan most directly across the living room from Marathe was an addicted 
man waiting for seeking treatment by admission. This one, he appeared to have several 
cigarettes burning at one time. He held a metal ashtray in his lap and jiggled the boot of 
his crossed leg with vigor. For Marathe, it was not difficult to ignore the fact that the 
addicted man was glaring at him. He noted it, and did not understand because of what 
the man glared, but he was unconcerned. Marathe was prepared to die violently at any 



time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions. U.S.A.'s B.S.S.'s M. Steeply 
had verified that U.S.A.s did not comprehend this or appreciate it; it was foreign to 
them. The veil allowed Marathe the liberty of staring calmly back at the addicted man 
without the man's knowledge, which Marathe found he enjoyed. Marathe felt sick to his 
body, from the smoky room's smoke. Marathe had once, as a child, with legs, bent 
himself over and overturned a decaying log in the forests of the Lac de Deux Montaignes 
region of his four-limbed childhood, before Le Culte du Prochain Train. 304 The pallor of 
the things which had writhed and scuttled beneath the wet log was the pallor of this 
addicted man, who wore a square of the facial hair between lower lip and chin and had 
also a needle run through the flesh of the top of an ear, which the needle, it glistened 
and did not glisten rapidly in succession as it vibrated with the jiggle of the jiggling boot. 
Marathe gazed at him calmly through the veil while rehearsing his prepared lines within 
his head. The more idiomatic would be that the needle jiggled sympathetically with the 
jiggle of the boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of 
persons who did not own motorcycles but wore the boots of those who did. 

The addicted man rose slowly and carried the burning ashtray with him nearer to 
Marathe, trying to kneel. His Blue Jeans of Levi #501 were strangely torn in spots with 
tattered white strings which showed the pallor of the knees; the torn holes had the size 
and perimeter-damage of holes that Marathe recognized had been made by shotgun- 
blasts of the high gauge. Marathe was mentally memorizing every detail of all things, for 
both his reports. The addicted man kneeling before him, he leaned in closer, trying to 
remove something he believed was on his lip. Close in, the expression that through the 
veil had appeared as glaring corrected itself: the expression was more truly that the 
man's eyes had the vacant intensity of those who have violently died. 

The man whispered: 'You real?' Marathe looked through the veil at his facial square. 
'Are you real?' again the man whispered. All the time leaning more and more in, slowly. 

'You're real I can tell ain't you,' the man whispered. Quickly he looked behind him at 
the uproaring room before leaning once more in. 'Listen then.' 

Marathe kept his hands calmly in his lap, his machine pistol bolstered securely to his 
right stump beneath the blanket. The whispering man's searching fingers were leaving 
small bits of filth on the lip. 

"s these poor fuckers' — the man gestured slightly with indicating the room — 'most 
of them ain't real. So watch your six. Most of these fuckers are — : metal people.' 

'I am Swiss," Marathe experimentally said. It was the second of his lines of 
introduction. 

'Walking around, make you think they're alive.' The addicted man had the way with 
subtleness of looking all around himself which Marathe associated with intelligence 
professionals. One of his eyes had an exploded vein within it. 'But that's just the layer,' 
he said. He leaned in so far Marathe could see pores through the veil. 'There's a micro- 
thin layer of skin. But underneath, it's metal. Heads full of parts. Under a organic layer 
that's micro-thin.' The eyes of men violently dead were also the eye of a fish in a 
vendor's crushed ice, studying nothing. The man's smell suggested livestock on a hot 
day, a goatish, even through the smoke of the room. Trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid 
was a material, M. BroullTme had lectured to pass times in long surveillances, a chemical 



material in the sweat of grave mental illness. Marathe, he had no trouble timing his 
breath so his exhalation matched the addicted man's, who leaned more in. 

'There's one way to tell,' he said. 'Get right up close. Like right up flush next to: you 
can hear a whir. Micro-faint. This whirring. It's the processors' gears. It's their flaw. 
Machines always whir. They're good. They can quiet down the whir.' 

'I have no six.' 

'But they can't — can not — eliminate it.' 

'I am Swiss, seeking residential treatment with desperation.' 

'Not under no micro-thin tissue-layer they can't.' If the gaze were not vacant the gaze 
would be grim, frightened. Marathe distantly remembered the emotion fear. 

'Did you hear what she said?' the ironic man on the divan laughed. 'Potable means 
drinkable. It's not even the same root. Did you hear what she said?' 

The man's breath, it smelled of trans-3-methyl acid as well. 'I'm clueing y'in,' he 
whispered. 'They're there to fool you. The real ones of us're getting fooled. Nine-nine- 
plus per cent of the time.' The flesh of the knees through the holes in the Blue Jeans was 
the white of long death. 'But you, I could tell you were real.' He indicated the veil. 'No 
micro-thin layer. The metal ones — have faces.' The smoke of his cigarette in the 
ashtray rose in a motion of corkscrewing. 'Which this is why' — feeling the lip — 'why 
the ones on the T or in the street — they won't let you right up close. Try it. They'll 
never let you right up close. It's programming. They know to look scared and — like — 
offended and back away and move to another seat. The real advanced ones, they'll give 
you change, even, to let 'em back off. Try it. Get right — up — like this — close.' 
Marathe sat calmly behind the veil, feeling the veil move with the man's breath, waiting 
patiently to inhale. The women with experiences in cults had smelled the odor of the 
man's trans-3 odor and relocated farther away upon the divan. The man's face smiled 
with one knowing side only of his mouth, acknowledging their movement away. He was 
so close that the nose of him touched the veil when Marathe finally inhaled. Marathe 
was prepared for death in all forms. The smells were trans-3-methyl-2 and of digested 
cheese and the under of an arm, from the facial skin. Marathe ignored impulses to 
impale the eyesockets with one two-finger motion. The man had his hand to his ear in a 
mime of to listen closely. His smile disclosed what might have once been teeth. 
'Nothing,' he smiled. 'I knew. Not a sound.' 

'The Swiss, we are a quiet people, and reserved. In addition, I am deformed.' 

The man waved his cigarette with impatience. 'Listen up. This is why. You're how come 
I was here. I only thought it was the habit. They can fool you.' He scrubbed at the lip of 
his mouth. 'I'm here to tell you. Listen. You ain't here.' 

'I have emigrated from my native Swiss.' 

Still whispering: 'You ain't here. These fuckers are metal. Us — us that are real — 
there's not many — they're fooling us. We're all in one room. The real ones. One room 
all the time. Everything's pro — jected. They can do it with machines. They pro — ject. 
To fool us. The pictures on the walls change so's we think we're going places. Here and 
there, this and that. That's just they change the pro — jections. It's all the same place all 
the time. They fool your mind with machines to think you're moving, eating, cooking up, 
doing this and that.' 



'I have come desperately here.' 

'The real world's one room. These so-called people, so-called' — with again the 
flourish — 'they're everybody you know. You've met 'em before, hunnerts times, with 
different faces. There's only 26 total. They play different characters, that you think you 
know. They wear different faces with different pictures they pro — ject on the wall. You 
get me?' 

'This Recovery House was recommended highly.' 

'You follow? Count. Coincidence? There's 26 here, counting the one without feet on 
the stairs. Coincidence? Chance? This here's every machine that's played everbody you 
ever met. Are you hearin' me? They fool us. They take the machines in the back room 
and they — like —' 

The visible door of the locked Office opened and an addicted patient emerged with a 
person in authority holding a clipboard. The addicted patient limped and leaned far to a 
side, though was attractive in the blond stereotype of the U.S.A. image-culture. 

'— change them. The thin organic layers. All the different people you know. So-called. 
They're the same machines' 

'Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!' the authority 
called with the clipboard. 

'I am being indicated,' Marathe said, bending to release the clamps on his fauteuil's 
wheels. 

'— why I'm in this pro — jection, to clue you. So that now you know.' 

Marathe manipulated the fauteuil to the right with its trusty left wheel. 'I must be 
excused to plead for treatment.' 

'Get right up close.' 

'Good night,' over his left shoulder. The inutile woman seemed to twitch slightly in her 
heavy fauteuil as he passed. 

'You only think you're goin' someplace!' the addicted man called, still one-half 
kneeling. 

Marathe rolled up to the person in authority as slowly as possible, hunched deep into 
the sportcoat and pathetically tacking. With significance, the large and clipboarded 
woman seemed without faze at the veil of U.H.I.D. Marathe extended a large hand in 
greeting which he made tremble. 'Good night.' 

The insane-smelling man on the carpet called out after: 'Make sure and pet the dogs!' 


Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked 
to clean. She dusted the top of the fiberboard dresser she and Nell Gunther shared. She 
dusted the oval top of the dresser's mirror's frame and cleaned off the mirror as best 
she could. She was using Kleenex and stale water from a glass by Kate Gompert's bed. 
She felt oddly averse to putting on socks and clogs and going down to the kitchen for 
real cleaning supplies. She could hear the noise of all the post-meeting nighttime 
residents and visitors and applicants down there. She could feel their voices in the floor. 
When the dental nightmare tore her upright awake her mouth was open to scream out, 
but the scream was Nell G. down in the living room, whose laugh always sounds like 



she's being eviscerated. Nell preempted Joelle's own scream. Then Joelle cleaned. 
Cleaning is maybe a form of meditation for addicts too new in recovery to sit still. The 5- 
Woman's scarred wood floor had so much grit all over she could sweep a pile of grit 
together with just an unappliqued bumper sticker she'd won at B.Y.P. Then she could 
use damp Kleenex to get up most of the pile. She had only Kate G.'s little bedside lamp 
on, and she wasn't listening to any YYY tapes, out of consideration for Charlotte Treat, 
who was unwell and missed her Saturday Night Lively Mtng. on Pat's OK and was now 
asleep, wearing a sleep mask but not her foam earplugs. Expandable foam earplugs 
were issued to every new Ennet resident, for reasons the Staff said would clarify for 
them real quick, but Joelle hated to wear them — they shut out exterior noise, but they 
made your head's pulse audible, and your breath sounded like someone in a space suit 
— and Charlotte Treat, Kate Gompert, April Cortelyu, and the former Amy Johnson had 
all felt the same way. April said the foam plugs made her brain itch. 

It had started with Orin Incandenza, the cleaning. When relations were strained, or 
she was seized with anxiety at the seriousness and possible impermanence of the thing 
in the Back Bay's co-op, the getting high and cleaning became an important exercise, 
like creative visualization, a preview of the discipline and order with which she could 
survive alone if it came to that. She would get high and visualize herself solo in a 
dazzlingly clean space, every surface twinkling, every possession in place. She saw 
herself being able to pick, say, dropped popcorn up off the rug and ingest it with total 
confidence. An aura of steely independence surrounded her when she cleaned the co¬ 
op, even with the little whimpers and anxious moans that exited her writhing mouth 
when she cleaned high. The place had been provided nearly gratis by Jim, who said so 
little to Joelle on their first several meetings that Orin kept having to reassure her that it 
wasn't disapproval — Himself was missing the part of the human brain that allowed for 
being aware enough of other people to disapprove of them, Orin had said — or dislike. 
It was just how The Mad Stork was. Orin had referred to Jim as 'Himself or 'The Mad 
Stork' — family nicknames, both of which gave Joelle the creeps even then. 

It'd been Orin who introduced her to his father's films. The Work was then so obscure 
not even local students of serious film knew the name. The reason Jim kept forming his 
own distribution companies was to ensure distribution. He didn't become notorious 
until after Joelle'd met him. By then she was closer to Jim than Orin had ever been, part 
of which caused part of the strains that kept the brownstone co-op so terribly clean. 

She'd barely thought consciously of any Incandenzas for four years before Don Gately, 
who for some reason kept bringing them bubbling up to mind. They were the second- 
saddest family Joelle'd ever seen. Orin felt Jim disliked him to the precise extent that Jim 
was even aware of him. Orin had spoken about his family at length, usually at night. On 
how no amount of punting success could erase the psychic stain of basic fatherly dislike, 
failure to be seen or acknowledged. Orin'd had no idea how banal and average his 
same-sex-parent-issues were; he'd felt they were some hideous exceptional thing. 
Joelle'd known her mother didn't much like her from the first time her own personal 
Daddy'd told her he'd rather take Pokie to the pictures alone. Much of the stuff Orin 
said about his family was dull, gone stale from years of never daring to say it. He 
credited Joelle with some strange generosity for not screaming and fleeing the room 



when he revealed the banal stuff. Pokie had been Joelle's family nickname, though her 
mother'd never called her anything but Joelle. The Orin she knew first felt his mother 
was the family's pulse and center, a ray of light incarnate, with enough depth of love 
and open maternal concern to almost make up for a father who barely existed, 
parentally. Jim's internal life was to Orin a black hole, Orin said, his father's face any 
room's fifth wall. Joelle had struggled to stay awake and attentive, listening, letting Orin 
get the stale stuff out. Orin had no idea what his father thought or felt about anything. 
He thought Jim wore the opaque blank facial expression his mother in French 
sometimes jokingly called Le Masque. The man was so blankly and irretrievably hidden 
that Orin said he'd come to see him as like autistic, almost catatonic. Jim opened himself 
only to the mother. They all did, he said. She was there for them all, psychically. She was 
the family's light and pulse and the center that held tight. Joelle could yawn in bed 
without looking like she was yawning. The children's name for their mother was 'the 
Moms.' As if there were more than one of her. His younger brother was a hopeless 
retard, Orin had said. Orin recalled the Moms used to tell him she loved him about a 
hundred times a day. It nearly made up for Himself's blank stare. Orin's basic childhood 
memory of Jim had been of an expressionless stare from a great height. His mother had 
been really tall, too, for a girl. He'd said he'd found it secretly odd that none of the 
brothers were taller. His retarded brother was stunted to about the size of a fire 
hydrant, Orin reported. Joelle cleaned behind the filthy room's radiator as far as she 
could reach, being careful not to touch the radiator. Orin described his childhood's 
mother as his emotional sun. Joelle remembered her own personal Daddy's Uncle T.S. 
talking about how her own personal Daddy'd thought his own Momma 'Hung the God 
Damn Moon,' he'd said. The radiators on Ennet House's female side stayed on at all 
times, 24/7/365. At first Joelle had thought Mrs. Avril Incandenza's high-watt maternal 
love had maybe damaged Orin by bringing into sharper relief Jim's remote self¬ 
absorption, which would have looked, by comparison, like neglect or dislike. That it had 
maybe made Orin too emotionally dependent on his mother — why else would he have 
been so traumatized when a younger brother had suddenly appeared, specially 
challenged from birth and in need of even more maternal attention than Orin? Orin, late 
one night on the co-op's futon, recalled to Joelle his skulking in and dragging a 
wastebasket over and inverting it next to his infant brother's special crib, holding a 
heavy box of Quaker Oats high above his head, preparing to brain the needy infant. 
Joelle had gotten an A- in Developmental Psych, the semester before. And also 
dependent psychologically, Orin, it seemed, or even metaphysically — Orin said he'd 
grown up, first in a regular house in Weston and then at the Academy in Enfield, grown 
up dividing the human world into those who were open, readable, trustworthy, v. those 
so closed and hidden that you had no clue what they thought of you but could pretty 
damn well imagine it couldn't be anything all that marvelous or else why hide it? Orin 
had recounted that he'd started to see himself getting closed and blank and hidden like 
that, as a tennis player, toward the end of his junior career, despite all the Moms's 
frantic attempts to keep him from hiddenness. Joelle had thought of B.U.'s Nickerson 
Field's 30,000 voices' openly roared endorsement, the sound rising with the punt to a 
kind of amniotic pulse of pure positive noise. Versus tennis's staid and reserved 



applause. It had all been so easy to figure and see, then, listening, loving Orin and 
feeling for him, poor little rich and prodigious boy — all this was before she came to 
know Jim and the Work. 

Joelle scrubbed at the discolored square of fingerprints around the light-switch until 
the wet Kleenex disintegrated into greebles. 

Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might 
be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, 
still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his 
perspective on it. She's learned this through sheer experience. 

Greebles had been her own mother's word for the little bits of sleepy goo you got in 
your eyes' corners. Her own personal Daddy called them 'eye-boogers' and used to get 
them out for her with the twisted corner of his hankie. 

Though it's not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their 
children either. 

The cheap glass shade over the ceiling's light was black with interior grime and dead 
bugs. Some of the bugs looked like they might have been from long-extinct species. The 
loose grime alone filled half an empty Carefree box. The more stubborn crud would take 
a scouring pad and ammonia. Joelle put the shade aside for until she'd shot down to the 
kitchen to toss out different boxes of crud and wet Kleenex and grab some serious 
Chore-type supplies from under the sink. 

Orin had said she was the third-neatnikest person he knew after his Moms and a 
former player he'd played with with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a dual diagnosis 
with which the U.H.I.D. membership was rife. But at the time the import had missed 
her. At that time it had never occurred to her that Orin's pull toward her could have had 
anything either pro or con to do with his mother. Her biggest worry was that Orin was 
pulled only by what she looked like, which her personal Daddy'd warned her the 
sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies, so to watch out. 

Orin hadn't been anything like her own personal Daddy. When Orin was out of the 
room it had never seemed like a relief. When she was home, her own Daddy never 
seemed to be out of the room for more than a few seconds. Her mother said she hardly 
even tried to talk to him when his Pokie was home. He kind of trailed her around from 
room to room, kind of pathetically, talking batons and low-pH chemistry. It was like 
when she exhaled he inhaled and vice versa. He was all through the house. He was real 
present at all times. His presence penetrated a room and outlasted him there. Orin's 
absence, whether for class or practice, emptied the co-op out. The place seemed 
vacuumed and buffed sterile before the cleaning even started, when he went. She didn't 
feel lonely in the place without him, but she did feel alone, what alone was going to feel 
like, and she, no one's fool, 305 was erecting fortifications real early into it. 

It was Orin, of course, who'd introduced them. He'd had this stubborn idea that 
Himself would want to use her. In the Work. She was too pretty for somebody not to 
want to arrange, capture. Better Himself than some weak-chinned academic. Joelle'd 
protested the whole idea. She had a brainy girl's discomfort about her own beauty and 
its effect on folks, a caution intensified by the repeated warnings of her personal Daddy. 
Even more to the immediate point, her filmic interests lay behind the lens. She'd do the 



capturing thank you very much. She wanted to make things, not appear in them. She 
had a student filmmaker's vague disdain for actors. Worst, Orin's idea's real project was 
developmentally obvious: he thought he could somehow get to his father through her. 
That he pictured himself having weighty, steeple-fingered conversations with the man, 
Joelle's appearance and performance the subjects. A three-way bond. It made her real 
uneasy. She theorized that Orin unconsciously wished her to mediate between himself 
and 'Himself,' just as it sounded like his mother had. She was uneasy about the excited 
way Orin predicted that his father wouldn't be able to 'resist using' her. She was extra 
uneasy about how Orin referred to his father as 'Himself.' It seemed painfully blatant, 
developmental-arrest-wise. Plus she felt — only a little less than she made it sound, on 
the futon at night, protesting — she'd felt uneasy at the prospect of any sort of 
connection with the man who had hurt Orin so, a man so monstrously tall and cold and 
remotely hidden. Joelle heard a howl and a crash from the kitchen, followed by 
McDade's tubercular laugh. Twice Charlotte Treat sat up in sleep, glistening with fever, 
and said in a flat dead voice something that sounded for all the world like 'Trances in 
which she did not breathe,' and then fell back, out. Joelle was trying to pin down a 
queer rancid-cinnamon smell that came from the back of a closet stuffed with luggage. 
It was especially hard to clean when you weren't supposed to be allowed to touch any 
other resident's stuff. 

She might have known from the Work. The man's Work was amateurish, she'd seen, 
when Orin had had his brother — the unretarded one — lend them some of The Mad 
Stork's Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a 
brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. 
Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But 
oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness — no narrative movement 
toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. Like conversing with 
a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones, the upperclassman Molly Notkin 
had said of Incandenza's early oeuvre. Joelle thought them more like a very smart 
person conversing with himself. She thought of the significance of the moniker 'Himself.' 
Cold. Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell — mordant, sophisticated, campy, hip, 
cynical, technically mind-bending; but cold, amateurish, hidden: no risk of empathy with 
the Job-like protagonist, whom she felt like the audience was induced to regard like 
somebody sitting atop a dunk-tank. The lampoons of 'inverted' genres: archly funny and 
sometimes insightful but with something provisional about them, like the finger- 
exercises of someone promising who refused to really sit down and play something to 
test that promise. Even as an undergrad Joelle'd been convinced that parodists were no 
better than camp-followers in ironic masks, satires usually the work of people with 
nothing new themselves to say. 306 'The Medusa v. the Odalisgue' — cold, allusive, 
inbent, hostile: the only feeling for the audience one of contempt, the meta-audience in 
the film's theater presented as objects long before they turn to blind stone. 

But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself 
made the leap to narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped 
prolong the arc of, where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make 
characters move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything 



he did well and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had). But even 
in the early Work — flashes of something. Very hidden and quick. Almost furtive. She 
noticed them only when alone, watching, without Orin and his rheostat's dimmer, the 
living room's lights up high like she liked them, liked to see herself and everything else in 
the room with the viewer — Orin liked to sit in the dark and enter what he watched, his 
jaw slackening, a child raised on multichannel cable TV. But Joelle began — on repeated 
viewing whose original purpose was to study how the man had blocked out scenes, for 
an Advanced Storyboard course she went the extra click in — she began to see little 
flashes of something. The M v. O.'s three quick cuts to the sides of the gorgeous 
combatants' faces, twisted past recognition with some kind of torment. Each cut to a 
flash of pained face had followed the crash of a petrified spectator toppling over in her 
chair. Three split-seconds, no more, of glimpses of facial pain. And not pain at wounds 
— they never touched each other, whirling with mirrors and blades; the defenses of 
both were impenetrable. More like as if what their beauty was doing to those drawn to 
watch it ate them alive, up there on stage, the flashes seemed to suggest. But just three 
flashes, each almost subliminally quick. Accidents? But not one shot or cut in the whole 
queer cold film was accidental — the thing was clearly s-boarded frame by frame. Must 
have taken hundreds of hours. Astounding technical anality. Joelle kept trying to Pause 
the cartridge on the flashes of facial torment, but these were the early days of InterLace 
cartridges, and the Pause still distorted the screen just enough to keep her from seeing 
what she wanted to study. Plus she got the creepy feeling the man had upped the film- 
speed in these few-frame human flashes, to thwart just such study. It was like he 
couldn't help putting human flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and 
unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow. 

Orin Incandenza had been only the second boy ever to approach her in a male-female 
way. 307 The first had been shiny-chinned and half blind on Everclear punch, an All- 
Kentucky lineman for the Shiny Prize Biting Shoats team back in Shiny Prize KY, at a 
cookout to which the Boosters had invited the Pep and Baton girls; and the lineman had 
looked like a little shy boy as he confessed, by way of apologizing for almost splashing 
her when he threw up, that she was just too Goddamn-all petrifyingly pretty to 
approach any other way but liquored up past all horror. The lineman'd confessed the 
whole team's paralyzing horror of the prettiness of varsity Pep's top twirler, Joelle. Orin 
confessed to his private name for her. The memory of that H.S. afternoon remained real 
strong. She could smell the mesquite smoke and the blue pines and the YardGuard 
spray, hear the squeals of the stock they butchered and cleaned in symbolic prep for the 
opener against the N. Paducah Technical H.S. Rivermen. She could still see the swooning 
lineman, wet-lipped and confessing, keeping himself upright against an immature blue 
pine until the blue pine's trunk finally gave with a snap and crash. 

Until that cookout and confession she'd somehow thought it was her own personal 
Daddy, somehow, discouraging dates and male-female approaches. The whole thing had 
been queer, and lonely, until she'd been approached by Orin, who made no secret of 
the fact that he had balls of unrejectable steel where horrifyingly pretty girls were 
concerned. 

But it wasn't even the subjective identification she felt, watching, she felt, somehow. 



for the flashes and seeming non-seqs that betrayed something more than cold hip 
technical abstraction. Like e.g. the 240-second motionless low-angle shot of Gianlorenzo 
Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa,' which — yes — ground Pre-Nuptial... 's dramatic 
movement to an annoying halt and added nothing that a 15- or 30-second still shot 
wouldn't have added just as well; but on the fifth or sixth reviewing Joelle started to see 
the four-minute motionless shot as important for what was absent: the whole film was 
from the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman's POV, 308 and the alcoholic sandwich-bag 
salesman — or rather his head — was on-screen every moment, even when split- 
screened against the titanic celestial marathon seven-card-stud-with-Tarot-cards game 

— his rolling eyes and temples' dents and rosary of upper-lip sweat was imposed 
nonstop on the screen and viewer... except for the four narrative minutes the alcoholic 
sandwich-bag salesman stood in the Vittorio's Bernini room, and the climactic statue 
filled the screen and pressed against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence 
of the thing, let the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself, his tiresome 
ubiquitous involuted head, she saw, was the thing. The four-minute still shot maybe 
wasn't just a heavy-art gesture or audience-hostile herring. Freedom from one's own 
head, one's inescapable P.O.V. —Joelle started to see here, oblique to the point of being 
hidden, an emotional thrust, since the mediated transcendence of self was just what the 
apparently decadent statue of the orgasmic nun claimed for itself as subject. Here then, 
after studious (and admittedly kind of boring) review, was an un-ironic, almost moral 
thesis to the campy abstract mordant cartridge: the film's climactic statue's stasis 
presented the theoretical subject as the emotional effect — self-forgetting as the Grail 

— and — in a covert gesture almost moralistic, Joelle thought as she glanced at the 
room-lit screen, very high, mouth writhing as she cleaned — presented the self- 
forgetting of alcohol as inferior to that of religion/art (since the consumption of 
bourbon made the salesman's head progressively swell, horrendously, until by the film's 
end its dimensions exceeded the frame, and he had a nasty and humiliating time 
squeezing it through the front door of the Vittorio). 

It didn't much matter once she'd met the whole family anyhow, though. The Work and 
reviewings were just an inkling — usually felt on the small manageable bits of coke that 
helped her see deeper, harder, and so maybe not even objectively accessible in the 
Work itself— a lower-belly intuition that the punter's hurt take on his father was limited 
and arrested and maybe unreal. 

With Joelle makeupless and stone-sober and hair up in a sloppy knot, the introductory 
supper with Orin and Himself at Legal Seafood up in Brookline 309 betrayed nothing much 
at all, save that the director seemed more than able to resist 'using' Joelle in any 
capacity — she saw the tall man slump and cringe when Orin told him the P.G.O.A.T. 
majored in F&C 310 —Jim'd told her later she'd seemed too conventionally, commercially 
pretty to consider using in any of that period's Work, part of whose theoretical project 
was to militate against received U.S. commercial-prettiness-conventions — and that 
Orin was so tense in 'Himself's presence that there wasn't room for any other real 
emotion at the table, Orin gradually beginning to fill up silences with more and faster 
nonstop blather until both Joelle and Jim were embarrassed at the fact that the punter 
hadn't touched his steamed grouper or given anyone else space for a word of reply. 



Jim later told Joelle that he simply didn't know how to speak with either of his 
undamaged sons without their mother's presence and mediation. Orin could not be 
made to shut up, and Hal was so completely shut down in Jim's presence that the 
silences were excruciating. Jim said he suspected he and Mario were so easy with each 
other only because the boy had been too damaged and arrested even to speak to until 
he was six, so that both he and Jim had got a chance to become comfortable in mutual 
silence, though Mario did have an interest in lenses and film that had nothing to do with 
fathers or needs to please, so that the interest was something truly to share, the two of 
them; and even when Mario was allowed to work crew on some of Jim's later Work it 
was without any of the sort of pressures to interact or bond via film that there'd been 
with Orin and Hal and tennis, at which Jim (Orin informed her) had been a late-blooming 
junior but a top collegian. 

Jim referred to the Work's various films as 'entertainments.' He did this ironically 
about half the time. 

In the cab (that Jim had hailed for them), on the way back home from Legal Seafood, 
Orin had beaten his fine forehead against the plastic partition and wept that he couldn't 
seem to communicate with Himself without his mother's presence and mediation. It 
wasn't clear how the Moms mediated or facilitated communication between different 
family-members, he said. But she did. He didn't have one fucking clue how Himself felt 
about his abandoning a decade's tennis for punting, Orin wept. Or about Orin's being 
truly great at it, at something, finally. Was he proud, or jealously threatened, or 
judgmental that Orin had quit tennis, or what? 

The 5-Woman's room's mattresses were too skinny for their frames, and the rims of 
the frames between the slats were appallingly clotted with dust, with female hair 
entwined and involved in the dust, so that it took one Kleenex just to wet the stuff 
down, several dry ones to wipe the muck out. Charlotte Treat had been too sick to 
shower for days, and her frame and slats were hard to be near. 

At Joelle's first interface with the whole sad family unit — Thanksgiving, Headmaster's 
House, E.T.A., straight up Comm. Ave. in Enfield — Orin's Moms Mrs. Incandenza 
('Please do call me Avril, Joelle') had been gracious and warm and attentive without 
obtruding, and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate 
communication, and to make Joelle feel like a welcomed and esteemed part of the 
family gathering — and something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle's 
body pucker and distend. It wasn't that Avril Incandenza was one of the tallest women 
Joelle had ever seen, and definitely the tallest pretty older woman with immaculate 
posture (Dr. Incandenza slumped something awful) she'd ever met. It wasn't that her 
syntax was so artless and fluid and imposing. Nor the near-sterile cleanliness of the 
home's downstairs (the bathroom's toilet seemed not only scrubbed but waxed to a 
high shine). And it wasn't that Avril's graciousness was in any conventional way fake. It 
took a long time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling 
fantods about Orin's mother. The dinner itself— no turkey; some politico-familial in-joke 
about no turkey on Thanksgiving — was delicious without being grandiose. They didn't 
even sit down to eat until 2300h. Avril drank champagne out of a little fluted glass 
whose level somehow never went down. Dr. Incandenza (no invitation to call him Jim, 



she noticed) drank at a tri-faceted tumbler of something that made the air above it 
shimmer slightly. Avril put everyone at ease. Orin did credible impressions of famous 
figures. He and little Hal made dry fun of Avril's Canadian pronunciation of certain 
diphthongs. Avril and Dr. Incandenza took turns cutting up Mario's salmon. Joelle had a 
weird half-vision of Avril hiking her knife up hilt-first and plunging it into Joelle's breast. 
Hal Incandenza and two other lopsidedly muscular boys from the tennis school ate like 
refugees and were regarded with gentle amusement. Avril dabbed her mouth in a 
patrician way after every bite. Joelle wore girl-clothes, her dress's neckline very high. Hal 
and Orin looked vaguely alike. Avril directed every fourth comment to Joelle, to include 
her. Orin's brother Mario was stunted and complexly deformed. There was a spotless 
doggie-dish under the table, but no dog, and no mention was ever made of a dog. Joelle 
noticed Avril also directed every fourth comment to Orin, Hal, and Mario, like a cycle of 
even inclusion. There was New York white and Albertan champagne. Dr. Incandenza 
drank his drink instead of wine, and got up several times to freshen his drink in the 
kitchen. A massive hanging garden behind Avril's and Hal's captains' chairs cut complex 
shadows into the UV light that made the table's candles' glow a weird bright blue. The 
director was so tall he seemed to rise forever, when he rose with his tumbler. Joelle had 
the queerest indefensible feeling that Avril wished her ill; she kept feeling different 
areas of hair stand up. Everybody Please-and-Thank-You'd in a way that was sheer 
Yankee WASP. After his second trip to the kitchen. Dr. Incandenza molded his twice- 
baked potatoes into an intricate futuristic cityscape and suddenly started to discourse 
animatedly on the 1946 breakup of Hollywood's monolithic Studio system and the sub¬ 
sequent rise of the Method actors Brando, Dean, Clift et al., arguing for a causal 
connection. His voice was mid-range and mild and devoid of accent. Orin's Moms had to 
be over two meters tall, way taller than Joelle's own personal Daddy. Joelle could 
somehow tell Avril was the sort of female who'd been ungainly as a girl and then 
blossomed and but who'd only become really beautiful later in life, like thirty-five. She'd 
decided Dr. Incandenza looked like an ecologically poisoned crane, she told him later. 
Mrs. Incandenza put everyone at ease. Joelle imagined her with a conductor's baton. 
She never did tell Jim that Orin called him The Mad or Sad Stork. The whole 
Thanksgiving table inclined very subtly toward Avril, very slightly and subtly, like 
heliotropes. Joelle found herself doing it too, the inclining. Dr. Incandenza kept shading 
his eyes from the UV plant-light in a gesture that resembled a salute. Avril referred to 
her plants as her Green Babies. At some point out of nowhere, little Hal Incandenza, 
maybe ten, announced that the basic unit of luminous intensity is the Candela, which he 
defined for no one in particular as the luminous intensity of 1/600,000 of a square 
meter of a cavity at the freezing-temperature of platinum. All the table's males wore 
coats and ties. The larger of Hal's two tennis partners passed out dental stimulators, and 
no one made fun of him. Mario's grin seemed both obscene and sincere. Hal, whom 
Joelle wasn't crazy about, kept asking wasn't anybody going to ask him the freezing- 
temperature of platinum. Joelle and Dr. Incandenza found themselves in a small 
conversation about Bazin, a film-theorist Himself detested, making a tormented face at 
the name. Joelle intrigued the optical scientist and director by explaining Bazin's 
disparagement of self-conscious directorial expression as historically connected to the 



neo-Thomist Realism of the 'Personalistes,' an aesthetic school of great influence over 
French Catholic intellectuals circa 1930-1940 — many of Bazin's teachers had been 
eminent Personalistes. Avril encouraged Joelle to describe rural Kentucky. Orin did a 
long impression of late pop-astronomer Carl Sagan expressing televisual awe at the 
cosmos' scale. 'Billions and billions,' he said. One of the tennis friends burped just 
awfully, and no one reacted to the sound in any way. Orin said 'Billions and billions and 
billions' in the voice of Sagan. Avril and Hal had a brief good-natured argument about 
whether the term circa could modify an interval or only a specific year. Then Hal asked 
for several examples of something called Haplology. Joelle kept fighting urges to slap the 
sleek little show-offy kid upside the head so hard his bow-tie would spin. 'The universe:' 
— Orin continued long after the wit had worn thin — 'cold, immense, incredibly 
universal.' The subjects of tennis, baton-twirling, and punting never came up: organized 
sports were never once mentioned. Joelle noticed that nobody seemed to look directly 
at Dr. Incandenza except her. A curious flabby white mammarial dome covered part of 
the Academy's grounds outside the dining room's window. Mario plunged his special 
fork into Dr. Incandenza's potato-cityscape, to general applause and certain grating puns 
on the term deconstruction from the insufferable Hal kid. Everyone's teeth were 
dazzling in the candlelight and UV. Hal wiped Mario's snout, which seemed to run 
continuously. Avril invited Joelle by all means to make a Thanksgiving call home to her 
family in rural Kentucky if she wished. Orin said the Moms was herself originally from 
rural Quebec. Joelle was on her seventh glass of wine. Orin's fingering his half-Windsor 
kept looking more and more like a signal to somebody. Avril urged Dr. Incandenza to 
find a way to include Joelle in a production, since she was both a film student and a now 
a heartily welcome honorary addition to the family. Mario, reaching for the salad, fell 
out of his chair, and was helped up by one of the tennis players amid much hilarity. 
Mario's deformities seemed wide-ranging and hard to name. Joelle decided he looked 
like a cross between a puppet and one of the big-headed carnivores from Spielberg's old 
special-effects orgies about reptiles. Hal and Avril hashed out whether misspoke was a 
bona fide word. Dr. Incandenza's tall narrow head kept inclining toward his plate and 
then slowly rising back up in a way that was either meditative or tipsy. Deformed 
Mario's broad smile was so constant you could have hung things from the corners of it. 
In a fake Southern-belle accent that was clearly no jab at Joelle, more like a Scarlett 
O'Hara accent, Avril said she did declare that Albertan champagne always gave her 'the 
vapors.' Joelle noticed that pretty much everybody at the table was smiling, broadly and 
constantly, eyes shiny in the plants' odd light. She was doing it herself, too, she noticed; 
her cheek muscles were starting to ache. Hal's larger friend kept pausing to use his 
dental stimulator. Nobody else was using their dental stimulator, but everyone held one 
politely, as if getting ready to use it. Hal and the two friends made odd spasmic one- 
handed squeezing motions, periodically. No one seemed to notice. Not once in Orin's 
presence did anyone mention the word tennis. He had been up half the previous night 
vomiting with anxiety. Now he challenged Hal to name the freezing-point of platinum. 
Joelle couldn't for the life of her remember either of the names of poor old Spielberg's 
old computer-enhanced celluloid dinosaur things, though her own Daddy'd personally 
taken her to each one. At some point Orin's father got up to go freshen his drink and 



never returned. 

Just before dessert — which was on fire — Orin's Moms had asked whether they could 
perhaps all join hands secularly for a moment and simply be grateful for all being 
together. She made a special point of asking Joelle to include her hands in the hand¬ 
holding. Joelle held Orin's hand and Hal's smaller friend's hand, which was so callused 
up it felt like some sort of rind. Dessert was Cherries Jubilee with gourmet New 
Brunswick ice cream. Dr. Incandenza's absence from the table went unmentioned, 
almost unnoticed, it seemed. Both Hal and his nonstimulating friend pleaded for Kahlua, 
and Mario flapped pathetically at the tabletop in imitation. Avril made a show of gazing 
at Orin in mock-horror as he produced a cigar and clipper. There was also a blancmange. 
The coffee was decaf with chickory. When Joelle looked over again, Orin had put his 
cigar away without lighting it. 

The dinner ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill. 

Joelle'd felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady's grace and 
cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts' pit that the 
woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle's pancreas and thymus and minced them 
and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without 
batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way. 

On the way back home, in a cab whose company's phone-number Hal had summoned 
from memory, Orin hung his leg over Joelle's crossed legs and said that if anybody could 
have been counted on to see that the Stork needed to use Joelle somehow, it was the 
Moms. He asked Joelle twice how she'd liked her. Joelle's cheek muscles ached 
something awful. When they got back to the brownstone co-op on that last pre- 
Subsidized Thanksgiving was the first historical time Joelle intentionally did lines of 
cocaine to keep from sleeping. Orin couldn't ingest anything during the season even if 
he wanted to: B.U.'s major-sport teams Tested randomly. So Joelle was awake at 0400, 
cleaning back behind the refrigerator for the second time, when Orin cried out in the 
nightmare she'd somehow felt should have been hers. 


Shaking to the confidence of his judgment of these persons, the one Marathe had 
believed a desperate addict was revealed as the woman in authority for the demi- 
maison of Ennet. The clip boarded woman was a mere subaltern. Marathe very seldom 
misjudged persons or their roles. 

The woman in authority was negative on the telephone. 'No, no. No,' she said into the 
telephone. 'No.' 

'I am sorry,' she spoke to Marathe over the telephone's speaker without placing the 
hand of privacy over the speaker. 'This won't take a second. No she can't. Mars. 
Promises don't matter. She's promised before. How many times. No. Mars, because it'll 
end up hurting us again and just enabling her.' The other side's man's voice came loudly, 
and the authority stopped a sobbing with the back of her wrist, then stiffened. Marathe 
watched expressionlessly. He had the great fatigue, a time at which English was 
straining. There were dogs upon the floor. 'I know, but no. For today, no. Next time she 
calls, ask her to call me here. Yes.' 



She deactivated this transmission and stared at her top of the desk for a moment. Two 
dogs lay on the floor between her chair and Marathe's fauteuil, one dog of which was 
licking its private organs. Marathe stifled a shudder and pulled up his blanket slightly, 
hunching to minimalize the musculature of health of his upper torso, also. 

'Good night. . .,' Marathe began. 

'Well, don't go,' the woman of authority ejaculated from coming out of her reverie of 
sadness, giving her seat the rotation to face him. She tried to smile in the professional 
manner of U.S.A. 'After you waited all that time out there. I saw you sharing with 
Selwyn. Selwyn tends to show up whenever we're doing group intakes.' 

'Me, I think he suffers with mental illness.' Marathe noticed one leg of the woman was 
thinner by far of her other leg. He was being driven distracted also by this habit to 
pretend to sniff. The false sniffs came from nowhere. 

She crossed these legs. Two autos' horns mightily blew upon the avenue far beyond 
the concave window of her desk. 

'This Selwyn, he advised me to stroke your animals, which I have regret but I will not.' 

This woman quietly laughed and leaned forward above the crossed legs. In addition, 
one of the dogs had flatulence. 'You listed your citizenship as Swiss.' 

'I am a residing alien addicted to smack, to scag, and to H, seeking desperately the 
residential treatment.' 

'But legally residing? With a Green Card? An O.I.N.S. 311 Residency Code?' 

Marathe from his sportcoat produced the documents M. DuPlessis had arranged with 
foresight in the long past. 

'Disabled, also. Also deformed,' Marathe said, shrugging stoically, inclining his veil at 
the dark carpet. 

The woman was examining his O.I.N.S. documents with the pursed mouth and face for 
poker of O.N.A.N. authorities in all places. One of her hands was twisted in the manner 
of a claw. 'We all come in with issues, Henry,' she said. 

'Henri. Pardon. Henri.' 

Some woman just outside the door near the demi-maison's front door, she laughed in 
the manner of an automatic weapon. Wet sounds were audible from beneath the rear 
leg of the dog with private organs, of which the head hid beneath the raised leg. The 
woman of authority had to support the body by placing the hands on the desk to rise 
and unlock and lift the door of a black metal cabinet over her TP and console of her 
desk. The door of old black metal lifted outward. Marathe committed to memory the 
model numbers of this teleputer, which was Indonesian and of cheap cost. 

'Well Henri, Ennet House, in the years I've been on Staff here, we've had aliens, 
resident aliens, E.S.L.'s whose English was worse than yours by a long shot.' She stood 
on the thicker leg to reach into this cabinet deeply for some item. Marathe took the 
opportunity of her inattention to commit to his memory the office's facts. The office's 
door had a decoration of a triangle within a circle, and no bolt of death for locking, but 
merely a sadly cheap recess-lock in the knob. Nowhere the small nozzle of standard 
10.525 GHz microwave alarming. The large windows had no small ends of wires about 
their frames. This left the possibility only of a magnet-contact alarm, which if so was 
difficult to jumper but also possible. Marathe felt himself missing his wife intensely. 



which always signalled his deep fatigue. Twice he sniffed. 

The woman was speaking into the cabinet to him: '...get you to sign some releases for 
me so we can make copies of your 0.1.N.S. proofs and get an Outtake faxed from your 
detox, which was in ... ?' 

'The Chit Chat Farms Rehabilitation of Pennsylvania State. Last month.' The A.F.R.'s 
data liaison in Montreal had promised to arrange all records without some delay. 

'In, what, Wernersdale, something?' 

Marathe cocked his veiled head ever so slightly. 'Wernersberg of Pennsylvania.' 

'Well we know Chit Chat, we've had some Chit Chat graduates come through the 
House. Highest ... respect.' Her head was inside the cabinet, with an arm. It appeared 
difficult for her to rummage inside the cabinet and keep at the same time her balance. 
Deciding the bay windows were the optimal office's entry if required, Marathe looked at 
the woman's attempt to balance and the old cabinet. Then he blinked slowly. In this 
cabinet visibly, in twin stacks near the front of the open cabinet, were many cartridges 
of TP entertainment. 

The woman said 'And we've been Disabled-Accessible since the beginning. One of only 
a handful of Houses in the metro area that are fully equipped to take disabled clients, I 
assume they told you down at Chit Chat.' The wall banged with the impact of 
boisterousness in the outside room, and somebody either laughed or was in pain. 
Marathe sniffed. The woman was continuing to speak: '...why I got to come here in the 
first place. Which I came in in a chair, too, originally, by the way.' She teetered back out 
from the cabinet with a folder of Manila. 'At the time I declared up and down I was too 
disabled to kneel and pray, to give you an idea of where I was at.' She laughed gaily. She 
was attractive. 

'Me,' Marathe responded, 'I will attempt to pray at a moment's order.' Aiding the ruse 
of application, he and Fortier discovered, was that U.S.A. recovery from the addictions 
was somewhat paramilitary in nature. There were orders and the obeying of orders. The 
A.F.R. had reviewed cartridges of antique U.S.A. programming, which they had found 
through luck in the inventory of Antitoi, and had watched to learn many things. But 
casting his veiled face desperately upward while saying allowed that Marathe could scan 
along the plastic cases of cartridges' spines. Among the small-of-font titles such as Focal 
Length Parameters X-XI and Drop Volley Ex. II were two cases of plain brown plastic, 
blank, except for — this was why his veil, it remained tilted upward for so much longer 
that he was concerned that this woman of authority — except for — but it was difficult 
of sureness, for the office's light was the deadening fluorescence of U.S.A., and the 
cabinet's mouth in the shadow of the lid and the cheesecloth veil made less his focus — 
except maybe for tiny round faces of embossed smiles upon the brown cases. Marathe 
felt suddenly the excitement of himself — M. Hugh Steeply's wording for this had been 
from somewhere blue. 

The authority spoke also: 'Not to mention U.H.I.D. members, you might want to 
know.' Gesturing then at the veil of Marathe neither was mentioning. The woman 
attempted to affix a sheet of faint toner to a board with a clip. 'In fact we have a U.H.I.D. 
member in early residency right now.' 

Marathe blinked twice more. He said 'I am deformed, me.' 



'She might be able to help you adjust, identify. Be good for her, too.' 

Marathe had begun locking down in RAM every detail of every moment since his 
entering the Ennet House demi-maison. He in another part of his brain considered 
whether he would report truly first to M. Fortier or to the Steeply of U.S.B.S.S., whose 
contact number had always the prefix of 8000, he had jested. In another part was 
whether to seem eager for meeting the Entertainment's performer here now, a fellow 
veil. To think of what a desperate addict would have eagerness in. Marathe was 
throughout this thinking smiling largely at the woman, forgetting she could not witness 
it. 'This is happy,' finally he said. 

'Your facial issues —' the person stated, leaning in over the crossed legs in her chair. 
'Are they connected to your use and abuse? Did they work with you on progression and 
Y.E.T.s 312 and owning consequences at Chit Chat?' 

Marathe was in little hurry now to leave for returning to chez Antitoi. He utilized his 
abilities to recite complex lines of covering-story on addiction while also at the time 
reviewed locking down the face and locations of every person at the Ennet House he 
had regarded. For they would come here again, the A.F.R., and maybe Services Without 
Specificity of Steeply and Tine, as well. He had the ability of splitting his mind's thinking 
along several parallel tracks. 

'The legs — I do an overdose in Berne, which is in my home of Switzerland, while 
alone, and I fall down face-down while my legs, they remain how you say tangle, tangled 
in the chair on which occurred this injection, fix. A stupid. I lie down without conscious 
or to move for many days, and my legs, they — comment-on-dit — they are sleepy, lose 
the circulating, suffer gangrene, become infectious.' Marathe sniffed while stoically 
shrugging. 'As well the nose and mouth, from facial squishing of lying face-down in a 
position without conscious for days. I die almost. All is amputated, for my life. I 
withdraw from the scag, smack, and H, in t'infirmiere. A result of abuse of the drugs.' 

'This is your story. This is your first step.' 

Marathe shrugged. 'My legs, my nose and oral. All as a consequence of the 
progression. At the Chit Chat, I admit all the things, I realize I am addicted desperately.' 
Marathe was trying to decide if to find ways to make the authority woman briefly leave 
the office, so that Marathe might rapidly arm-climb up to the cabinet to regard the 
smiling cases of cartridge closely before the cabinet's locking. Or instead also to return 
on pretext to remain and hang roundly in the living room for waiting persons, to find a 
glimpse of who is this mentioned resident with her female U.H.I.D. veil; for this is the 
purpose of coming to demi-maisons M. Fortier gave. Marathe could give the fact of the 
cartridges to Fortier and the veiled girl to Steeply, or oppositely. The fatigue returned. 
But Steeply, before committing to overt action, will wish for confirmation that those in 
the cabinet were items of the true Entertainment, not the blank and joking F.L.Q. 
displays. There was truly a faint whirring noise coming from the head, he imagined. 
Marathe's sidearm sat in its holster under the seat of him, hidden by the plaid-colored 
blanket of his lap. To easily kill the person in authority was inutile at this time of not 
glimpsing the girl, he had decided, plus impractical of surrounding witness. Marathe's 
fouteuil could travel 45 kph on a level surface over short distance. The authority figure 
liked to comb at the bright hair with her claw of the deformed hand. She was telling 



Marathe the false addict that she found his honesty encouraging and saying to sign 
these forms, for releasing. As Marathe signed slowly the name of a deceased Health- 
Benefits administrator at the Caisse de Depot et Placement, 313 the woman began to ask 
about what lengths he believed he was willing to go to. 


The whole family was lousy with secrets, she'd decided, was part of the nonturkey 
dinner's sadness. From each other, themselves, itself. A big one being this pretense that 
overt eccentricity was the same as openness. I.e. that they were all 'exactly as crazy as 
they seem' — the punter's phrase. 

We're all a lot more intuitive about our lovers' families than we are about our own 
families, she knew. Charlotte Treat's face glistened; her cheek's deep scars were a more 
violent red than the rest. Her ribs under the wet Michelob Dry T-shirt were starting to 
stand out, her neck to get that skinny stemmy look of katexia. She looked like a ravaged 
fowl. Kate Gompert's bed sat unmade, a copy of some yellow paperback called Feeling 
Good open facedown on the mattress and starting to curl. Joelle had this weird fear that 
Gompert, who made Joelle extremely nervous at the best of times, would come home 
and walk in and find Joelle cleaning with her hair in a kerchief and veil damply clinging. 
She used the last of the room's Kleenex dusting all five bedside tables, wiping in careful 
rings around objects she wasn't to touch. 


There was then some trickiness in the situation when the demi-maison's woman 
offered the extension of a place for Marathe. Desperately addicted Henri the Swiss 
could sleep upon the Convertisofa in the rear office this very P.M., she said, if he was 
willing to endure the mess and sometimes insects of the rear office. The woman had a 
ripe spot of sympathique for the disableds, Marathe could see. For trickiness in the 
situation, no lines had been prepared by Fortier to defer this offer of the extension of 
the spot of treatment in the demi-maison. The woman in authority smiled that she could 
see in his playing with the fauteuil's wheels the addicted struggle between desperation 
and denial, she said. Marathe was rapidly calculating should he falsely accept and 
remain here for one night to observe for himself the description of the veiled patient 
from U.H.I.D., against should he exit and roll like no person's business to the nearest 
place of private telephoning to alert the A.F.R. at the shop that here at this demi-maison 
were of possibility real cartridges of the Entertainment, perhaps including a duplicatable 
Master or the anti-samizdat remedy cartridge of F.L.Q.'s allegation, to return to chez 
Antitoi and return later in squeaking force to the demi-maison and acquire both the 
cartridges and the veiled performer, if the U.H.I.D. patient of treatment is revealed as 
the disguised performer. The engineer of radio had spoken volubly of this person's veil 
and screen. Or calculating also whether to telephone not Antitoi Entertainent but the 
24-hour costless prefix of M./Mlle. Steeply and convey the very same information 
instead, finally, first, to Bureau des Services sans Specificite, placing bets on O.N.A.N. 
and against Fortier, casting his lots finally with one side only, conveying his restenotic 
wife and entertainment-hungry children down from St.-Remi-d'Amherst's Convexity- 



ravaged wastes to live with him the rest of their lives down here among U.S.A.'s 
confusion of choices, demanding hidden protection from Steeply and high-income 
medical care for the heart- and head-difficulties of beloved Gertraude. 

Or to tell this figure of medical authority to look out behind for a large spider and 
thereupon snap her slim neck with one hand and use the telephone console in this 
office to summon Fortier and an A.F.R. elite detail directly to this demi-maison. Or else 
to summon directly Steeply and the white-suiting forces of O.N.A.N.. The authority 
made a spire of her fingers beneath her chin and gazed at Marathe's cocked head with a 
face of respect and sympathy but not solicitude, also which made snapping her neck 
with one hand seem a sad choice for Marathe. Fie pretended that it was necessary to 
sniff. Mssrs. Fortier and BroullTme, the A.F.R. others he had known well since the days of 
when they stood together tensed at the crossings of many trains, beneath the sky's 
moon — none of them sensed truly that Marathe has lost the belly for this type of work. 
That Marathe, he must fight the nausea of the stomach as he pushed the sharpened 
handle of the manche a balai broomstick through the Antitoi's insides during the 
technical interview of the Antitoi, and later had vomited out into the alley under 
secrecy. One of the Office's dogs chewed at its haunch with great ferocity, in misery. In 
the U.S.A. of O.N.A.N., M./Mlle. Flugh/Flelen Steeply of the clandestine 
U.S.O.U.S./U.S.B.S.S. would hide the family of Marathe in obscure suburban locales, 
with papers of identity fashioned by specialists in above reproach and no suspicion; and 
Marathe, his familiarity with the knowledge of Quebecois insurgency would be 
comfortably rewarded once Notre Rai Pays seceded to alone draw down the wrath of 
chanteur-fou Gentle's anger. The A.F.R.'s triumph of dissemination of the lethal 
Entertainment would ensure Marathe's valuable welcome by Gentle and his wife's 
beloved treatments for the ventricle and lack of skull. Marathe pictured Gertraude with 
a helmet and hook of gold, breathing easily through expensive tubes. The variable of 
calculus was how long to remain and work for dissemination against when to jump to 
the safety of American welcome. Fortier's wrath would be implacable at Marathe's 
'perdant son coeur,' 314 and it may be far wiser of waiting until Quebec had been evicted 
and the A.F.R. were fully engaged to reveal his quadrupling for O.N.A.N., Marathe. 

Knocking at the Office's door at the same time as entering came a young girl with 
missing teeth, radiating coldness from the exterior outside the demi-maison, leaning 
only her upper half of the body into the office through the doorway she had opened. 

'Clocking in, boss,' the young girl stated in the flat nasality of Boston U.S.A. 

The woman in authority smiled in return. 'Two more to interview, Johnette, then I'm 
off.' 

'Pisser.' 

'Can you let the people in from the shed when they come for Mrs. Lopate?' 

The young and inclined girl nodded her slim head. In a nostril a generic diaper-pin was 
transperce, which glittered in the fluorescence of the light as she nodded. 'And Janice 
says she's screwing out of here now and any message for her before she goes.' The 
authority negated with her head at this. The young girl in the door looked down upon 
Marathe and said 'Hey' or 'Eh' in a greeting of neutral emotions. Marathe smiled with 
desperation and pretended to sniff. Visible smoke's odor came through the open door 



from the noisy salon beyond it. Marathe decided firmly against the snapping of any 
necks upon this visit, because of bodies leaning with suddenness into the office 
unexpectedly. The torso of the person began to withdraw as suddenly the authority 
looked up and stated 'Oh and Johnette?' 

The door swung more open once more as the returned upper half replied 'Yo.' 

'Do me a favor? Clenette H. brought some donie-cartridges down from E.T.A. this 
afternoon?' 

'Let me guess.' 

'The natives are restless.' The authority laughed aloud. 'Something new.' 

The torso laughed as well. 'Did you see McDade's watching that Korean thing again 
out here?' 

'So can you just run them through after lights-out, as many as you can, check and 
make sure they're appropriate?' 

'No skin, no substances, light drinking only,' the young girl said in the manner of 
reviewing the rehearsal of something learned. 

'As many as you can get through, and leave them on Janice's desk, and I'll have her put 
them out at the start of the day-shift tomorrow.' 

The young girl of substitute authority made a curious circle with two of her fingers in 
the air of the doorway. Some kind of signal of the hand to the chief authority. Every 
finger of the hand of the girl wore a ring of different type. 'The natives'll be grateful, for 
once.' 

'They're in the cabinet with the intakes,' the authority told her. 

'I'll watch them during Dream Duty, as many as there's time.' 

'And Johnette?' 

Once more the torso reextended inward. 

The woman with authority said 'And keep Emil and Wade from tormenting David K., 
will you please?' 

Marathe smiled largely as the door closed entirely and the authority made a small 
motion of apologies for being interrupted. 'I do not have these meanings donie and 
natives, if I may boldly ask,' he said. 'Nor etier.' 

A laugh of friendliness. It occurred to Marathe that this was a happy person. 'Domes 
are donated goods. Which we depend on more than we'd like. The residents and alums 
are always on the lookout. Sometimes we call the current residents the natives; we 
mean it as affectionate. That was Johnette, she's living 315 staff. We've got two living 
staff, alums of the house. One's under the weather, but Johnette's — you'll like 
Johnette. Johnette's a keeper. E.T.A. is letters, E-T-A.' 

Marathe pretended to laugh aloud. 'I beg a pardon, for I thought some etier in the 
pronunciation of my native Swiss.' 

The authority smiled with understanding. 'E.T.A.'s a private school. We usually get 
some residents on up there, part-time. It's just up the hill.' Seeing the deep intake of veil 
which his inhaling caused for one moment only, the authority expressed surprise of the 
face and said 'But you did know Ennet's a working house. Residents have a month to 
find work, normally.' Exhaling with care, Marathe gestured faintly as in But of course. 



11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


Part of Mario's footage for the documentary they're letting him do on this fall's E.T.A. 
consists of Mario just walking around different parts of the Academy with the Bolex H64 
camera strapped to his head and joined by coax cable to the foot-treadle, which he 
holds against his sweatered chest with one hand and operates with the other. At 2100 
at night it's cold out. The Center Courts are brightly lit, but only one court is being used, 
Gretchen Holt and Jolene Criess still winding up some sort of marathon challenge from 
the P.M. session, the hands around their grips bluish and sweaty hair frozen into 
electrified spikes, pausing between points to blow noses on sleeves, wearing so many 
layers of sweats they look barrel-bodied out there, and Mario doesn't bother with the 
change in film-speed he'd need to record them through the steamed window of Schtitt's 
room, where he is. The room's noise is deafening. 

Coach Schtitt's room is 106, next to his office on the first floor of Comm.-Ad., past Dr. 
Rusk's office and down a two-corner hall from the lobby. 

It's a big empty room, built for its stereo. Hardwood floor in need of sanding, a 
wooden chair and a cane chair, an army cot. A little low table just big enough for 
Schtitt's pipe rack. A folding card table folded up and leaning against the wall. Acoustic 
damping-tile on all the walls and nothing decorative hanging or mounted on the walls. 
Acoustic tiling on the ceiling also, with a bare overhead light with a long chain mounted 
in a dirty ceiling fan with a short chain. The fan never rotates but sometimes emits a 
sound of faulty wiring. There's a faint odor of Magic Marker in the room. There is 
nothing upholstered, no pillow on the cot, nothing soft to absorb or deflect the sound of 
the equipment stacked on the floor, the black Germanness of a top-shelf sound system, 
a Mario-sized speaker in each corner of the room with the cloth cover removed so each 
woofer's cone is exposed and mightily throbbing. Schtitt's room is soundproofed. The 
window faces the Center Courts, the transom and observatory directly overhead and 
mangling the shadows of the courts' lights. The window is right over the radiator, which 
when the stereo is off makes odd hollow ringing clanky clunks as if someone deep 
underground were having at the pipes with a hammer. The cold window over the 
radiator is steamed and trembles slightly with Wagnerian bass. 

Gerhardt Schtitt is asleep in the cane chair in the middle of the empty room, his head 
thrown back and arms hanging, hands treed with arteries you can see his slow pulse in. 
His feet are stolidly on the floor, his knees spread way out wide, the way Schtitt always 



has to sit, on account of his varicoceles. His mouth is partly open and a dead pipe hangs 
at an alarming angle from its corner. Mario records him sleeping for a little while, 
looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit. What's on and making the 
window shiver and condensed droplets gather and run in little bullet-headed lines down 
the glass is a duet that keeps climbing in pitch and emotion: a German second tenor and 
a German soprano are either very happy or very unhappy or both. Mario's ears are 
extremely sensitive. Schtitt sleeps only amid excruciatingly loud European opera. He's 
shared with Mario several different tales of grim childhood experiences at a BMW- 
sponsored 'Quality-Control-Orientated' Austrian Akademie to account for his REM- 
peculiarities. The soprano leaves the baritone and goes up to a high D and just hangs 
there, either shattered or ecstatic. Schtitt doesn't stir, not even when Mario falls twice, 
loudly, trying to get to the door with his hands over his ears. 

The Community-Administration stairwells are narrow and no-nonsense. Red railings of 
cold iron whose red is one coat of primer. Steps and walls of raw-colored rough cement. 
The sort of sandy echo in there that makes you take stairs as fast as possible. The salve 
makes a sucking sound. The upper halls are empty. Low voices and lights from under the 
doors on the second floor. 2100 is still mandatory Study Period. There won't be serious 
movement till 2200, when the girls will drift from room to room, congregating, doing 
whatever packs of girls in robes and furry slippers do late at night, until deLint kills all 
the dormitory lights at the dorms' main breaker around 2300. Isolated movement: a 
door down the hall opens and shuts, the Vaught twins are heading down the hall to the 
bathroom at the far end, wearing only an enormous towel, one of their heads in curlers. 
One of the falls in Mr. Schtitt's room had been on the burnt hip, and squunched salve 
from the bandage is starting to darken the corduroys at that side of the pelvis, though 
there is zero pain. Three tense voices behind Carol Spodek and Shoshana Abram's door, 
lists of degrees and focal lengths, a study group for Mr. Ogilvie's 'Reflections on 
Refraction' exam tomorrow. A girl's voice from he can't tell which room says 'Steep hot 
beach sea' twice very distinctly and then is still. Mario is leaning back against a wall in 
the hallway, panning idly. Felicity Zweig emerges from her door by the stairwell carrying 
a soap-dish and wearing a towel tied at that breast-level, as if there were breasts, 
moving toward Mario on her way to the head. She puts her hand out straight at his 
head's camera, a kind of distant stiff-arm as she passes: 

'I'm wearing a towel.' 

'I understand,' Mario says, using his arms to turn himself around and pointing the lens 
at the bare wall. 

'I'm wearing a towel.' 

Brisk controlled sounds of retching from behind Diane Prins's door. Mario gets a 
couple seconds of Zweig hurrying away in the towel, tiny little bird steps, looking terribly 
fragile. 

The stairwells smell like the cement they're made of. 

Behind 310, Ingersoll and Penn's door, is the faint rubbery squeak of somebody 
moving around on crutches. Someone in 311 is yelling 'Boner check! Boner check!' A lot 
of the third floor is for boys under fourteen. The hall carpet up here is ectoplasmically 
stained, the expanses of wall between doors hung with posters of professional players 



endorsing gear. Someone has drawn a goatee and fangs on an old Donnay poster of 
Mats Wilander, and the poster of Gilbert Treffert is defaced with anti-Canadian slurs. 
Otis Lord's door has Infirmary next to his name on the door's name-card. Penn's room's 
door's card's name also had Infirmary. Sounds of someone talking low to someone 
who's sobbing from Beak, Whale, and Virgilio's room, and Mario resists an impulse to 
knock. LaMont Chu's door next door is completely covered with magazines' action-shots 
of matches. Mario is leaning back to get footage of the door when LaMont Chu exits the 
bathroom at this end in a terry robe and thongs and wet hair, literally whistling 'Dixie.' 

'Mario!' 

Mario gets him bearing down, his calves hairless and muscular, hair-water dripping 
onto his robe's shoulders with each step. 'LaMont Chu!' 

'What's happening?' 

'Nothing's happening!' 

Chu stands there just within conversation-range. He's only slightly taller than Mario. A 
door down the hall opens and a head sticks out and scans and then withdraws. 

'Well.' Chu squares his shoulders and looks into the camera atop Mario's head. 'You 
want me to say something for posterity?' 

'Sure!' 

'What should I say?' 

'You can say anything you want!' 

Chu draws himself way up and looks penetrating. Mario checks the meter on his belt 
and uses the treadle to shorten the focal length and adjust the angle of the camera's 
lens slightly downward, right at Chu, and there are tiny grinding adjustment-sounds 
from the Bolex. 

Chu's still just standing there. 'I can't think what to say.' 

'That happens to me all the time.' 

'The minute your invitation became official my mind went blank.' 

'That can happen.' 

'There's just this staticky blank field in there now.' 

'I know just what you mean.' 

They stand there silent, the camera's mechanism emitting a tiny whir. 

Mario says 'You just got out of the shower, I can tell.' 

'I was talking with good old Lyle downstairs.' 

'Lyle's terrific!' 

'I was going to just whip right over into the showers, but the locker room's got this, 
like, odor.' 

'It's always great to talk with good old Lyle.' 

'So I came up here.' 

'Everything you're saying is very good.' 

LaMont Chu stands there a moment looking at Mario, who's smiling and Chu can tell 
wants to nod furiously, but can't, because he needs to keep the Bolex steady. 'What I 
was doing, I was filling Lyle in on the Eschaton debacle, telling him about the lack of 
hard info, the conflicted rumors that are going around, about how Kittenplan and some 
of the Big Buds are going to get blamed. About disciplinary action for the Buds.' 



'Lyle's just an outstanding person to go to with concerns,' Mario says, fighting not to 
nod furiously. 

'Lord's head and Penn's leg, the Postman's broken nose. What's going to happen to 
the Incster?' 

'You're acting perfectly natural. This is very good.' 

'I'm asking if you've heard from Hal what they're going to do, if he's in on the blame 
from Tavis. Pemulis and Kittenplan I can see, but I'm having trouble with the idea of 
Struck or your brother taking discipline for what happened out there. They were strictly 
from spectation for the whole thing. Kittenplan's Bud is Spodek, and she wasn't even 
out there.' 

'I'm getting all this, you'll be glad to know.' 

Chu is now looking at Mario, which for Mario is weird because he's looking through 
the viewfinder, a lens-eye view, which means when Chu looks down from the lens to 
look at Mario it looks to Mario like he's looking down south somewhere along Mario's 
thorax. 

'Mario, I'm asking if Hal's told you what they're going to do to anybody.' 

'Is this what you're saying, or are you asking me?' 

'Asking.' 

Chu's face looks slightly oval and convex through the lens's fish-eye, a jutting aspect. 
'So what if I want to use this that you're saying for the documentary I've been asked to 
make?' 

'Jesus, Mario, use whatever you want. I'm just saying I have conscience-trouble with 
the idea of Hal and Troeltsch. And Struck didn't even seem like he was conscious for the 
debacle itself.' 

'I should tell you I feel like we're getting the totally real LaMont Chu here.' 

'Mario, camera to one side. I'm standing here dripping asking you for Hal's impressions 
of when Tavis called them in, as in did he give you impressions. Van Vleck at lunch said 
he yesterday saw Pemulis and Hal coming out of Tavis's office with the Association 
urine-guy holding them both by the ear. Van Vleck said Hal's face was the color of 
Kaopectate.' 

Mario directs the lens at Chu's shower-thongs so he can look over the viewfmder at 
Chu. 'Are you saying this, or is this what happened?' 

'That's what I'm asking you, Mario, if Hal told you what happened.' 

'I follow what you're saying.' 

'So you asked whether I was asking, and I'm asking you about it.' 

Mario zooms in very tight: Chu's complexion is a kind of creamy green, with not one 
follicle in view. 'LaMont, I'm going to find you and tell you whatever Hal tells me, this is 
so good.' 

'So then you haven't talked to Hal?' 

'When?' 

'Jesus, Mario, it's like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes.' 

'This is going very well!' 

Someone gargling. Guglielmo Redondo's voice going through the rosary, it sounds like, 
just inside his and Esteban Reynes's door. The Clipperton Suite in East House had had a 



bright-yellow strip of B.P.D. plastic for over a month, he remembers. The Boys Room 
door a different kind of wood than the room doors. The Clipperton Suite had a glued 
picture of Ross Reat pretending to kiss Clipperton's ring at the net. The roar of a toilet 
and a stall door's squeak. The Academy's plumbing is high-pressure. It takes Mario 
longer to walk down a set of stairs than to walk up. Red primer stains his hand, he has to 
hold the railing so tight. 

The special hush of lobby carpet, and smells of Benson & Hedges brand cigarettes in 
the reception area off the lobby. The little hall doors that are always closed and never 
locked. The rubber sheaths on the knobs. Benson & Hedges cost $5.60 O.N.A.N. a pack 
at Father & Son grocery down the hill. Lateral Alice Moore's desk's plaque's DANGER: 
THIRD RAIL light is unilluminated, and her word-processing setup wears its cover of 
frosted plastic. The blue chairs have the faint imprints of people's bottoms. The waiting 
room is empty and dim. Some light from the lit courts outside. From under double doors 
is lamplight, much attenuated by double doors, from the Headmaster's office, which 
Mario doesn't explore; Tavis is unnerved into such gregarity around Mario it's awkward 
for all parties. 316 If you asked Mario whether he got on with his Uncle C.T. he'd say: Sure. 
The Bolex's light-meter is in the No Way range. Most of the waiting area's available light 
comes from the doorless Dean of Females's office. Meaning the Moms is: In. 

Heavy shag carpet is especially treacherous for Mario when he's top-heavy with 
equipment. Avril Incandenza, a fiend for light, has the whole bank of overheads going, 
two torcheres and some desk lamps, and a B&H cigarette on fire in the big clay ashtray 
Mario'd made her at Rindge and Latin School. She is swivelled around in her swivel- 
chair, facing out the big window behind her desk, listening to someone on the phone, 
holding the transmitter violin-style under her chin and holding up a stapler, checking its 
load. Her desk has what looks like a skyline of stacks of file folders and books in neat 
cross-hatched stacks; nothing teeters. The open book on top facing Mario is Dowty, Wall 
and Peters's seminal Introduction to Montague Semantics, 317 which has very fascinating 
illustrations that Mario doesn't look at this time, trying to film the cock of the Moms's 
head and the phone's extended antenna against the cumulus of her hair from behind, 
capturing her back unawares. 

But the sound of Mario entering even a shag-carpeted room is unmistakable, plus she 
can see his reflection in the window. 

'Mario!' Her arms go up in a V, stapler open in one hand, facing the window. 

'The Moms!' It's a good ten meters past the seminar table and viewer and portable 
blackboard to the far part of the office where the desk is, and each step on the deep 
shag is precarious, Mario resembling a very old brittle-boned man or someone carrying 
a load of breakables down a slick hill. 

'Hel/o/' She's addressing his reflection in the quartered window, watching him put the 
treadle down carefully on the desk and struggle with the pack on his back. 'Not you,' she 
tells the phone. She points the stapler at the image of the Bolex on the image of his 
head. 'Are we On-Air?' 

Mario laughs. 'Would you like to be?' 

She tells the phone she's still here, that Mario's come in. 

'I don't want to intercept your call.' 



'Don't be absurd.' She talks past the phone at the window. She rotates her swivel-chair 
to face Mario, the receiver's antenna describing a half moon and now pointing up at the 
window behind her. There are two blue chairs like the reception-area chairs in front of 
her desk; she doesn't indicate to Mario to sit. Mario's most comfortable standing and 
leaning into the support of the police lock he's trying to detach from his canvas plastron 
and lower, shucking the pack off his back at the same time. Avril looks at him like the 
sort of stellar mother where just looking at her kid gives her joy. She doesn't offer to 
help him get the lock's lead brace out of the pack because she knows he'd feel 
completely comfortable asking for her help if he needed it. It's like she feels these two 
sons are the people in her life with whom so little important needs to be said that she 
loves it. The Bolex and support-yoke and viewfinder over his forehead and eyes give 
Mario an underwater look. His movements, setting and bracing his police lock, are at 
once graceless and deft. The lit Center Courts, now empty, are visible out the left side of 
Avril's window, if you lean far forward and look. Someone has forgotten a gear bag and 
pile of sticks out by the net-post of Court 17. 

Silences between them are totally comfortable. Mario can't tell if the person on the 
phone is still talking or if Avril just hasn't put the dead phone down. She still holds the 
black stapler. Its jaws are open and it looks alligatorish in her hand. 

'Is this you passing through the neighborhood poking a head in to say hello? Or am I a 
subject, tonight?' 

'You can be a subject. Moms.' He moves the big head around in a weary circle. 'I get 
tired from wearing this.' 

'It gets heavy. I've held it.' 

'It's good.' 

'I remember his making that. He took such care making that. It's the last time I believe 
he enjoyed himself on something, thoroughly.' 

'It's terrific!' 

'He took weeks putting everything together.' 

He likes to look at her, too, leaning in and letting her know he likes looking. They are 
the two least embarrassable people either of them knows. She's rarely here this late; 
she has a big study at the HmH. The only thing that ever shows she's tired is that her 
hair gets a sort of huge white cowlick, like a rolling ocean comber of hair, and just on 
one side, the side with the phone, sticking up and touching the antenna. Her hair has 
been pure white since Mario can first remember seeing her looking down at him 
through the incubator's glass. Pictures of her own father's hair were like that. It goes 
down the middle of her back against the chair and down both arms, hanging off the 
arms near the elbow. Its part shows her pink scalp. She keeps the hair very clean and 
well-combed. She has one of Mr. deLint's big whistles around her neck. The big cowlick 
casts a bent shadow on the sill of the window. There's a maple-leaf flag and a 50-star 
U.S.A. flag hanging limp off brass poles on either side of the window; in an extreme 
corner are fleur-de-lis pennons on tall sharp polished sticks. C.T.'s office has an O.N.A.N. 
flag and a 49-star U.S.A. flag. 318 

'I had quality interface dialogue with LaMont Chu upstairs. But I made the girl Felicity, 
the really thin one — she got upset. She said only a towel.' 



'Felicity will be just fine. So you're just strolling. Peripatetic footage.' She refuses to 
adjust syntax, to speak in any way down to him, it'd be beneath him, though he seems 
not to mind when most people do it, speak down. 

Nor will she ask about the burn on his pelvis unless he brings it up. She's careful to 
keep her oar out of Mario's health stuff unless he brings things up, out of concern that it 
might be taken as intrusive or smothering. 

'I saw your lights. Why is the Moms here, still, I thought to myself.' 

She made as if to clutch her head. 'Don't ask. I'll starting whingeing. Tomorrow's going 
to be hellishly busy.' Mario didn't hear her say goodbye to the man as she put down the 
phone so the antenna now points at Mario's chest. She's putting out the nub of the 
Benson & Hedge against the rooster-comb holder he'd squeezed and karate-chopped 
and put down the bowl's center, when he made it, after she'd said she wanted it to be 
an ashtray. 'You give me such pleasure standing there, all outfitted for work,' she said. 
'Aprowl.' She ground individual sparks out in the bowl. She had the idea that her 
smoking around Mario made him worry, though he'd never said anything about it one 
way or the other. 'I have a breakfast engagement at 07, which means I have to do final 
swotting and whacking for morning classes now, so I just lurched back over here to do it 
instead of carrying everything back and forth.' 

'Are you tired?' 

She just smiled at him. 

'This is off.' Pointing at his head. 'I turned it off.' 

To look at them, you'd never guess these two persons were related, one sitting and 
one standing canted forward. 

'Will you eat with us? I hadn't even thought of dinner until I saw you. I don't even 
know what there might be for dinner. Many Wonders. 319 Turkey cartilage. Your bag is by 
the radio. Will you stay again? Charles is still in conference, I believe, he said.' 

'About the debracle with the Eschaton and the Postman's nose?' 

'A person from a magazine has come to do a piece of reportage on your brother. 
Charles is speaking to her in lieu of any of the students. You may speak to her about 
Orin if you like.' 

'She's been aprowl for Hal, Ortho said.' 

Avril has a certain way of cocking her fine head at him. 

'Your poor Uncle Charles has been with Thierry and this magazine person since this 
afternoon.' 

'Have you talked to him?' 

'I've been trying to buttonhole your brother. He's not in your room. The Pemulis 
person was seen by Mary Esther taking their truck before Study Period. Is Hal with him, 
Mario?' 

'I haven't seen Hal since lunchtime. He said he'd had a tooth thing.' 

'I didn't even find out he'd been to see Zeggarelli until today.' 

'He asked about how the burn on my pelvis is.' 

'Which I won't ask about unless you'd care to discuss how it's coming along.' 

'It's fine. Plus Hal said he wishes I'd come back and sleep there.' 

'I left two messages asking him to let me know how the tooth was. Love-o, I feel bad I 



wasn't there for him. Hal and his teeth.' 

'Did C.T. tell what happened? Was he upset? Was that C.T. on the phone you were 
with?' Mario can't see why the Moms would call C.T. on the phone when he was in 
there right across the hall behind his doors. When she didn't smoke a lot of the time she 
held a pen in her mouth; Mario didn't know why. Her college mug has about a hundred 
blue pens in it, on the desk. She likes to square herself in her chair, sitting up extra 
straight and grasping the chair's arms in a commanding posture. She looks like 
something Mario can't place when she does this. He keeps thinking the word typhoon. 
He knows she's not trying to consciously be commanding with him. 

'How was your own day, I want to hear.' 

'Hey Moms?' 

'I determined years ago that my position needs to be that I trust my children, and I'd 
never traffic in third-party hearsay when the lines of communication with my children 
are as open and judgment-free as I'm fortunate they are.' 

'That seems like a really good position. Hey Moms?' 

'So I have no problem waiting to hear about Eschaton, teeth, and urine from your 
brother, who'll come to me the moment it's appropriate for him to come to me.' 

'Hey Moms?' 

'I'm right here, Love-o.' 

Tycoon is the term her commanding way of sitting suggests, grasping her chair, a pen 
clamped in her teeth like a businessman's cigar. There were other carpet-prints in the 
heavy shag. 

'Moms?' 

'Yes.' 

'Can I ask you a thing?' 

'Please do.' 

'This is off,' again indicating the silent apparatus on his head. 

'Is this a confidential thing, then?' 

'There isn't any secret. My day was I was wondering about something. In my mind.' 

'I'm right here for you anytime day or night, Mario, as you are for me, as I am for Hal 
and we all are for each other.' She gestures in a hard-to-describe way. 'Right here.' 

'Moms?' 

'I am right here with my attention completely focused on you.' 

'How can you tell if somebody's sad?' 

A quick smile. 'You mean whether someone's sad.' 

A smile back, but still earnest: 'That improves it a lot. Whether someone's sad, how 
can you tell so you're sure?' 

Her teeth are not discolored; she gets them cleaned at the dentist all the time for the 
smoking, a habit she despises. Hal inherited the dental problems from Himself; Himself 
had horrible dental problems; half his teeth were bridges. 

'You're not exactly insensitive when it comes to people, Love-o,' she says. 

'What if you, like, only suspect somebody's sad. How do you reinforce the suspicion?' 

'Confirm the suspicion?' 

'In your mind.' Some of the prints in the deep shag he can see are shoes, and some are 



different, almost like knuckles. His lordotic posture makes him acute and observant 
about things like carpet-prints. 

'How would I, for my part, confirm a suspicion of sadness in someone, you mean?' 

'Yes. Good. All right.' 

'Well, the person in question may cry, sob, weep, or, in certain cultures, wail, keen, or 
rend his or her garments.' 

Mario nods encouragingly, so the headgear clanks a little. 'But say in a case where 
they don't weep or rend. But you still have a suspicion which they're sad.' 

She uses a hand to rotate the pen in her mouth like a fine cigar. 'He or she might 
alternatively sigh, mope, frown, smile halfheartedly, appear downcast, slump, look at 
the floor more than is appropriate.' 

'But what if they don't?' 

'Well, he or she may act out by seeming distracted, losing enthusiasm for previous 
interests. The person may present with what appears to be laziness, lethargy, fatigue, 
sluggishness, a certain passive reluctance to engage you. Torpor.' 

'What else?' 

'They may seem unusually subdued, quiet, literally "low." 

Mario leans all his weight into his police lock, which makes his head jut, his expression 
the sort of mangled one that expresses puzzlement, an attempt to reason out 
something hard. Pemulis called it Mario's Data-Search Face, which Mario liked. 

'What if sometime they might act even less low than normal. But still these suspicions 
are in your mind.' 

She's about the same height sitting as Mario upright and leaning forward. Now neither 
of them is quite looking at the other, both just a couple degrees off. Avril taps the pen 
against her front teeth. Her phone light is blinking, but there's no ringing. The thing's 
handset's antenna still points at Mario. Her hands are not her age. She hoists the 
executive chair back slightly to cross her legs. 

'Would you feel comfortable telling me whether we're discussing a particular person?' 

'Hey Moms?' 

'Is there someone specific in whom you're intuiting sadness?' 

'Moms?' 

'Is this about Hal? Is Hal sad and for some reason not yet able to speak about it?' 

'I'm just saying how to be generally sure.' 

'And you have no idea where he is or whether he left the grounds this evening sad?' 

Lunch today was the exact same as lunch yesterday: pasta with tuna and garlic, and 
thick wheaty bread, and required salad, and milk or juice, and pears in juice in a dish. 
Mrs. Clark had taken a Sick Morning off because when she came in this morning Pemulis 
at lunch said one of the breakfast girls had said there'd been brooms on the wall in an X 
of brooms, out of nowhere, on the wall, when she'd come in very early to fire up the 
Wheatina-cauldron, and nobody knowing how the brooms were there or why or who 
glued them on had upset Mrs. Clarke's nerves, who'd been with the Incandenzas since 
long before E.T.A., and had nerves. 

'I didn't see Hal since lunchtime. He had an apple he cut into chunks and put peanut 
butter on, instead of pears in juice.' 



Avril nods with vigor. 

'LaMont didn't know either. Mr. Schtitt is asleep in his chair in his room. Hey Moms?' 

Avril Incandenza can switch a Bic from one side of her mouth to the other without 
using her hand; she never knows she's doing it when she's doing it. 'Whether or not 
we're discussing anyone in particular, then.' 

Mario smiles at her. 

'Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of 
sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.' 

'I don't know disassociation.' 

'Well, love, but you know the idiom "not yourself" — "He's not himself today," for 
example,' crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she 
says, which Mario adores. 'There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their 
own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, 
perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional 
engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. 
Would become infinite and engulf them.' 

'Engulf mea ns obliterate.' 

'I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as 
persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is "existential," Mario, which means vague 
and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories 
of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger 
than my father's. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he 
wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of 
money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently 
narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy 
coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain 
smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My 
father's father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry 
juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests 
were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now 
Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness 
about this, though. That he somehow couldn't. My father said his father was frozen, and 
could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a 
year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and 
disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L'lslet Province, drunk and 
enraged.' 

She's not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario's been looking at her. 

She smiled. 'My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when be was drunk. 
He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale 
and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he 
fell out of the chair and didn't get up again, and that was how your maternal 
grandfather passed away. I'd never have gotten to go to University had he not died 
when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his 
era; it wasn't his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university,' 



She's been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into 
the wastebasket, wiping the bowl's inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of 
folders on her desk. A couple odd long crinkly paper strips of bright red hung over the 
side of the wastebasket, which was normally totally empty and clean. 

Avril Incandenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn't ever quite world-class, 
shiny-magazine-class beautiful, but who early on hit a certain pretty high point on the 
beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and lots of other beautiful 
women age too and get less beautiful. She's 56 years old, and Mario gets pleasure out of 
just getting to look at her face, still. She doesn't think she's pretty, he knows. Orin and 
Hal both have parts of her prettiness in different ways. Mario likes to look at Hal and at 
their mother and try to see just what slendering and spacing of different features makes 
a woman's face different from a man's, in attractive people. A male face versus a face 
you can just tell is female. Avril thinks she's much too tall to be pretty. She'd seemed 
much less tall when compared to Himself, who was seriously tall. Mario wears small 
special shoes, almost perfectly square, with weights at the heel and Velcro straps 
instead of laces, and a pair of the corduroys Orin Incandenza had worn in elementary 
school, which Mario still favors and wears instead of brand-new pants he's given, and a 
warm crewneck sweater that's striped like a flea. 

'My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into 
genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They 
are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one 
knows, Love-o. It's sometimes called "suppression," ' with the fingers out to the sides 
again. 'Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. 
There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being that 
the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness's expression must itself feel intensely sad 
and painful. For the hypothetical person in question. There may be sad people right 
here at the Academy who are like this, Mario, and perhaps you're sensitive to it. You are 
not exactly insensitive when it comes to people.' 

Mario scratches his lip again. 

She says 'What I'll do' — leaning forward to write something on a Post-It note with a 
different pen than the one she has in her mouth — 'is to write down for you the terms 
disassociation, engulfment, and suppression, which I'll put next to another word, 
repression, with an underlined unequal sign between them, because they denote 
entirely different things and should not be regarded as synonyms.' 

Mario shifts slightly forward. 'Sometimes I get afraid when you forget you have to talk 
more simply to me.' 

'Well then I'm both sorry for that and grateful that you can tell me about it. I do forget 
things. Particularly when I'm tired. I forget and just get going.' Lining the edges up and 
folding the little sticky note in half and then half again and dropping it into the waste 
basket without having to look for where the wastebasket is. Her chair is a fine executive 
leather swivelling chair but it shrieks a little when she leans back or forward. Mario can 
tell she's making herself not look at her watch, which is all right. 

'Hey Moms?' 

'People, then, who are sad, but who can't let themselves feel sad, or express it, the 



sadness. I'm trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who's 
sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. 
Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. 
Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both 
blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of 
expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the 
flowerbeds she'd so very carefully repaired after the last incident.' 

'Moms, I think I get it.' 

'Is that better, then, instead of my maundering on and on?' 

She's risen to pour herself coffee from the last black bit in the glass pot. So her back is 
almost to him as she stands there at the little sideboard. An old folded pair of U.S.A. 
football pants and a helmet are on top of one of the file cabinets by the flag. Her one 
memento of Orin, who won't talk to them or contact them in any way. She has an old 
mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress small and perspectivally distant in a knee-high 
field of wheat or rye, that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD. A blue blazer 
with an O.N.A.N.T.A. insignia is hung very neatly and straight on a wooden hanger from 
the metal tree of the coatrack in the corner. She's always had her coffee out of the 
OUTSTANDING FIELD mug, even in Weston. The Moms hangs up stuff like shirts and 
blazers neater and more wrinkle-free than anyone alive. The mug has a hair-thin brown 
crack down one side, but it's not dirty or stained, and she never gets lipstick on the rim 
the way other ladies over fifty years old pinken cups' rims. 

Mario was involuntarily incontinent up to his early teens. His father and later Hal had 
changed him for years, never once judging or wrinkling their face or acting upset or sad. 

'But except hey Moms?' 

'I'm still right here.' 

Avril couldn't change diapers. She'd come to him in tears, he'd been seven, and 
explained, and apologized. She just couldn't handle diapers. She just couldn't deal with 
them. She'd sobbed and asked him to forgive her and to assure her that he understood 
it didn't mean she didn't love him to death or find him repellent. 

'Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn't not himself?' 

She especially likes to hold the coffee's mug in both hands. 'Pardon me?' 

'You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it's that they're almost like 
even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it's not that he's blank or 
dead. If he's himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens 
and you still think he's sad, inside, somewhere?' 

One thing that's happened as she got over fifty is she gets a little red sideways line in 
the skin between her eyes when she doesn't follow you. Ms. Poutrincourt gets the same 
little line, and she's twenty-eight. 'I don't follow you. How can someone be too much 
himself?' 

'I think I wanted to ask you that.' 

'Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?' 

'Hey Moms?' 

She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse. 'Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are 
you trying to determine whether I've been sensing that you yourself are sad?' 



Mario's gaze keeps going from Avril to the window behind her. He can activate the 
Bolex's foot-treadle with his hands, if necessary. The Center Courts' towering lights cast 
an odd pall up and out into the night. The sky has a wind in it, and dark thin high clouds 
whose movement's pattern has a kind of writhing weave. All this is visible out past the 
faint reflections of the lit room, and up, the tennis lights' odd small lumes like criss¬ 
crossing spots. 

'Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come 
and tell me you were sad. There would be no need for intuition about it.' 


And plus then to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the 
Enfield Marine Complex below, and beyond that Commonwealth's cars' headers and 
store lights and the robed lit lady's downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth's Hospital. 
Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY 
transmitter, its spin's ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River, the Charles tumid 
with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the 
Storrow 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows 
and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing. 


The dark had a distanceless shape. The room's ceiling might as well have been clouds. 
'Skkkkk.' 

'Booboo?' 

'Skk-kkk.' 

'Mario.' 

'Hal!' 

'Were you asleep there. Boo?' 

'I don't think I was.' 

'Cause I don't want to wake you up if you were.' 

'Is it dark or is it me?' 

'The sun won't be up for a while, I don't think.' 

'So it's dark then.' 

'Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.' 

'You were saying "Thank you Sir may I have another" several times.' 

'Sorry Boo.' 

'Numerous times.' 

'Sorry.' 

'I think I slept right through it.' 

'Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across. You can feel the snores' 
vibrations in your midsection.' 

'I slept right through it. I didn't hear you even come in.' 

'Quite a nice surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed Mario-shape in 
his rack again.' 

l l 



'I hope you didn't move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have 
been asking you. To.' 

'I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show 
me how to ask somebody I don't know to borrow tapes, if we're both devoted.' 

l l 

'Hey Hal?' 

'Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dry-rotted 
somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments 
all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.' 

'All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, 
what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal's urine. Moms asked me where's 
Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check 
up.' 

'Then, without any sort of dream-segue. I'm sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, 
in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier 
keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with 
various bills for teeth.' 

'She wants you to know she trusts you at all times and you're too trustworthy to worry 
about or check up on.' 

'Only not for any teeth of mine. Boo. The bills are for somebody else's teeth, not my 
teeth, and I can't seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this, that they're not for 
my teeth.' 

'I promised LaMont Chu I'd tell him whatever information you told me, he was so 
concerned.' 

'The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part 
of the bills. I put them in my lap until the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top 
and fall to the floor.' 

'LaMont and me had a whole dialogue about his concerns. I like LaMont a lot.' 

'Booboo, do you happen to remember S. Johnson?' 

'S. Johnson used to be the Moms's dog. That passed away.' 

'And you remember how he died, then.' 

'Hey Hal, you remember a period in time back in Weston when we were little that the 
Moms wouldn't go anywhere without S. Johnson? She took him with her to work, and 
had that unique car seat for him when she had the Volvo, before Himself had the 
accident in the Volvo. The seat was from the Fisher-Price Company. We went to 
Himself's opening of Kinds of Light at the Hayden 320 that wouldn't let in cigarettes or 
dogs and the Moms brought S. Johnson in a blind dog's harness-collar that went all the 
way around his chest with the square bar on the leash thing and the Moms wore those 
sunglasses and looked up and to the right the whole time so it looked like she was 
legally blind so they'd let S.J. into the Hayden with us, because he had to be there. And 
how Himself just thought it was a good one on the Hayden, he said.' 

'I keep thinking about Orin and how he stood there and lied to her about S. Johnson's 
map getting eliminated.' 

'She was sad.' 



'I've been thinking compulsively about Orin ever since C.T. called us all in. When you 
think about Orin what do you think. Boo?' 

'The best was remember when she had to fly and wouldn't put him in a cagey box and 
they wouldn't even let a blind dog on the plane, so she'd leave S. Johnson and leave him 
out tied to the Volvo and she'd make Orin put a phone out there with its antenna up 
during the day out by where S. Johnson was tied to the Volvo and she'd call on the 
phone and let it ring next to S. Johnson because she said how S. Johnson knew her 
unique personal ring on the phone and would hear the ring and know that he was 
thought about and cared about from afar, she said?' 

'She was unbent where that dog was concerned, I remember. She bought some kind 
of esoteric food for it. Remember how often she bathed it? 

l l 

'What was it with her and that dog. Boo?' 

'And the day we were out rolling balls in the driveway and Orin and Marlon were there 
and S. Johnson was there lying there on the driveway tied to the bumper with the 
phone right there and it rang and rang and Orin picked it up and barked into it like a dog 
and hung it up and turned it off?' 

i i 

'So she'd think it was S. Johnson? The joke that Orin thought was such a good one?' 

'Jesus, Boo, I don't remember any of that.' 

'And he said we'd get Indian Rub-Burns down both arms if we didn't pretend how we 
didn't know what she was talking about if and when she asked us about the bark on the 
phone when she got home? 

'The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well.' 

'We were supposed to shrug and look at her like she was minus cards from her deck, 
or else?' 

'Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I've been 
remembering.' 

'He made us laugh really hard a lot of times, though. I miss him.' 

'I don't know whether I miss him or not.' 

'I miss Family Trivia. Do you remember four times he let us sit in on when they played 
Family Trivia?' 

'You've got a phenomenal memory for this stuff. Boo.' 

l l 

'You probably think I'm wondering why you don't ask me about the thing with C.T. and 
Pemulis and the impromptu urine, after the Eschaton debacle, where the urologist took 
us right down to the administrative loo and was going to watch personally while we 
filled his cups, like watch it go in, the urine, to make sure it came from us personally.' 

'I think I especially have a phenomenal memory for things I remember that I liked.' 

'You can ask, if you like.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'The key datum is that the O.N.A.N.T.A. guy didn't actually extract urine samples from 
us. We got to hold on to our urine, as the Moms no doubt knows quite well, don't kid 
yourself, from C.T.' 



'I have a phenomenal memory for things that make me lough is what I think it is.' 

'That Pemulis, without self-abasement or concession of anything compromising, got 
the guy to give us thirty days — the Fundraiser, the What-a-Burger, Thanksgiving Break, 
then Pemulis, Axford and I pee like racehorses into whatever-sized receptacles he 
wants, is the arrangement we made.' 

'I can hear Schacht, you're right. Also the fans.' 

'Boo?' 

'I like the fans' sound at night. Do you? It's like somebody big far away goes like: 
it'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK, over and over. From very far away.' 

'Pemulis — the alleged weak-stomached clutch-artist — Pemulis showed some serious 
brass under pressure, standing there over that urinal. Fie played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man 
like a fine instrument. I found myself feeling almost proud for him.' 

I l 

'You might think I'm wondering why you aren't asking me why thirty days, why it was 
so important to extract thirty days from the blue-blazered guy before a G.C./M.S. scan. 
As in what is there to be afraid of, you might ask.' 

'Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every 
way, Hal.' 

'Jesus, it's just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes. Boo.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'Except with you I can feel you mean it.' 

'You're up on your elbow. You're on your side, facing my way. I can see your shadow.' 

'How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether 
you're ever being lied to, I sometimes wonder, Booboo. Like what criteria brought to 
bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?' 

'You always get hard to understand when you're up on your side on your elbow like 
this.' 

'Maybe it just doesn't occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it's never once struck 
you that something's being fabricated, misrepresented, skewed. Hidden.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'And maybe that's the key. Maybe then whatever's said to you is so completely 
believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air 
toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off 
the other person's stick.' 

l l 

'You know, for me. Boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I've found. 
Maybe I can't change the spin the way you can, and this is all I've been able to do, is 
assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.' 

l l 

'Some people, from what I've seen. Boo, when they lie, they become very still and 
centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person 
they lie to. The person to whom they're lying. Another type becomes fluttery and 
insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if 
credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides 



that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug 
through a windowscreen.' 

'Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn't think he was.' 

'Would that that were a trait family-wide. Boo.' 

'Maybe if we call him he'll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him if you want to if 
you ask, maybe.' 

'Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These'll tell you a surreal 
and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the 
original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real 
lie'll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type's mercifully 
easy to see through.' 

'The merciful type of lie.' 

'Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo 
formations of detail and amendment, and that's how you can always tell. Pemulis was 
like that, I always thought, til his performance over the urinal.' 

'Rococo's a pretty word.' 

'So now I've established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who 
used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo 
elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, 
seeming somehow bored, like what he's saying is too obviously true to waste time on.' 

l l 

'I've established that as a sort of subtype.' 

'You sound like you can always tell.' 

'Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there. Boo. It was an incredibly high- 
pressure moment. I never thought he had it in him. He was nerveless and stomachless. 
He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount. His 
face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would have believed 
he had that kind of performance in him.' 

'Psychosis live on the radio used to read an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time 
where Eve Arden says: "The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation," 
quote.' 

'The truth is nobody can always tell. Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex 
and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close to the truth's heart for you to tell.' 

'I can't ever tell. You wanted to know. You're right. It never crosses my mind.' 

l l 

'I'm the type that'd buy land, I think.' 

'You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?' 

'Boy do I ever.' 

'Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or 
vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might 
be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.' 

'But then how do you know they're monsters, then?' 

'That's the monstrosity right there. Boo, I'm starting to think.' 

'Golly Ned.' 



'That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced. 


'Can I ask you how it is being in that thing?' 

'Thing?' 

'You know. Don't play dumb and embarrass me.' 

'A wheelchair is a thing which: you prefer it or do not prefer, it is no distance. 
Difference. You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?' 

'I can't believe I'm drinking. There's all these people in the House they're always 
worried they're going to drink. I'm in there for drugs. I've never had more than a beer 
ever in my life. I only came in here to throw up from getting mugged. Some street guy 
was offering to be a witness and he would not leave me alone. I didn't even have any 
money. I came in here to vomit.' 

'I know what it is you are meaning.' 

'What's your name one more time?' 

'I call myself Remy.' 

'This is a beautiful thing as Hester would say. I don't feel horrid anymore. Ramy I feel 
better than I feel, felt in ever so I don't know how long. This is like novocaine of the soul. 
I'm like: why was I spending all that time doing one-hitters when this is really what / call 
feeling better.' 

'Us, I do not take any drugs. I drink infrequently.' 

'Well you're making up for lost time I have to say.' 

'When I drink I have many drinks. This is how it is for my people.' 

'My mom won't even have it in the house. She said it's what made her father drive 
into concrete and wipe out his entire family. Which like I'm so tired of hearing it. I came 
in here — what is this place?' 

'This, it is Ryle's Inman Square Club of Jazz. My wife is dying at home in my native 
province.' 

'There's this thing in the Big Book they make us every Sunday we have to drag 
ourselves out of bed at the absolute crack of dawn and sit in a circle and read out of it 
and half the people can barely even read and it's excruciating to listen to!' 

'You should make your voice lower, for in the hours of no jazz they enjoy low voices, 
coming in for quiet.' 

'And there's a thing about a car salesman trying to quit drinking, it's about the they 
call it the insanity of the first one, drink — he comes in a bar for a sandwich and a glass 
of milk — are you hungry?' 

'Non. 1 

'What am I saying I don't have any money. I don't even have my purse. This stuff 
makes you stupid but it makes you feel quite a bit improved. He wasn't thinking of a 
drink and then all of a sudden he thinks of a drink. This guy-' 

'Out of a blue place, in one flashing instant.' 

'Exactly. But the insanity is after all this time in hospitals and losing his business and 
his wife because of drinking he suddenly gets it into his head that one drink won't hurt 
him if he puts it in a glass of milk. a 



'Crazy in his head. 1 

'So when this absolutely reptilian character you saved me from by sitting down, rolling 
over, whatever. Sor-ry. When he says can he buy me a drink the book flashes in my mind 
and for sort of as it felt like a joke I ordered Kahlua and milk.' 

'Me, I come in for nights I am tired, after the music has packed away, for the quiet. I 
use the telephone here as well, sometimes.' 

'I mean even before the mugging I was walking along soberly deciding how to kill 
myself, so it seems a little silly to worry about drinking.' 

'You have a certain expression of resemblance of my wife.' 

'Your wife is dying. Jesus I'm sitting here laughing and your wife is dying. I think it's 
that I haven't felt decent in so freaking long, do you know what I'm saying? I'm not 
talking like good , I'm not talking like pleasure, I wouldn't want to go overboard with this 
thing, but at least at like zero, even, what do they call it Feeling No Pain.' 

'I know of this meaning. I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will 
kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and 
telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles my wife. 
I think: Remy, it is time for many drinks.' 

'Well / think you're nice. I think you just about saved my life. I've spent like nine weeks 
feeling so bad I wanted to just about kill myself, both getting high and not. Dr. Garton 
never mentioned this. He talked plenty about shock but he never even freaking 
mentioned Kahlua and milk.' 

'Katherine, I will tell you a story about feeling so bad and saving a life. I do not know 
you but we are drunk together now, and will you hear this story?' 

'It's not about Hitting Bottom ingesting any sort of Substance and trying to Surrender, 
is it?' 

'My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss. My legs, 
they were lost in the teenage years being struck by a train.' 

'That must have smarted.' 

'I would have temptation to say you have no idea. But I am sensing you have an idea 
of hurting.' 

'You have no idea. 1 

'I am in early twenty years, without the legs. Many of my friends also: without legs.' 

'Must have been an awful train crash.' 

'Also my own father: dead when his Kenbeck pacemaker came within range of a 
misdialed number of a cellular phone far away in Trois Rivieres, in a freakish occurrence 
of tragedy.' 

'My dad emotionally abandoned us and moved to Portland, which is in Oregon, with 
his therapist.' 

'Also in this time, my Swiss nation, we are a strong people but not strong as a nation, 
surrounded by strong nations. There is much hatred of our neighbors, and unfairness.' 

'It all started when my mom found a picture of his therapist in his wallet and goes 
"What's that doing in here?"' 

'It is, for me, who I am weak, so painful to be without legs in the early twenty years. 
One feels grotesque to people; one's freedom is restricted. I have no chances now for 



jobs in the mines of Switzerland.' 

'The Swiss have gold mines.' 

'As you say. And much beautiful territory, which the stronger nations at the time of 
losing my legs committed paper atrocities to my nation's land.' 

Trucking bastards.' 

'It is a long story to the side of this story, but my part of the Swiss nation is in my time 
of no legs invaded and despoiled by stronger and evil hated and neighboring nations, 
who claim as in the Anschluss of Hitler that they are friends and are not invading the 
Swiss but conferring on us gifts of alliance.' 

'Total dicks.' 

'It is to the side, but for my Swiss friends and myself without legs it is a dark period of 
injustice and dishonor, and of terrible pain. Some of my friends roll themselves off to 
fight against the invasion of paper, but me, I am too painful to care enough to fight. To 
me, the fight seems without point: our own Swiss leaders have been subverted to 
pretend the invasion is alliance; we very few legless young cannot repel an invasion; we 
cannot even make our government admit that there is an invasion. I am weak and, in 
pain, see all is pointless: I do not see the meaning of choosing to fight.' 

'You're depressed is what you are.' 

'I see no point and do no work and belong to nothing; I am alone. I think of death. I do 
nothing but frequently drink, roll around the despoiled countryside, sometimes dodging 
falling projectiles of invasion, thinking of death, bemoaning the depredation of the Swiss 
land, in great pain. But it is myself I bemoan. I have pain. I have no legs.' 

'I'm Identifying every step of the way with you, Ramy. Oh God, what did I say?' 

'And us, our Swiss countryside is very hilly. The fauteuil, it is hard to push up many 
hills, then one is braking with all the might to keep from flying out of control on the 
downhill.' 

'Sometimes it's like that walking, too.' 

'Katherine, I am, in English, moribund. I have no legs, no Swiss honor, no leaders who 
will fight the truth. I am not alive, Katherine. I roll from skiing lodge to tavern, frequently 
drinking, alone, wishing for my death, locked inside my pain in the heart. I wish for my 
death but have not the courage to make actions to cause death. I twice try to roll over 
the side of a tall Swiss hill but cannot bring myself. I curse myself for cowardice and 
inutile. I roll about, hoping to be hit by a vehicle of someone else, but at the last minute 
rolling out of the path of vehicles on Autoroutes, for I am unable to will my death. The 
more pain in my self, the more I am inside the self and cannot will my death, I think. I 
feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or choose anything 
outside it. Unable to see anything or feel anything outside my pain.' 

'The billowing shaped black sailing wing. I am so totally Identifying it's not even funny.' 

'My story it was one day at the top of a hill I had drunkenly labored for many minutes 
to roll to the crest, and looking out over the downhill slope I see a small hunched 
woman in what I am thinking is a metal hat far below at the bottom, attempting the 
crossing of the Swiss Provincial Autoroute at the bottom, in the middle of the Provincial 
Autoroute, this woman, standing and staring in the terror at one of the hated long and 
shiny many-wheeled trucks of our paper invaders, bearing down upon her at high 



speeds in the hurry to come despoil part of the Swiss land.' 

'Like one of those Swiss metal helmets? Is she scrambling crazily to get out of the 
way?' 

'She is standing transfixed with horror of the truck — identically as I had been 
motionless and transfixed by horror inside me, unable to move, like one of the many 
moose of Switzerland transfixed by the headlights of one of the many logging-trucks of 
Switzerland. The sunlight is reflecting madly on her metal hat as she is shaking her head 
in terror and she is clutching her — pardon me, but her female bosom, as if the heart of 
her would explode from the terror.' 

'And you think. Oh fuck me, just great, another horrible thing I'm going to have stand 
here and witness and then go feel pain over.' 

'But the great gift of this time today at the hilltop above the Provincial Autoroute is I 
do not think of me. I do not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I release 
my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-outing numerous places 
on the bumps and rocks of the hill's slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schussch at 
enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the 
Provincial Auto-route into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, 
which had not slowed.' 

'Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical 
depression by being a freaking hero.' 

'We rolled and tumbled down the embanking on the Autoroute's distant side, causing 
my chair to tip and injuring a stump of me, and knocking away her thick metal hat.' 

'You saved somebody's freaking life, Ramy. I'd give my left nut for a chance to pull 
myself out of the shadow of the wing that way, Ramy.' 

'You are not seeing this. It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life. 
For this saved my life. This moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant 
and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my 
thinking of my life. Her, she allowed this will without thinking. She with one blow broke 
the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation. When I had crawled back to 
my fauteuil and placed my tipped fauteuil aright and I was again seated I realized the 
pain of inside no longer pained me. I became, then, adult. I was permitted leaving the 
pain of my own loss and pain at the top of Switzerland's Mont Papineau.' 

'Because suddenly you gazed at the girl without her metal hat and felt a rush of 
passion and fell madly in love enough to get married and roll together off into the s—' 

'She had no skull, this woman. Later I am learning she had been among the first Swiss 
children of southwestern Switzerland to become born without a skull, from the toxicities 
in association of our enemy's invasion on paper. Without the confinement of the metal 
hat the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes 
and oral cavity greatly distended from this hanging, and sounds exiting this cavity which 
were difficult to listen.' 

'But still, something about her moved you to fall madly in love. Her gratitude and 
humility and acceptance and that kind of quiet dignity really horribly handic— birth- 
defected people usually have.' 

'It was not mad. I had already chosen. The unclamping of the brakes of the fauteuil 



and schussching to the Autoroute — this was the love. I had chosen loving her above my 
lost legs and this half a self.' 

'And she looked at your missing limbs and didn't even see them and chose you right 
back — result: passionate love.' 

'There was for this woman in the embanking no possible choosing. Without the 
containing helmet all energies in her were committed to the shaping of the oral cavity in 
a shape that allowed breathing, which was a task of great enormity, for her head it had 
also neither muscles nor nerves. The special hat had found itself dented in upon one 
side, and I had not the ability to shape my wife's head into a shape that I could stuff the 
sac of her head into the hat, and I chose to carry her over my shoulders in a high-speed 
rolling to the nearest Swiss hopital specializing in deformities of grave nature. It was 
there I learned of the other troubles.' 

'I think I'd like a couple more Kahlua and milks.' 

'There was the trouble of the digestive tracking. There were seizures also. There were 
progressive decays of circulation and vessel, which calls itself restenosis. There were the 
more than standard accepted amounts of eyes and cavities in many different stages of 
development upon different parts of the body. There were the fugue states and rages 
and frequency of coma. She had wandered away from a public institution of Swiss 
charitable care. Worst for choosing to love was the cerebro-and-spinal fluids which 
dribbled at all times from her distending oral cavity.' 

'And but your passionate love for each other dried up her cerebro-spinal drool and 
ended the seizures and there were certain hats she looked so good in it just about drove 
you mad with love? Is that it?' 

'Garqon!' 

'Is the madly-in-love part coming up?' 

'Katherine, I had too believed there was no love without passion. Pleasure. This was 
part of the pain of the no legs, this fear that for me there would be no passion. The fear 
of the pain is many times worse than the pain of the pain, n'est ce —?' 

'Ramy I don't think I'm like thinking this is a feel-better story at all.' 

'I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m'epouse au 
future, behind at the hopital of grave nature and to wheel off into my new life of 
uncaged acceptance and choice. I would roll into the fraying of battle for my despoiled 
nation, for now I saw the point not of winning but of choosing merely to fight. But I had 
travelled no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil when the old despair of 
before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within several 
revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain that made 
me not choose. Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife.' 

'You're saying this is love? This isn't love. I'll know when it's love because of the way 
it'll feel. It won't be about spinal fluid and despair believe you me. Bucko. It'll be about 
your eyes meet across someplace and both your knees give out and from that second 
forward you know you're not going to be alone and in hell. You're not half the guy I 
started to think you might have been, Ray.' 

'I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out 
of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself. 



there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.' 

'This is love? It's like you were chained to her. It's like if you tried to get on with your 
own life the pain of the clinical depression came back. It's like the clinical depression 
was a shotgun nudging you down the wedding aisle. Was there a wedding aisle? Could 
she even get down a wedding aisle?' 

'My wife's wedding helmet was of the finest nickel mined and molded by friends in the 
nickel mines of southwest Switzerland. Each of us, we were rolled down the aisle in 
special conveyings. Hers with special pans and drains, for the fluids. It was the happiest 
day ever for me, since the train. The cleric asked did I choose this woman. There was a 
long time of silence. My whole very being came to a knifelike point in that instant, 
Katharine, my hand holding tenderly the hook of my wife.' 

'Hook? As in hand-hook?' 

'I have been knowing since the wedding night her death was coming. Her restenosis of 
the heart, it is irreversible. Now my Gertraude, she has been in a comatose and 
vegetating state for almost one year. This coma has no exit, it is said. The advanced 
Jaarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart is said by the public-aid cardiologists of Switzerland to 
be her chance for life. With it they say my wife can live for many more years in a 
comatose and vegetated state.' 

'So you're down here like pressing your case to the Jaarvik IX people at Harvard or 
wherever.' 

'It is for her I betray my friends and cell, the cause of my nation, which now that 
victory and independence of the neighbors is possible I am betraying it.' 

'You're spying and betraying Switzerland to try and keep alive somebody with a hook 
and spinal fluid and no skull in an irreversible coma? And I thought / was disturbed. 
You're making me totally reorient my idea of disturbed, mister.' 

'I am not telling for disturbing you, poor Katherine. I am telling of pain and saving a 
life, and love.' 

'Well, Ray, far be it from far for me, but that's not love: that's low self-esteem and self¬ 
abuse and Settling For Less, choosing a coma over your comrades. Assuming you're even 
not totally lying to get me into the hay or some fucked-up disturbed sicko shit like that.' 

This -' 

'Which I've got to tell you, saying I remind you of her isn't exactly the way to sweep my 
feet off, you know what I'm saying here?' 

'This is what is hard to tell. To ask any person to see. It is no choice. It is not choosing 
Gertraude over the A.F.R., my companions. Over the causes. Choosing Gertraude to love 
as my wife was necessary for the others, these other choices. Without the choice of her 
life there are no other choices. I tried leaving at the commencement. I got only very few 
revolutions of the fauteuil.' 

'Sounds more like a gun to your head than a choice. If you can't choose the other way, 
there's no choice.' 

'No, but this choice, Katherine: I made it. It chains me, but the chains are of my choice. 
The other chains: no. The others were the chains of not choosing.' 

'Do you have a twin that just came in and sat down just to the left of you but is also 
like about one-third overlapping on you?' 



'You are merely drunk. This will happened quickly if unused to alcohol. Nausea often 
accompanies this. Do not be alarmed if there is visual doubling, losing balance, and 
nausea of the stomach.' 

'The price of a like complete normal human digestive tract. I used to throw up every 
morning without drinking. Rain and shine both.' 

'You think there is no love without the pleasure, the no-choice compelling of passion.' 

'I appreciate the drinks and all, but I don't think I'm going to like memorize a lecture 
on love from somebody who marries somebody with cerebro-fluid spewing out of their 
mouth, no offense intended.' 

'As you say. My opinions are only that the love you of this country speak of yields none 
of the pleasure you seek in love. This whole idea of the pleasure and good feelings being 
what to choose. To give yourself away to. That all choice for you leads there — this 
pleasure of not choosing.' 

'Don't grudge me a little feeling good, of all people, Ray, asshole, shit-puddle, 
Swisshead.' 

l l 

'Is it better to throw up right away or try to wait before you throw up, Mr. Drinking 
Expert?' 

'I am thinking: what if I were to claim we might leave and I could lead you only three 
streets from here and show you something with this promise: you would feel more good 
feeling and pleasure than ever before for you: you would never again feel sorrow or pity 
or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing. I am thinking of this offer: you 
would reply to me what?' 

7 voot make ze hreply zat I've heard that one before, asshole, and from... from guys 
with a little more to them south of the waist, if you follow.' 

'I do not understand.' 

'What I'd reply is I'm a shitty lay. As in sex-partner. I've only ever been sexual twice, 
and both times it was awful, and Brad Anderson when I called and said why didn't you 
call again Brad Anderson you know what he said? He said I was a lousy lay and my 
snatch was sure awful big for somebody with such a little flat ass. Brad Anderson said.' 

'No. No. You are not understanding.' 

'That's just what / said.' 

'You would say No Thank You, you are saying, but this is because you would not 
believe my claim.' 

l l 

'If my claim, it was true, you would say yes, Katherine, no?' 

l l 

'Yes?' 


'Now you're not on your side anymore, Hal, I can see. When you're on your back you 
don't have a shadow.' 

l l 

'Hey Hal?' 



'Yes, Mario.' 

'I'm sorry if you're sad, Hal. You seem sad.' 

'I smoke high-resin Bob Hope in secret by myself down in the Pump Room off the 
secondary maintenance tunnel. I use Visine and mint toothpaste and shower with Irish 
Spring to hide it from almost everyone. Only Pemulis knows the true extent.' 

l l 

'I'm not the one C.T. and the Moms want gone. I'm not the one they suspect. Pemulis 
publicly dosed his opponent at Port Washington. It was impossible to miss. The kid was 
a devout Mormon. The dose was impossible to miss. Sales of Visine bottles of pre¬ 
adolescent urine during quarterly tests have been noted, it turns out, and classed as a 
Pemulis production.' 

'Selling Visine bottles?' 

'I'd be immune to expulsion anyway, obviously, as the Moms's relative. But I'm 
suspected of nothing other than ill-considered moral paralysis out there on I. Day. My 
urine and Axhandle's urine are just to establish a context of objectivity for Pemulis's 
urine. It's Pemulis they want. I'm almost positive they're going to give Pemulis the Shoe 
by the end of the term. I don't know whether Pemulis knows this or not.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'Normally they're after steroids, endocrine synthetics, mild 'drines, when they test. 
The O.N.A.N.T.A. guy gave indications this one'll be a full-spectrum scan. Gas 
chromatography followed by electron-bombardment, with spectrometer readings on 
the resultant mass-fragments. The real McCoy. The kind the Show uses.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'Mike stands there and says what if hypothetically somebody was downwind from 
substances and got exposed and so on. Claimed vague memories of a poppy-seed bagel. 
Not at all Pemulis's normal rococo type of lie. This one had a kind of weary earnestness. 
The guy in the blazer said he'd go ahead and give us thirty days before a full-spectrum 
scan. Mike had pointed out that there was an enormous lady from Moment due to 
arrive and snuffle around, making it a really unfortunate time for any outside-chance 
inadvertent scandals for anybody. It was like the guy needed hardly any prodding to give 
us time to clean out the system. O.N.A.N.T.A. doesn't want to catch anybody, really. 
Good clean fun and so on and so forth.' 

l l 

'The ingenious layer to the lie was that the guy thought the thirty days' grace was for 
Pemulis. That it was what Pemulis needed. Pemulis could pass a urine test hanging 
upside down in a high wind. Guy watching or not. He has a whole unpleasant 
catheterization technique you don't want to hear about. He's checked it. And Tenuates 
are apparently the Indy-type car of 'drines, he says; his own urine can be all innocent 
and pale with two days' warning, as long as he stays off the Bob.' 

l l 

'Booboo, the thirty days was actually for me, and Mike let me stand there with my 
Unit out and not say anything while he sold the urologist land and magazine 
subscriptions and Ginsu knives. He did it for me, and I'm not even the one they want.' 

'You can tell me whatever you said.' 



'What I do in secret. Boo, Mike says no more than thirty days to get it all out for sure. 
Cranberry juice, Calli tea, vinegar in water. Plus or minus a couple days. The Bob Hope I 
smoke and hide. Boo, it's fat-soluble. It stays in there, in the body's fat.' 

'Mrs. Clarke told Bridget the human brain is high in fat, Bridget said.' 

'Mario, if I get caught. If I come up dirty-urined in front of O.N.A.N.T.A., what could 
C.T. do? It's not just that I'd lose my even year in 18's. He'd have to give me the Shoe if 
he'd brought O.N.A.N.T.A. into it. And what about Himself's memory? I'm directly 
related to Himself. Not to mention Orin. And meanwhile here's this Moment lady 
lumbering around looking for family linen.' 

'Troeltsch says she all she wants to do is soften Orin's profile.' 

'The hideous thing is how brightly it'd come out, if I flunk a urine. 

E.T.A.'II be publicly hurt. Hence Himself's memory, hence Himself.' 

l l 

'And it'd kill the Moms, Mario. It'd be a terrible kertwang on the Moms. Not so much 
the Hope. The secrecy of it. That I hid it from her. That she'll feel I had to hide it from 
her.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'Something terrible will happen if she finds out I hid it from her.' 

'Thirty days is one calendar month of Calli tea and juice, you're saying.' 

'Of tea and vinegar and total abstinence. Of no substances whatsoever. Of abrupt and 
total withdrawal while I try to justify my seed at the WhataBurger and maybe get 
offered up to Wayne at the Fundraiser. And then your birthday in two weeks.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'Jesus and then the SAT's in December, I'll have to finish prepping for the Boards and 
then take the Boards while still in abrupt withdrawal.' 

'You'll get a perfect score. Everybody's betting you get a perfect score. I've heard 
them.' 

'Marvelous. That's just exactly what I need to hear.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'And of course you're hurt. Boo, that I've tried to hide all of it from you.' 

'I'm zero percent hurt, Hal.' 

'And of course you're wondering why I didn't just tell you when of course you knew 
anyway, knew something, the times hanging upside-down in the weight room with a 
forehead Lyle didn't even want to get near. You sitting there letting me say I was just 
really really tired and nightmare-ridden.' 

'I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it's right to.' 

'Marvelous.' 

'I feel like you're the only one who knows when it's right to tell. I can't know for you, 
so why should I be hurt.' 

'Be a fucking human being for once. Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let 
you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.' 

'I wasn't hurt. I don't want you to be sad.' 

'You can get hurt and mad at people. Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. 
It's called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go 



away. You don't have to put on a Moms-act of total trust and forgiveness. One liar's 
enough.' 

'You're scared your pee might still flunk after one calendar month.' 

'Jesus it's like talking to a big poster of some smily-faced guy. Are you in there?' 

'And you can't use a Visine bottle of pee because the man will be right there looking at 
your penis, and Trevor and Pemulis's penises.' 

'The sun's thinking about coming up in the window. You can see it.' 

'It's been like forty hours without Bob Hope and already I'm bats inside and I can't 
sleep without more of the horror-show dreams. I feel like I'm stuck halfway down a 
chimney.' 

'You beat Ortho, and your toothache's gone.' 

Temulis and Axhandle say a month'll be tit. Pemulis's only concern is is this DMZ he 
got for the WhataBurger detectable. He goes to the library and pores. He's fully alert 
and functional. 321 It seems different with me. Boo. I feel a hole. It's going to be a huge 
hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole.' 

'So what do you think you should do?' 

'And the hole's going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different 
directions. I'll fly apart in midair. I'll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in 
front of all these people who knew Himself and think I'm different. Whom I've lied to, 
and liked it. It'll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.' 

'Hey Hal?' 

'And it'll kill her. I know it will. It will kill her dead, Booboo, I'm afraid.' 

'Hey Hal? What are you going to do?' 

l l 

'Hal?' 

'Booboo, I'm up on my elbow again. Tell me what you think I should do.' 'Me tell you?' 

'I'm just two big aprick ears right here. Boo. Listening. Because I do not know what to 
do.' 

'Hal, if I tell you the truth, will you get mad and tell me be a fucking?' 

'I trust you. You're smart. Boo.' 

Then Hal?' 

'Tell me what I should do.' 

'I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.' 

l l 

'Do you see what I mean?' 



17 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


In Don Gately's medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts on 
Dream Duty and was in the front office just after 0830 writing up the previous night in 
the Log, trying to think of synonyms for boredom and periodically dipping a finger in her 
scalding coffee to stay awake, plus listening to distant toilets flush and showers hiss and 
residents clunking sleepily around in the kitchen and dining room and everything like 
that, when somebody all of a sudden starts knocking at the House's front door, which 
meant that the person was like a newcomer or stranger, since people in the Ennet 
House recovery community know that the front door's unlocked at 0800 and always 
completely open to all but the Law as of 0801. 

The residents these days all know not to answer any knocks at the door themselves. 

So Johnette F. at first thought it might be some more of those kind of police 322 that 
wore suits and ties, come to depose more residents as witnesses on the Lenz-and- 
Gately-and-Canadian fuck-up and everything like that; and Johnette got out the 
clipboard with the names of all the residents with unresolved legal issues who needed 
to be put upstairs out of sight before any police were let on the premises. A couple of 
the residents on the list were in the dining room in full view, eating cereal and smoking. 
Johnette carried the clipboard as a kind of emblem of authority as she went to the 
window by the front door to check out the knocking party and everything like that. 

And but the kid at the door there was no way he was police or court-personnel, and 
Johnette opened the unlocked door and let him in, not bothering to explain that nobody 
had to knock. It was an upscale kid about Johnette's own age or slightly less, coughing 
against the foyer's pall of A.M. smoke, saying he wanted to speak in comparative private 
to someone in whatever passed here for authority, he said. This kid he had the sort of 
cool aluminum sheen of an upscale kid, a kid with either a weird tan or a weird 
windburn on top of a tan, and just the whitest Nike hightops Johnette had ever seen, 
and ironed jeans, as in with like a crease down the front, and a weird woolly-white 
jacket with A.T.E. in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other, and slicked-back dark 
hair that was wet, as in showered and not oil, and had half frozen, the hair, in the early 
outside cold and was standing up straight and frozen in front, making his dark face look 
small. His ears looked inflamed from the cold. Johnette appraised him coolly, digging at 
her ear with a pinkie. She watched the boy's face as David Krone came scuttling over like 
a crab and blinked at the boy upside-down a few times and scuttled around and up the 
stairs, his forehead clunking against each stair. It was pretty obvious the boy wasn't any 
resident's like homey or boyfriend come to give somebody a ride to work or like that. 
The way the boy looked and stood and talked and everything like that radiated high- 
maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where nobody carried weapons, pretty 



much a whole planet of privilege away from the planet of Johnette Marie Foltz of South 
Chelsea and then the Right Honorable Edmund F. Heany Facility for Demonstrably 
Incorrigible Girls down in Brockton; and in Pat's office, with the door only half shut, 
Johnette gave her face the blandly hostile expression she wore around upscale boys 
with no tatts and all their teeth that outside of NA wouldn't have interest in her or 
might view her lack of front teeth and nose-pin as evidence of they were like better than 
her and like that, somehow. It emerged this kid didn't seem like he had enough 
emotional juice to be interested in judging anybody or even noticing them, however. His 
talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew all too wicked well, the quality 
of somebody who'd just lately put down the pipe and/or bong. The kid's hair was 
starting to melt in the heat of Pat's office and drip and settle on his head like a slashed 
tire, causing that his face got bigger. He looked a little like what the fourth Mrs. Foltz 
had called green around the gills. The boy stood there very straight with his hands 
behind his back and said he lived nearby and had for some time been interested in sort 
of an idle, largely speculative way in considering maybe dropping in on some sort of 
Substance Anonymous meeting and everything like that, basically as just something to 
do, the exact same roundabout Denial shit as persons without teeth, and said but he 
didn't know where any were, any Meetings, or when, and but knew The Ennet House 323 
was nearby, that dealt directly with Anonymous organizations of this sort, and was 
wondering whether he maybe could have — or borrow and Xerox and promptly return 
by either e-or fax or First-Class mail, whichever they might prefer — some sort of rele¬ 
vant meeting schedule. He apologized for intruding and said but he didn't know whom 
else to call. The sort of guy like Ewell and Day and snotty look-right-through-you-if-you- 
weren't-a-fucking-covergirl Ken E. that knew how to long-divide and say whom but 
didn't even know how to look up shit in the Yellow Pages. 324 

Much later, in subsequent events' light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the 
boy's frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, and the sight of clear 
upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to pronounce 
the word without swallowing. 


Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. ('the G.') Tine 325 really 
do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light 
shines down directly on the face of the interview's subject, whose homburg and shade- 
affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request. And it was this, 
the harsh light on her fully exposed post-Marxist face, more than any kind of tough noir- 
informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical interviewer, that prompted 
M.l.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin, fresh off the N.N.Y.C. high-speed rail, seated in the 
Sidney Peterson-shaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage in her co-op's darkened 
and lock-dickied living room, to spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary, tell 
everything she believed she knew: 326 

— Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the apres- 
garde Auteur J. 0. Incandenza's lethally entertaining Infinite Jest (V or VI) is that it 
features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal 



figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her 
hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer¬ 
generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face 
by the camera's apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in 
very simple childlike language to whomever the film's camera represents that Death is 
always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills 
you is always your next life's mother. This, which Molly Notkin said didn't make too 
much sense to her either, when she heard it, was the alleged substance of the Death- 
cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue to the 
viewer, mediated by the very special lens. She may or may not have been holding a knife 
during this monologue, and the film's big technical hook (the Auteur's films always 
involved some sort of technical hook) involved some very unusual kind of single lens on 
the Bolex H32's turret, 327 and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis 
looked pregnant, because the real Madame Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, 
Molly Notkin had seen her naked, 328 and you can always tell if a woman's ever carried 
anything past the first trimester if you look at her naked. 329 

— Molly Notkin tells them that Madame Psychosis's own mother had killed herself in a 
truly ghastly way with an ordinary kitchen garbage disposal on the evening of 
Thanksgiving Day in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, four-odd months before the 
film's Auteur himself had killed himself, also with a kitchen appliance, also ghastlyly, 
which she says though any Lincoln-Kennedy-type connections between the two suicides 
will have to be ferreted out by the interviewers on their own, since as far as Molly 
Notkin knew the two different parents didn't even know of each other's existence. 

— That the lethal cartridge's digital Bolex H32 camera — already a Rube- 
Goldbergesque amalgam of various improvements and digital adaptations to the already 
modification-heavy classic Bolex HI6 Rex 5 — a Canadian line, by the way, favored 
throughout his whole career by the Auteur because its turret could accept three 
different C-mount lenses and adapters — that Infinite Jest (V) or (Vl)'s had been fitted 
with an extremely strange and extrusive kind of lens, and lay during filming on either the 
floor or like a cot or bed, the camera, with Madame Psychosis as the Death- Mother 
figure inclined over it, parturient and nude, talking down to it — in both senses of the 
word, which from a critical perspective would introduce into the film a kind of 
synesthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual perspectives of the 
subjective camera — explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this was 
why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow 
narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends 
for a murder neither of you quite remember. 

— Molly Notkin tells them she could be far more helpful and forth-comingly detailed if 
only they'd switch that beastly lamp off or train it someplace else, which is a brass-faced 
falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr., and so the light stays right on Molly 
Notkin's glabrous unhappy face. 

— That Madame Psychosis and the film's Auteur had not been sexually enmeshed, 
and for reasons beyond the fact that the Auteur's belief in a finite world-total of 
available erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden. That in fact 



Madame Psychosis had loved and been sexually enmeshed only with the Auteur's son, 
who, though Molly Notkin never encountered him personally and Madame Psychosis 
had taken care never to speak ill of him, was clearly as thoroughgoing a little rotter as 
one would find down through the whole white male canon of venery, moral cowardice, 
emotional chicanery, and rot. 

— That Madame Psychosis had been present neither at the Auteur's suicide nor at his 
funeral. That she'd missed the funeral because her passport had expired. That nor had 
Madame Psychosis been present at the reading of the late Auteur's will, despite the fact 
that she was one of the beneficiaries. That Madame Psychosis had never mentioned the 
fate or present disposition of the unreleased cartridge entitled either Infinite Jest (V) or 
Infinite Jest (VI), and had described it only from the perspective of the experience of 
performing in it, nude, and had never seen it, but had a hard time believing it was even 
entertaining, let alone lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represented 
little more than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential 
tether — the Auteur having apparently been extremely close to his own mother, in 
childhood — and had no doubt been recognized as such by the Auteur — who though 
not exactly the psychic sea's steadiest keel had been in many respects an acute reader 
and critic of film, and would have been able to distinguish the real filmic McCoy from 
pathetic cries veiled as film no matter how wildly his nautical compass was spinning 
around, on its tether, and would in all probability have destroyed the Master Print of the 
failed piece of art, the same way he'd reportedly destroyed the first four or five failed 
attempts at the same piece, which pieces had admittedly featured actresses of lesser 
mystique and allure. 

— That the Auteur's funeral had purportedly taken place in the L'lslet Province of 
Nouveau Quebec, the birth-province of the Auteur's widow, featuring an interrment and 
not a cremation. 

— That far be it from her to tell the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services its business, but 
why not simply go to J.O.I.'s widow and verify directly the existence and location of the 
purported cartridge? 

— That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur's widow had 
any connections to any anti-American groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the 
files on her indiscreet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin's heard 
the woman didn't have much interest in any agendas larger than her own individually 
neurotic agendas, even though she came on to Madame Psychosis all sweet and 
solicitous. That Madame Psychosis had confessed to Molly Notkin that the widow struck 
her as very possibly Death incarnate — her constant smile the rictal smile of some kind 
of thanatoptic figure — and that it had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was 
she, Madame Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine 
instantiations of Death when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently 
photogenic to boot, the widow-to-be, apparently a real restaurant-silencer-type beauty 
even in her late forties. 

— That the Auteur had stopped ingesting distilled spirits as Madame Psychosis's 
personal condition for consenting to appear in what she knew to be her but did not 
know to be the J.O.I.'s final film-cartridge, and that the Auteur had, apparently. 



incredibly, 330 kept his side of the bargain — possibly because he'd been so deeply 
moved at M.P.'s consent to appear before the camera again even after her terrible 
accident and deformation and the little rotter of a son's despicable abandonment of the 
relationship under the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being sexually 
enmeshed with their — here Molly Notkin said that she of course had meant to say his 
— father, the Auteur. And that the Auteur had apparently remained alcohol-free for the 
whole next three-and-a-half months, from Xmas of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad 
to 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the date of his suicide. 

— That the completely secret and hidden substance-abuse problem, the one that had 
now landed Madame Psychosis in an elite private dependency-treatment facility so elite 
that not even M.P.'s closest friends knew where it was beyond knowing only that it was 
someplace far, very far away, that the abuse-problem could have been nothing but a 
consequence of the terrible guilt Madame Psychosis felt over the Auteur's suicide, and 
constituted a clear unconscious compulsion to punish herself with the same sort of 
substance-abuse activity she had coerced the Auteur into stopping, merely substituting 
narcotics for Wild Turkey, which Molly Notkin could attest was some very gnarly-tasting 
liquor indeed. 

— No, that Madame Psychosis's guilt over the Auteur's felo de self had nothing to do 
with the purportedly lethal Infinite Jest (V) or (VI), which as far as Madame Psychosis 
had determined from the filming itself was little more than an olla podrida of depressive 
conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty. That, no, 
rather the consuming guilt had been over the condition that the Auteur suspend the 
ingestion of spirits, which it turned out, M.P. had claimed in deluded hindsight, had 
been all that was keeping the man's tether ravelled, the ingestion, such that without it 
he was unable to withstand the psychic pressures that pushed him over the edge into 
what Madame Psychosis said she and the Auteur had sometimes referred to as quote 
'self-erasure.' 

— That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited- 
edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits 
with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its 
wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur's 
body had been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse's 
widow-to-be — who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never 
been willing to give up spirits quote 'for her' but had apparently been willing to give 
them up quote 'for' Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus. 

— That the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis had suffered an 
irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed 
herself with a kitchen-appliance, leaving her (Madame Psychosis) hideously and 
improbably deformed, and that her membership in the Union of the Hideously and 
Improbably Deformed's 13-Step self-help organization was no kind of metaphor or ruse. 

— That the intolerable stresses leading to the Auteur's self-erasure had probably way 
less to do with film or digital art — this Auteur's anti-confluential approach to the 
medium having always struck Molly Notkin as being rather aloof and cerebrally 
technical, to say nothing of naively post-Marxist in its self-congratulatory combination of 



anamorphic fragmentation and anti-Picaresque 331 narrative stasis — or with having 
allegedly spawned some angelic monster of audience-gratification — anyone with a 
nervous system who watched much of his oeuvre could see that fun or entertainment 
was pretty low on the late filmmaker's list of priorities — but rather much more likely to 
do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just 
about everything with a Y-chromo-some, and had been for what sounded like many 
years, including possibly with the Auteur's son and Madame's craven lover, as a child, 
seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his 
mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time. 

— That thus — with the Promethean-guilt angle on the Auteur's suicide cast into 
serious doubt — there was little question in A.B.D.-Dr. Notkin's mind that the entire 
perfect-entertainment-as-/./ebestod myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final 
cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid 
function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity 
as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal, as 
detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze's posthumous Incest and the Life of 
Death in Capitalist Entertainment, which she'd be happy to lend the figures standing up 
somewhere above the lamp's white fire, one of them tapping something irritatingly 
against the lamp's conic metal shade, if they'd promise to return it and not mark it up. 

— That — in response to respectful but pointed requests to keep the responses on 
some sort of factual track and spare them all the eggheaded abstractions — Madame 
Psychosis's deforming trauma, in its combination of coincidence and malefic intention, 
had been like something right out of the Auteur's most ghastly and unresolvable proto- 
incestuous disaster films, e.g. The Night Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence, 
and The Unfortunate Case of Me. That Madame Psychosis, an only child, had been 
extremely and heart-warmingly close to her father, a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky 
reagent outfit, who'd apparently had an extremely close only-child and watching- 
movies-together-based relationship with his own mother and seemed to reenact the 
closeness with Madame Psychosis, taking her to movies on a near-daily basis, in 
Kentucky, and driving her all over the mid-South for various junior baton-twirling 
competitions while his wife, Madame Psychosis's mother, a devoutly religious but 
wounded and neurasthenic woman with a fear of public spaces, stayed home on the 
family farm, canning preserves and seeing to the administration of the farm, etc. But 
that things had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered 
puberty, apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to 
behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older: taking her to 
increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge issues of 
menses or breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues were 
complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost 
freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor 
nutrition and indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely 
rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis's 
toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis's 
father interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile 



Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her 
childhood diminutive like Pookie or Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from 
accepting a scholarship to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies 
Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Bam-Bams, 
unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified. 

— That — to cut to a chase which the interviewers' hands-on-hip attitudes and 
replacement of the lamp's bulb with a much higher wattage signified they'd very much 
like to see cut to — as is often the case, it wasn't until Madame Psychosis got to college 
and gradually acquired some psychic distance and matter for emotional comparison 
that she even began to see how creepy her reagent-Daddy's regression had been, and 
not until a certain major-sport-star son's autograph on a punctured football inspired 
more e-mailed suspicion and sarcasm than gratitude from home in KY that she began 
even to suspect that her lack of social life throughout puberty might have had as much 
to do with her Daddy's intrusive discouragement as with her actaeonizing pubescent 
charms. That — pausing briefly to spell actaeonizing — the shit had hit the 
intergenerational psychic fan when Madame Psychosis brought the Auteur's little rotter 
of a son home to the KY spread for the third time, for Thanksgiving in the Year of the 
Tucks Medicated Pad, and witnessing her Daddy's infantilizing conduct of her and her 
mother's wordless compulsive canning and cooking, not to mention the terrific tension 
that resulted when Madame Psychosis attempted to move some of the stuffed animals 
out of her room to make room for the Auteur's son, in short experiencing her home and 
Daddy through the comparative filter of enmeshment with the Auteur's son brought 
Madame Psychosis to the crisis that precipitates Speaking the Unspeakable; and that it 
had been at Thanksgiving Dinner, at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P., when the low-pH 
Daddy began not only cutting up Madame Psychosis's plate's turkey for her but mashing 
it into puree between the tines of his fork, all under the raised comparative eyebrows of 
the Auteur's son, that Madame Psychosis finally aired the unspoken question of why, 
with her now of legal age and living with a male and retired from childhood's twirling 
and carving out an adult career on one and potentially two sides of the film-camera, did 
her own personal Daddy seem to feel she needed help to chew? Molly Notkin's 
secondhand take on the emotional eruptions that ensued is not detailed, but she feels 
she can state w/ confidence that it's plausibly a case of any kind of system that's been 
under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the 
accreted pressure's such that it's almost always a full-scale eruption. The low-pH 
Daddy's enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table, with his 
grown daughter's white meat between his tines, in the confession that he'd been 
secretly, silently in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had 
been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never 
touched her, wouldn't, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South 
father who touched and ogled than out of the purity of his doomed love for the little girl 
he'd escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily; that the repression and 
disguisability of his pure love hadn't been all that hard when Madame Psychosis had 
been juvenile and sexless, but that at the onset of puberty and nubility the pressure'd 
become so great that he could compensate only by regressing the child mentally to an 



age of incontinence and pre-mashed meat, and that his awareness of how creepy his 
denial of her maturation must have seemed — even though neither the daughter nor 
mother, even now wordlessly chewing a candied yam, had remarked on it, the denial 
and creepiness, although the man's beloved pointers were given to whimper and 
scratch at the door when the denial had gotten especially creepy (animals being way 
more sensitive than humans to emotional anomalies, in Molly Notkin's experience) — 
had raised his internal limbic system's pressure to near intolerable foot-kilo levels, and 
that he'd been hanging on for dear life for the past nigh on now a decade, but that now 
that he'd had to actually stand witness to the removal of Pooky and Urgle-Bear et al. 
from her ballerina-wallpapered room to make space for a nonrelated mature male 
whose physical vigor through the peephole the Daddy'd exerted every gram of 
trembling will he'd possessed trying not to drill the hole in the bathroom wall just above 
the mirror over the sink whose pipes made the wall behind the headboard of Madame 
Psychosis's room's bed sing and clunk, and through which, late at night — claiming to 
Mother a case of skitters from all the holiday nibbles — hunched atop the sink, every 
night since Madame Psychosis and the Auteur's son had first arrived to sleep together in 
the unstuffed-animaled bed of a childhood through which he'd been all but tortured by 
the purity of his impossible love for the — 

— That it had been at this point that Madame Psychosis's mother's fork and then 
whole plate had clattered to the floor, and that amid the sounds of the pointers under 
the table fighting over that plate the mother's own denial-system's pressure blew, and 
she freaked, announcing publicly at the table that she and the Daddy had not once 
known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated, that 
she'd known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it, evacuated her 
suspicions and placed them under great pressure in the bell-jar of her own denial, be¬ 
cause, she admits — admits is probably less accurate than something like keens or 
shrieks or jabbers — that her own father — an itinerant camp-meeting preacher — had 
molested her and her sister all through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and 
that this had been why she'd married at just sixteen, to escape, and that now it was 
clear to her that she'd married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his 
ordained mate and wants his daughter. 

— That she'd said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if 
so she was tired of hiding it and appearing falsely before God and man. 

— That whereupon she'd reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run 
down to the Daddy's acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid. 

— That the Daddy'd kept a world-class collection of various acids in Pyrex-brand flasks 
on wooden shelves down in the cellar. 

— That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis 
had all run down the stairs after the mother and hit the cellar just as the mother had 
removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on the 
side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside signified an 
incredibly low-pH and corrosive type of acid. 

— That Madame Psychosis's name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy's 
name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA. 



— That, despite the little rotter's professions of self-recrimination for allowing the 
deformity to take place and claim that the swirling systems of guilt and horror and 
denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis 
increasingly untenable, it didn't take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses to 
figure out why the fellow'd given Madame Psychosis the boot within months of the 
traumatic deformity, now did it. 

— That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to 
externalized rage, the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who'd 
reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion 
with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame 
Psychosis — dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure 
repressive family systems — open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic de¬ 
formity. And that it had been everyone's failure to press any charges that had liberated 
the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once again to her home's 
kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her 
extremities down the garbage disposal — first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if 
you think about it, the other arm. 332 


The most distant and obscure Tuesday P.M. Meeting listed in the little white Metro- 
Boston Recovery Options 333 booklet the incisorless nostril-pierced girl down at The 
Ennet House had given him looked to be a males-only thing at 1730h. out in Natick, 
almost in Framingham, at something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. 
booklet listed only as 'Q.R.S.-32A.' Hal, who had no last class period, rushed through 
P.M.'S, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular P.M.'s were even warming up, 
then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was also forgoing tonight's lemon 
chicken with potato rolls, all to blast out to Natick in time to check this anti-Substance- 
fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn't sure why, since it didn't seem to be any kind 
of slobbering inability to abstain that was the problem — he hadn't had so much as a 
mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week. The 
issue's the horrific way his head's felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All 
Hope. 334 It wasn't just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the 
bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal's eyes snapped open 
immediately said Glad You're UP I've Been Wanting To TALK To You and then didn't let 
up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to 
fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. 24/7's of 
feeling wretched and bereft. 

Dusk was coming earlier. Hal signed out at the portcullis and blasted down the hill and 
took the tow truck up Comm. Ave. to the C.C. Reservoir and then south on Hammond, 
the same deadening route as the E.T.A. conditioning run, except when he hit Boylston 
St. he turned right and struck out west. Once it cleared West Newton, Boylston St. 
became shunpike Rte. 9, the major west-suburb-commuter alternative to the suicidal I- 
90, and 9 suburb-hopped serpentine all the way west to Natick and Rte. 27. 

Hal crawled through traffic on a major-flow road that had once been a cowpath. By 



the time he was in Wellesley Hills, the sky's combustionish orange had deepened to the 
hellish crimson of a fire's last embers. Darkness fell with a clunk shortly after, and Hal's 
spirits with it. He felt pathetic and absurd even going to check this Narcotics Anonymous 
Meeting thing out. 

Everybody always flashed his or her brights at the tow truck because the headlamps 
were set so senselessly high on the truck's grille. 

The little portable disk player had been detached by either Pemulis or Axford and not 
returned. WYYY was a ghostly thread of jazz against a sea of static. AM had only 
corporate rock and reports that the Gentle administration had scheduled and then 
cancelled a special Spontaneous-Disseminated address to the nation on subjects 
unknown. NPR had a kind of roundtable on potential subjects — George Will's 
laryngectomy-prosthesis sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds. He 
ate two of three $4.00 bran muffins he'd whipped in for at a Cleveland Circle gourmet 
bakery, grimacing as he swallowed because he'd forgotten a tonic to wash them down, 
then put in a mammoth plug of Kodiak and spat periodically into his special NASA glass, 
which fit neatly in the cup-holder down by the transmission, and passed the last fifteen 
minutes of the dull drive considering the probable etymological career of the word 
Anonymous , all the way he supposed from the TEolic ovuya through Thynne's B.S. 1580s 
reference to 'anonymall Chronicals'; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at 
the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English on-ane, which supposedly meant All as One or 
As One Body and became Cynewulf's eventual standard inversion to the classic anon, 
maybe. Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. '35 
of the initial Substance group AA, on which there'd been such a lengthy entry in the 
Discursive O.E.D. that Hal hadn't had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or 
less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an ap¬ 
praising once-over. Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he'd ever read 
and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn't 
(so far) compromised, the withdrawal's effects being more like emotional/salivo- 
digestive. 

The rock faces on either side of the truck when 27 goes through blasted hills of rock, 
the very fringes of the Berkshires' penumbra, are either granite or gneiss. 

Hal for a while also practices saying 'My name's Mike.' 'Mike. Hi.' 'Hey there, name's 
Mike,' etc., into the truck's rearview. 

By 15 minutes east of Natick it becomes obvious that the little booklet's terse Q.R.S. 
designates a facility called Quabbin Recovery Systems, which is easy to find, roadside 
ad-signs starting to announce the place several clicks away, each sign a little different 
and designed to form a little like narrative of which actual arrival at Q.R.S. would be the 
climax. Even Hal's late father was too young really to remember Burma-Shave signs. 

Quabbin Recovery Systems is set far back from Rte. 27 on a winding groomed-gravel 
road flanked all the way up by classy old-time standing lanterns whose glass shades are 
pebbled and faceted like candy dishes and seem more for mood than illumination. Then 
the actual building's driveway's an even more winding little road that's barely more than 
a tunnel through meditative pines and poor-postured Lombardy poplars. Once off the 
highway the whole nighttime scene out here in exurbia — Boston's true boonies — 



seems ghostly and circumspect. Hal's tires crunch cones in the road. Some sort of bird 
shits on his windshield. The driveway broadens gradually into a like delta and then a 
parking lot of mint-white gravel, and the physical Q.R.S. is right there, cubular and 
brooding. The building's one of these late-model undeformed cubes of rough panel- 
brick and granite quoins. Illuminated moodily from below by more classy lanterns, it 
looks like a building-block from some child-titan's toy-chest. Its windows are the smoky 
brown kind that in daylight become dark mirrors. Hal's late father had publicly 
repudiated this kind of window-glass in an interview in Lens & Pane when the stuff first 
came out. Right now, lit from inside, the windows have a sort of bloody, polluted aspect. 

A good two-thirds of the lot's parking places say RESERVED FOR STAFF, which strikes 
Hal as odd. The tow truck tends to diesel and chuff after deignition, finally subsiding 
with a shuddering fart. It's dead quiet except for the hiss of light traffic down on 27 past 
all the trees. Only TP-link workers and marathon-type commuters live in exurban Natick. 
It's either way colder out here or else a front's been coming in while Hal drove. The lot's 
piney air has the ethyl sting of winter. 

Q.R.S.'s big doors and lintel are more of that reflector-shade glass. There's no obvious 
bell, but the doors are unlocked. They open in that sort of pressurized way of 
institutional doors. The savanna-colored lobby is broad and still and has a vague 
medical/dental smell. Its carpet's a dense low tan Dacronyl weave that evacuates sound. 
There's a circular high-countered nurse's station or reception desk, but nobody's there. 

The whole place is so quiet Hal can hear the squeak of blood in his head. 

The 32A that follows Q.R.S. in the girl's little white booklet is presumably a room 
number. Hal has on a non-E.T.A. jacket and carries the NASA glass he spits in. He'd have 
to spit even if he didn't have chew in; the Kodiak's almost like a cover or excuse. 

There is no map or You-Are-Here-type directory on view in the lobby. The lobby's heat 
is intense and close but kind of porous; it's in a sort of uneasy struggle with the radiant 
chill of all the smoked glass of the entrance. The lamps out in the lot and off along the 
driveway are blobs of sepia light through the glass. Inside, cove-lighting at the seams of 
walls and ceiling produce an indirect light that's shadowless and seems to rise from the 
room's objects themselves. It's the same lighting and lion-colored carpeting in the first 
long hall Hal tries. The room numbers go up to 17 and then after Hal turns a sharp 
corner start at 34A. The room doors are false blond wood but look thick and private, 
flush in their frames. There's also the smell of stale coffee. The walls' color scheme is 
somewhere between puce and mature eggplant-skin, kind of nauseous against the 
sandy tan of the carpet. All buildings with any kind of health-theme to them have this 
thin sick sweet dental sub-odor to them. Q.R.S. also seems to have some sort of balsamy 
air-freshener going in the ventilation system, too, but it doesn't quite cover the sweet 
medical stink or the bland sour smell of institutional food. 

Hal hasn't heard one human sound since he came in. The place's silence has that 
glittery sound of total silence. His footfalls make no sound on the Dacronyl. He feels 
furtive and burglarish and holds the NASA glass down at his side and the NA booklet 
higher up and cover-out as a sort of explanatory I.D. There are computer-enhanced 
landscapes on the walls, little low tables with glossy pamphlets, a framed print of 
Picasso's 'Seated Harlequin,' and nothing else that wasn't just institutional bullshit. 



visual Muzak. Without any sound to his footfalls it's like the gauntlets of doors just glide 
by. The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the 
tensed menace of a living thing that's chosen to hold itself still. If you asked Hal to 
describe his feelings as he looked for room 32A the best he could do would be to say he 
wished he were somewhere else and feeling some way besides how he felt. His mouth 
pours spit. The glass's one-third full and heavy in his hand and not much fun to look at. 
He's missed the glass a couple of times and marred the tan carpet with dark spit. After 
two 90° turns it's clear the hallway's run is a perfect square around the cube's ground 
level. He's seen no stairs or entrances to stairways. He empties the NASA glass rather 
gooily into a potted rubber tree's dirt. Q.R.S.'s building may be one of those infamous 
Rubikular cubes that looks topologically undeformed but is actually impossible to 
negotiate on the inside. But the numbers after the third corner start at 18, and now Hal 
can hear either very distant or very muffled voices. He carries the NA booklet in front of 
him like a crucifix. He has about $50 U.S. and another $100 in eagle-, leaf-, and broom- 
emblemized O.N.A.N. scrip, having had no idea what sort of introductory costs might be 
involved. Q.R.S. didn't purchase prime Natick acreage and the cutting-edge services of a 
Sao-Paulo-School Geometric-Minimalist architect with just altruistic goodwill, that was 
for sure. 

Room 32A's wood-grain door was just as emphatically shut as all the others, but the 
muffled voices were behind this one. The Meeting was listed in the book as starting at 
1730, and it was only around 1720, and Hal thought the voices might signify some sort 
of pre-Meeting orientation for people who've come for the first time, sort of tentatively, 
just to scout the whole enterprise out, so he doesn't knock. 

He still has this intractable habit of making a move like he's straightening a bow tie 
before he enters a strange room. 

And except for the thin rubber sheaths, the doorknobs on the Quabbin Recovery 
Systems doors are the same as at E.T.A. — flat bars of brass toggle-bolted to the latch 
mechanism, so you have to push the bar down instead of turning anything to open the 
door. 

But the Meeting is under way, apparently. It isn't near big enough to create a mood of 
anonymity or casual spectation. Nine or ten adult middle-class males are in the warm 
room on orange plastic chairs with legs of molded steel tubing. Every one of the men 
has a beard, and each wears chinos and a sweater, and they all sit the same way, that 
Indian cross-legged style with their hands on their knees and their feet under their 
knees, and they all wear socks, with no footwear or winter jackets anywhere in sight. 
Hal eases the door shut and sort of slinks along the wall to an empty chair, all the time 
conspicuously brandishing the Meeting booklet. The chairs are placed in no discernible 
order, and their orange clashes nastily with the room's own colors, walls and ceiling the 
color of Thousand Island dressing — a color-scheme with unplaceable but uneasy 
associations for Hal — and more of the lionskin Dacronyl carpet. And the warm air in 
32A is stuffy with C0 2 and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle- 
aged bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even 
than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta. 

The only guy in the Meeting to acknowledge Hal's entrance is at the front of the room. 



a man Hal would have to call almost morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and 
globularly round and the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it, his socks plaid 
and his legs not all the way crossable so it looks like he might pitch disastrously 
backward in his chair any minute, smiling warmly at Hal's winter coat and NASA glass as 
Hal slinks and sits and slumps down low. The round man's chair is positioned under a 
small white Magic Marker blackboard, and all the other chairs approximately face it, and 
the man holds a Magic Marker in one hand and holds what looks quite a bit like a teddy 
bear to his chest with the other, and wears chinos and a cable-knit Norwegian sweater 
the color of toast. His hair is that waxy sort of blond, and he's got the blond eyebrows 
and creepy blond eyelashes and violently flushed face of a true Norwegian blond, and 
his little beard is an imperial so sharply waxed it looks like a truncated star. The 
morbidly round blond man's pretty clearly the leader of the Meeting, possibly a high- 
ranking official of Narcotics Anonymous, whom Hal could casually approach about tracts 
and texts to buy and study, afterward. 

Another middle-aged guy up near the front is crying, and he too holds what looks like 
a bear. 

The blond brows hike up and down as the leader says 'I'd like to suggest we men all 
hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin's Inner 
Infant expressing his grief and loss.' 

They're all at subtly different angles to Hal, who's slumped low over by the wall in the 
second-to-last row, but it turns out after some subtle casual neck-craning that, sure 
enough, all these middle-class guys in at least their thirties are sitting there clutching 
teddy bears to their sweatered chests — and identical teddy bears, plump and brown 
and splay-limbed and with a little red corduroy tongue protruding from the mouths, so 
the bears all look oddly throttled. The room is menacingly quiet now except for the 
sibilance of the heating vents and the sobbing guy Kevin, and the plip of Hal's saliva 
hitting the bottom of the empty glass rather more loudly than he might have wished. 

The back of the crying guy's neck is turning redder and redder as he clutches his bear 
and rocks on his hams. 

Hal sits with his leg crossed good-ankle-on-knee and joggles his white hightop and 
looks at his callused thumb and listens to the Kevin guy sob and snuffle. The guy wipes 
his nose with the heel of his hand just like the littler Buddies at E.T.A. Hal figures the 
tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs, and that the Meeting is 
probably on the verge of coming around to talking explicitly about drugs and how to 
give up drugs for a certain period without feeling indescribably wretched and bereft, or 
maybe at least some data on how long one might expect the wretchedness of giving up 
drugs to continue before the old nervous system and salivary glands returned to normal. 
Even though Inner Infant sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Doloros Rusk's dreaded 
Inner Child, Hal'd be willing to bet that here it's some sort of shorthand Narcotics 
Anonymous sobriquet for like 'limbic component of the CNS' or 'the part of our cortex 
that's not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been 
pulling us through the day, secretly' or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal 
wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, 
hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge. 



The diglobular leader has made a cage of his hands and rested his hands on his teddy 
bear's head and is breathing slowly and evenly, watching Kevin kindly from under the 
blond eyebrows, looking more than anything like some sort of Buddha-as-California- 
surfer-dude. The leader inhales gently and says 'The energies I'm feeling in the group are 
energies of unconditional love and acceptance for Kevin's Inner Infant.' Nobody else 
says anything, and the leader doesn't seem to need anybody to say anything. He looks 
down at the cage his hands have made on the bear and keeps subtly changing the shape 
of the cage. The guy Kevin, whose neck is now not only beet-red but shiny with 
embarrassed sweat between his shirt-collar and hair's hem, sobs even harder at the 
affirmation of love and support. The round leader's high hoarse voice had the same 
blandly kind didactic quality as Rusk's, as if always speaking to a not-too-bright child. 

After some more cage-play and deep breathing the leader looks up and around and 
nods at nothing and says 'Maybe we could all name our feelings right now for Kevin and 
share how much we're caring for him and his Inner Infant right now, in his pain.' 

Various bearded cross-legged guys speak up: 

'I love you, Kevin.' 

'I'm not judging you, Kevin.' 

'Know just how you and the l.l. feel.' 

'I'm feeling really close to you.' 

'I'm feeling a lot of love for you right now, Kevin.' 

'You're crying for two, guy.' 

'Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin.' 

'I'm not feeling like your crying is one bit unmanly or pathetic, fella.' 

It's at this point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open- 
mindedness and to get a bad personal feeling about this Narcotics Anonymous ('NA') 
Meeting, which seems already deeply under way and isn't one bit like he's imagined an 
even remotely hopeful antidrug Meeting would be like. It seems more like some kind of 
cosmetic-psychology encounter thing. Not one Substance or symptom of Substance- 
deprivation has been mentioned so far. And none of these guys looks like they've ever 
been engaged with anything more substantial than an occasional wine cooler, if he had 
to guess. 

Hal's grim mood deepens as the round man up front now leans precariously over and 
down and opens a sort of toy-box under the blackboard by his chair and produces a 
cheap plastic portable CD laser-scanner and sets it on top of the toy-box, where it begins 
to issue a kind of low treacly ambient shopping-mall music, mostly cello, with sporadic 
harps and chimes. The stuff spreads through the hot little room like melted butter, and 
Hal sinks lower in his orange chair and looks hard at the space-and-spacecraft emblem 
on his NASA glass. 

'Kevin?' the leader says over the music. 'Kevin?' The sobbing man's hand lies over his 
face like a spider, and he doesn't even start to look up until the leader has said several 
times very blandly and kindly 'Kevin, do you feel okay about looking at the rest of the 
group?' 

Kevin's red neck wrinkles as he looks up at the blond leader through his fingers. 

The leader's made the cage again on his poor bear's squashed head. 'Can you share 



what you're feeling, Kevin?' he says. 'Can you name it?' 

Kevin's voice is muffled by the hand he hides behind. 'I'm feeling my Inner Infant's 
abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv,' he says, drawing shuddering breaths. 
His mauve sweater's shoulders tremble. Tm feeling my Inner Infant standing holding the 
bars of his crib and looking out of the bars... bars of his crib and crying for his Mommy 
and Daddy to come hold him and nurture him.' Kevin sobs twice in an apneated way. 
One arm holds his lap's bear so tight Hal thinks he can see a little stuffing start to come 
out of its mouth around its tongue, and a stalactite of that clear thin weepy-type mucus 
hangs from Kevin's nose just mm. over the throttled bear's head. 'And nobody's 
coming!' he sobs. 'Nobody's coming. I feel alone with my bear and plastic airplane- 
mobile and teething ring.' 

Everybody's nodding in an affirming and pained way. No two beards are exactly the 
same fullness and design. A couple other sobs break out across the room. Everyone's 
bear stares blankly ahead. 

The leader's nod is slow and meditative. 'And can you share your needs with the group 
right now, Kevin?' 

'Please share, Kevin,' says a slim guy over by a black filing cabinet who sits like he's a 
veteran at sitting Indian-style in hard plastic chairs. 

The music's still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes. 

'The work we're here to do,' the leader says over the music, one hand now pressed 
pensively to the side of his big face, 'is to work on our dysfunctional passivity and 
tendency to wait silently for our Inner Infant's needs to be magically met. The energy I 
feel in the group now is that the group is supportively asking Kevin to nurture his Inner 
Infant by naming and sharing his needs out loud with the group. And I'm feeling how 
aware we all are how risky and vulnerable need-naming-out-loud must feel for Kevin 
right now.' 

Everybody looks deadly serious. A couple guys are rubbing their bears' bellies 
pregnantly. The only really Infantile thing Hal can feel inside him is the inguinal gurgle of 
two heavy bran muffins swallowed at high speeds w/o liquid. The string of mucus from 
Kevin's nose trembles and swings. The slender guy who'd asked Kevin please to share is 
now waggling the arms of his teddy bear in an infantile way. Hal feels a wave of nausea 
flood his mouth with fresh saliva. 

'We're asking you to name what your Inner Infant wants right now more than anything 
in the world,' the leader's saying to Kevin. 

To be loved and held!' Kevin keens, sobbing harder. His lachrymucus is now a thin 
silver string joining his nose and the fuzzy top of his bear's head. The bear's expression is 
seeming creepier to Hal by the second. Hal wonders what the etiquette is in NA about 
getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody's Infantile revelation of need. 
Meanwhile Kevin is saying that his Inner Infant inside him had always hoped that some 
day his Mom and Dad would be there for him, to hold him and love him. He says but 
right from the start they'd never been there for him, leaving him and his brother with 
Hispanic nannies while they devoted themselves to their jobs and various types of 
psychotherapy and support groups. This takes a while to say, given all the snuffles and 
wracked spasms. Then Kevin says but then by the time he was eight they were gone 



altogether, dead, smooshed by a dysfunctionally falling radio traffic helicopter on the 
Jamaica Way on the way to Couples Counselling. 

At this Hal's slumped head jerks up, his mouth oval with horror. He's all of a sudden 
realized that this guy who's seated at such an angle that Hal's been able to see only the 
obliquest portion of his profile is in fact Kevin Bain, his brother Orin's old E.T.A. doubles 
and chemical-mischief partner Marlon Bain's older brother, Kevin Bain, of Dedham MA, 
who the last Hal had heard had gotten his M.B.A. at Wharton and cleaned up with a 
string of Simulated Reality arcades all up and down the South Shore, back during the 
pre-Subsidized-Time Simulated Reality craze, before InterLace viewers and digital 
cartridges let you do your own customized Simulating right at home and the novelty 
wore off. 335 The Kevin Bain whose childhood hobby was memorizing IRS capital- 
depreciation schedules and whose adult idea of a wild time 336 had been putting extra 
marshmallows in his nightly cocoa, and who wouldn't have known a recreational drug if 
it walked up and poked him in the eye. Hal begins to scan for possible exits. The only 
door was the one he'd come in, which is in full view of most of the room. There are no 
windows at all. 

Hal's chilled by multiple realizations. This is no NA or anti-Substance Meeting. This is 
one of those men's-issues-Men's-Movement-type Meetings K. D. Coyle's stepdad went 
to and Coyle liked to mimic and parody during drills, making his stick's grip poke out 
between his legs and yelling 'Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!' 

Kevin Bain is wiping his nose with his poor teddy bear's head and saying it didn't look 
like his Inner Infant would ever get its wish. The gooey music's cello sounds like some 
sort of cow mooing in distress, maybe at what it's in the middle of. 

Sure enough, the round man, whose hand's left a print on his soft cheek, asks poor old 
Kevin Bain to honor and name his l.l.'s wounded wish anyway, to say 'Please, Mommy 
and Daddy, come love and hold me,' out loud, several times, which Kevin Bain goes 
ahead and does, rocking a little in his chair, his voice now with an edge of good old adult 
mortified embarrassment to it, along with the racking sobs. A couple of the other men 
in the room are wiping at their bright-white drug-free eyes with the arms of their teddy 
bears. Hal is painfully reminded of the rare Ziplocs of Humboldt County hydroponic 
marijuana that Pemulis occasionally scored via FedEx from his mercantile counterpart at 
the Rolling Hills Academy, the curved tawny buds so big and plump with high-Delta-9 
resin the Ziplocs had looked like bags of little teddy-bear arms. The moist sounds right 
behind him turn out to be a mild-faced older man eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Hal 
keeps rechecking the Meeting data in the little M.B.R.O. booklet the girl had given him. 
He notes that the booklet has broad chocolate thumbprints on several of the pages, and 
that two pages are stuck firmly together with what Hal fears is an ancient dried booger, 
and now that the booklet's cover is dated January in the Year of Dairy Products from the 
American Heartland, i.e. nearly two years past, and that it's not impossible that the 
blandly hostile toothless girl at The Ennet facility had kertwanged him by giving him a 
dated and useless M.B.R.O. guide. 

Kevin Bain keeps repeating 'Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me' in 
a kind of monotone of pathos. The gradually intensifying lisp in Please is apparently a 
performative invocation of the old Inner Infant. Tears and other fluids flow and roll. The 



warm round leader Harv's own eyes are a moist glassy blue. The CD scanner's cello is 
now into some sort of semi-jazzy pizzicato stuff that seems oxymoronic against the 
room's mood. Hal keeps catching whiffs of a hot sick-sweet civety smell that signifies 
somebody nearby has some athlete's-foot issues to confront, under his socks. Plus it's 
mystifying that 32A has no windows, given all the smoky-brown fenestration Hal'd seen 
from outside the Q.R.S. cube. The man eating yogurt's beard is one of those small 
rectangular ones that's easy to keep clear of the cup's rim. The back and side of Kevin 
Bain's hair has separated into spiky sweat-soaked strands, from the room's heat and the 
Infant's emotions. 

All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and 
dandled and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like he could have told 
K. Bain's Inner Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn't automatically 
seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-free. Hal finds he rather 
envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to 
blame it on. Not even Pemulis blamed his late father Mr. Pemulis, who hadn't exactly 
sounded like the Fred MacMurray of U.S. fathers. But then Pemulis didn't consider 
himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances. 

The blond and Buddhic cable-knit Harv, dandling his bear on his knee now, calmly asks 
Kevin Bain if it feels to his Inner Infant like Mommy and Daddy were ever going to 
appear cribside to meet his needs. 

'No,' Kevin says very quietly. 'No, it doesn't, Harv.' 

The leader is idly arranging his bear's splayed arms in different positions, so it looks 
like the bear's either waving or surrendering. 'Do you suppose you would be able to ask 
someone in the group here tonight to love and hold you instead, Kevin?' 

The back of Kevin Bain's head doesn't move. Hal's whole digestive tract spasms at the 
prospect of watching two bearded adult males in sweaters and socks engage in 
surrogate Infant-hugging. He begins asking himself why he doesn't just fake a hideous 
coughing fit and flee Q.R.S.-32A with his fist over his face. 

Harv's now waggling the bear's arms back and forth and making his voice high and 
cartoon-characterish and pretending to have his bear ask Kevin Bain's bear if it would 
maybe point to the man in the group Kevin Bain would most like to have hold and 
nurture and love him in loco parentis. Hal's spitting quietly down the side of his glass 
and brooding wretchedly at the fact that he's driven fifty supperless clicks to listen to a 
globular man in plaid socks pretend his teddy bear's speaking Latin when he looks up 
from the glass and is chilled to see that Kevin Bain has wiggled his Indian-style way 
around in his chair and is holding his bear way up by its underarms, just the way a father 
holds a toddler up for a public spect-op or parade, turning the throttled-looking bear 
this way and that, scanning the room — as Hal covers part of his face with a hand, 
pretending to scratch an eyebrow, praying not to be recognized — and finally 
manipulating the bear's arm so the plump brown fuzzy fingerless hand of the bear's 
pointing right in Hal's direction. Hal doubles over in a coughing spasm only half-faked, 
running decision-trees on various ruses for flight. 

Just like his younger brother Marlon Bain, Kevin Bain is a short thick person with a 
dark swart face. He looks sort of like an overdeveloped troll. And he has the same 



capacity for constant incredible sweating that always made Marlon Bain look to Hal, 
both on-court and off-, like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade. Except 
Kevin Bain's little glittery Bain eyes are also red and swollen with public weeping, and 
he's balding back from the temples in a way that gives him a widow's peak like nobody's 
business, and doesn't seem to recognize a post-pubescent Hal, and is pointing his bear's 
blunt hand Hal realizes finally after almost swallowing his plug of Kodiak not at Hal but 
at the mild-faced square-bearded older guy behind him, who's holding a spoon of vividly 
pink yogurt in front of his bear's open mouth, just touching its protruding tongue's red 
corduroy, pretending to be feeding the bear. Hal very casually puts the NASA glass be¬ 
tween his legs and gets both hands under his chair-seat and hops the chair bit by bit 
over and out of the lines of sight and transit between Kevin Bain and the yogurt man. 
Harv, up front, is making a complex hand-signal to the yogurt man not to speak or move 
from his back-row orange chair no matter what; and then, as Kevin Bain wriggles cross- 
legged back around to face front again, Harv smoothly turns the hand-signal into a 
motion like he's smoothing his hair. The motion then becomes sincere and ruminative as 
the leader breathes deeply a couple of times. The music's settled back into its original 
nodding narcosis. 

'Kevin,' Harv says, 'since this is a group exercise in passivity and Inner-Infant needs, 
and since you've selected Jim as the member of the group you need something from, we 
need you to ask Jim out loud to meet your needs. Ask him to come up and hold you and 
love you, since your parents aren't ever coming. Not ever, Kevin.' 

Kevin Bain makes a mortified sound and reclamps a hand over his big swart face. 

'Go for it, Kev,' somebody over near the Bly poster calls out. 

'We affirm and support you,' says the guy by the filing cabinet. 

Hal now starts scrolling through an alphabetical list of the faraway places he'd rather 
be right now. He's not even up to Addis Ababa when Kevin Bain acquiesces and begins 
very softly and hesitantly asking the mild-faced Jim, who's put aside his yogurt but not 
the bear, to please come up and love him and hold him. By the time Hal's envisioned 
himself tumbling over American Falls at the Concavity's southwest rim in a rusty old 
noxious-waste-displacement drum, Kevin Bain has asked Jim eleven progressively louder 
times to come nurture and hold him, to no avail. The older guy just sits there, clutching 
his yogurt-tongued bear, his expression somewhere between mild and blank. 

Hal has never actually seen projectile-weeping before. Bain's tears are actually exiting 
his eyes and projecting outward several cm. before starting to fall. His facial expression 
is the scrunched spread one of a small child's total woe, his neck-cords standing out and 
face darkening so that it looks like some sort of huge catcher's mitt. A bright cape of 
mucus hangs from his upper lip, and his lower lip seems to be having some kind of 
epileptic fit. Hal finds the tantrum's expression on an adult face sort of compelling. At a 
certain point hysterical grief becomes facially indistinguishable from hysterical mirth, it 
appears. Hal imagines watching Bain weep on a white beach through binoculars from 
the balcony of a cool dim Aruban hotel room. 

'He's not coming!' Kevin Bain finally keens to the leader. 

Harv the leader nods, scratching an eyebrow, and confirms that that seems to be the 
case. He pretends to stroke his imperial in puzzlement and asks rhetorically what might 



be the problem, why mild-faced Jim isn't automatically coming when called. 

Kevin Bain's just about vivisecting his poor bear out of mortified frustration. He seems 
deeply into his Infant persona now, and Hal rather hopes these guys have procedures 
for getting Bain at least back to sixteen before he has to try to drive home. At some 
point a timpani has gotten involved in the CD's music, and a rather saucy cornet, and 
the music's finally started moving a little, toward what's either a climax or the end of the 
disk. 

By now various men in the group have started crying out to Kevin Bain that his Inner 
Infant wasn't getting its needs met, that sitting there passively asking for nurture to get 
up and come to him wasn't getting the needs met, that Kevin owed it to his Inner Infant 
to come up with some sort of active way to meet the Infant's needs. Somebody shouted 
out 'Honor that Infant!' Somebody else called 'Meet those needs!' Hal is mentally 
strolling down the Appian Way in bright Eurosunlight, eating a cannoli, twirling his 
Dunlop racquets by the throats like six-shooters, enjoying the sunshine and cranial 
silence and a normal salivary flow. 

Pretty soon the men's supportive exhortations have distilled into everybody in the 
room except Harv, Jim and Hal chanting 'Meet Those Needs! Meet Those Needs!' in the 
same male-crowd-exhortative meter as 'Hold That Line!' or 'Block That Kick!' 

Kevin Bain wipes his nose on his sleeve and asks humongous Harv the leader what he's 
supposed to do to get his Infant's needs met if the person he's chosen to meet those 
needs won't come. 

The leader has folded his hands over his belly and sat back, by this time, smiling, cross- 
legged, holding his tongue. His bear sits atop the protrusion of belly with its little blunt 
legs straight out, the way you'll see a bear sitting on a shelf. It seems to Hal that the 0 2 
in 32A is now getting used up at a ferocious clip. Not at all like the cool, sheep-scented 
breezes of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. The men in the room are still chanting 
'MeetThose Needs!' 

'What you're saying is I need to actively go over to Jim myself and ask him to hold me,' 
Kevin Bain says, grinding at his eyes with his knuckles. 

The leader smiles blandly. 

'Instead of you're saying passively trying to get Jim to come to me,' says Kevin Bain, 
whose tears have largely stopped, and whose sweat has taken on the clammy shine of 
true fear-sweat. 

Harv emerges as one of these people who can heft one eyebrow and not the other. 'It 
would take real courage and love and commitment to your Inner Infant to take the risk 
and go actively over to somebody that might give you what your Infant needs,' he says 
quietly. The CD player has at some point shifted into an all-cello instrumental of 'I Don't 
Know (How to Love Him)' from an old opera Lyle sometimes borrowed people's players 
and listened to at night in the weight room. Lyle and Marlon Bain had been particularly 
tight, Hal recalls. 

The trimeter of the men's chant has reduced to a one-foot low-volume 'Needs, Needs, 
Needs, Needs, Needs' as Kevin Bain slowly and hesitantly uncrosses his legs and rises 
from his orange chair, turning to face Hal and the motionless guy behind him, this Jim. 
Bain begins to move slowly toward them with the tortured steps of a mime miming 



walking against a tornadic gale. Hal's picturing himself doing a lazy backstroke in the 
Azores, spouting glassy water up out of his mouth in a cytological plume. He's leaning 
almost out of his chair, as far as possible out of Kevin Bain's line of transit, studying the 
brown suspension in the bottom of his glass. His prayer not to be recognized by a 
regressive Kevin Bain is the first really desperate and sincere prayer Hal can remember 
offering since he'd stopped wearing pajamas with feet in them. 

'Kevin?' Harv calls softly from the front of the room. 'Is it you moving actively toward 
Jim, or should it be the Infant inside you, the one with the needs?' 

'Needs, Needs, Needs,' the bearded men are chanting, some rhythmically raising their 
manicured fists in the air. 

Bain's looking back and forth between Harv and Jim, chewing his finger indecisively. 

'Is this how an Infant moves towards its needs, Kevin?' Harv says. 

'Go for it, Kevin!' a full-bearded man calls out. 

'Let the Infant out!' 

'Let your Infant do the walking, Kev.' 

So Hal's most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty 
oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother's doubles 
partner's older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered 
because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he 
crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain's knees 
leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up 
and past Hal, his face unspeakable. 


The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was 
in St. Elizabeth's Hospital's Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged 
and then deflated, shiny as a lung. When Don was a massive toddler his mother had put 
them in a little beach house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly. The 
place was affordable because it had a big ragged hole in the roof. Origin of hole 
unknown. Gately's outsized crib had been in the beach house's little living room, right 
under the hole. The guy that owned the little cottages off the dunes had stapled thick 
clear polyurethane sheeting across the room's ceiling. It was an attempt to deal with the 
hole. The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like 
some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, 
wide-eyed. The breathing polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a 
character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse. Gately, age 
like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had 
been afraid of it. He couldn't feel the right side of his upper body. He couldn't move in 
any real sense of the word. The hospital room had that misty quality rooms in fevers 
have. Gately lay on his back. Ghostish figures materialized at the peripheries of his vision 
and hung around and then de-materialized. The ceiling bulged and receded. Gately's 
own breath hurt his throat. His throat felt somehow raped. The blurred figure in the 
next bed sat up very still in bed in a sitting position and seemed to have a box on its 
head. Gately kept having a terrible repetitious ethnocentric dream that he was robbing 



the house of an Oriental and had the guy tied to a chair and was trying to blindfold him 
with quality mailing twine from the drawer under the Oriental's kitchen phone. The 
Oriental kept being able to see around the twine and kept looking steadily at Gately and 
blinking inscrutably. Plus the Oriental had no nose or mouth, just a smooth expanse of 
lower-facial skin, and wore a silk robe and scary sandals, and had no hair on its legs. 

What Gately perceived as light-cycles and events all out of normal sequence was really 
Gately going in and out of consciousness. Gately did not perceive this. It seemed to him 
more like he kept coming up for air and then being pushed below the surface of 
something. Once when Gately came up for air he found that resident Tiny Ewell was 
seated in a chair right up next to the bed. Tiny's little slim hand was on the bed's crib- 
type railing, and his chin rested on the hand, so his face was right up close. The ceiling 
bulged and receded. The room's only light was what spilled in from the nighttime hall. 
Nurses glided down the hall and past the door in subsonic footwear. A tall and slumped 
ghostish figure appeared to Gately's left, off past the blurred seated square-head boy's 
bed, slumped and fluttering, appearing to rest its tailbone on the sill of the dark 
window. The ceiling rounded on down and then settled back flat. Gately rolled his eyes 
up at Ewell. Ewell had shaved off his blunt white goatee. His hair was so completely 
clean and white it took a faint pink cast from the pink of his scalp below. Ewell had been 
discoursing to him for an unknown length of time. It was Gately's first full night in St. 
Elizabeth's Hospital's Trauma Wing. He didn't know what night of the week it was. His 
circadian rhythm was the least of the personal rhythms that had been scrambled. His 
right side felt encased in a kind of hot cement. Also a sick throb in what he assumed was 
a toe. He wondered dimly about going to the bathroom, if and when. Ewell was right in 
the middle of speaking. Gately couldn't tell if Ewell was whispering. Nurses glided across 
the doorway's light. Their sneakers were so noiseless the nurses seemed to be on 
wheels. A stolid shadow of somebody in a hat was cast obliquely across the hall's tile 
floor just outside the room, as if a stolid figure were seated just outside the door, 
against the wall, in a hat. 

'My wife's personal term for soul is personality. As in "There's something incorrigibly 
dark in your personality, Eldred Ewell, and Dewars brings it out."' 

The hall floor was pretty definitely white tile, with a cloudy overwaxed shine in the 
bright fluorescence out there. Some kind of red or pink stripe ran down the center of 
the hall. Gately couldn't tell if Tiny Ewell thought he was awake or unconscious or what. 

'It was in the fall term of third grade as a child that I found myself fallen in with the 
bad element. They were a group of tough blue-collar Irish lads bussed in from the East 
Watertown projects. Runny noses, home-cut hair, frayed cuffs, quick with their fists, 
sports-mad, fond of sneaker-hockey on asphalt,' Ewell said, 'and yet, strangely, I, unable 
to do even one pull-up in the President's Physical Fitness Test, quickly became the 
leader of the pack we all fell into. The blue-collar lads all seemed to admire me for 
attributes that were not clear. We formed a sort of club. Our uniform was a gray 
skallycap. Our clubhouse was the dugout of a Little League diamond that had fallen into 
disuse. Our club was called the Money-Stealers' Club. At my suggestion we went with a 
descriptive name as opposed to euphemistic. The name was mine. The Irish lads 
acquiesced. They viewed me as the brains of the operation. I held them in a kind of 



thrall. This was due in large part to my capacity for rhetoric. Even the toughest and most 
brutish Irish lad respects a gilded tongue. Our club was formed for the express purpose 
of undertaking a bunko operation. We went around to people's homes after school, 
ringing the doorbell and soliciting donations for Project Hope Youth Hockey. There was 
no such organization. Our donation-receptacle was a Chock Full O' Nuts can with 
PROJECT HOPE YOUTH HOCKEY written on a strip of masking tape wrapped around the 
can. The lad who made the receptacle had spelled PROJECT with a G in the first draft. I 
ridiculed him for the error, and the whole club pointed at him and laughed. 

Brutally.' Ewell kept staring at the crude blue jailhouse square and canted cross on 
Gately's forearms. 'Our only visible credentials were kneepads and sticks we'd purloined 
from the P.E. stockroom. By my order, all were held carefully to conceal the PPTY W. 
WTTN ELEM SCH emblazoned down the side of every stick. One lad had a goalie mask on 
under his skallycap, the rest kneepads and carefully held sticks. The kneepads were 
turned inside-out for the same reason. I couldn't even skate, and my mother absolutely 
forbade rough play on asphalt. I wore a necktie and combed my hair carefully after each 
solicitation. I was the spokesperson. The mouthpiece, the bad lads called me. They were 
Irish Catholics all. Watertown from east to west is Catholic, Armenian, and Mixed. The 
Eastside boys all but genuflected to my gift for bullshit. I was exceptionally smooth with 
adults. I rang doorbells and the lads arrayed themselves behind me on the porch. I 
spoke of disadvantaged youth and team spirit and fresh air and the meaning of 
competition and alternatives to the after-school streets' bad element. I spoke of 
mothers in support-hose and war-injured older brothers with elaborate prostheses 
cheering disadvantaged lads on to victory against far better-equipped teams. I 
discovered that I had a gift for it, the emotional appeal of adult rhetoric. It was the first 
time I felt personal power. I was unrehearsed and creative and moving. Hard-case 
homeowners who came to the door in sleeveless Ts holding tallboys of beer with 
stubble and expressions of minimal charity were often weeping openly by the time we 
left their porch. I was called a fine lad and a good kid and a credit to me Mum and Da. 
My hair was tousled so often I had to carry a mirror and comb. The coffee can became 
hard to carry back to the dugout, where we hid it behind a cinderblock bench-support. 
We'd netted over a hundred dollars by Halloween. This was a serious amount in those 
days.' 

Tiny Ewell and the ceiling kept receding and then looming in, bulging roundly. Figures 
Gately didn't know from Adam kept popping in and out of fluttery view in different 
corners of the room. The space between his bed and the other bed seemed to distend 
and then contract with a slow sort of boinging motion. Gately's eyes kept rolling up in 
his head, his upper lip mustached with sweat. 'And I was revelling in the fraud of it, the 
discovery of the gift,' Ewell was saying. 'I was flushed with adrenaline. I had tasted 
power, the verbal manipulation of human hearts. The lads called me the gilded 
blarneyman. Soon the first-order fraud wasn't enough. I began secretly filching receipts 
from the club's Chock Full O' Nuts can. Embezzling. I persuaded the lads it was too risky 
to keep the can in the open-air dugout and took personal charge of the can. I kept the 
can in my bedroom and persuaded my mother that it contained Christmas-connected 
gifts and must under no circumstances be inspected. To my underlings in the club I 



claimed to be rolling the coins and depositing them in a high-interest savings account I'd 
opened for us in the name Franklin W. Dixon. In fact I was buying myself Fez and Milky 
Ways and Mad magazines and a Creeple Peeple-brand Deluxe Oven-and-Mold Set with 
six different colors of goo. This was in the early 1970s. At first I was discreet. Grandiose 
but discreet. At first the embezzlement was controlled. But the power had roused some¬ 
thing dark in my personality, and the adrenaline drove it forward. Self-will run riot. Soon 
the club's coffee can was empty by each weekend's end. Each week's haul went toward 
some uncontrolled Saturday binge of puerile consumption. I doctored up flamboyant 
bank statements to show the club, in the dugout. I got more loquacious and imperious 
with them. None of the lads thought to question me, or the purple Magic Marker the 
bank statements were done in. I was not dealing with intellectual titans here, I knew. 
They were nothing but malice and muscle, the worst of the school's bad element. And I 
ruled them. Thrall. They trusted me completely, and the rhetorical gift. In retrospect 
they probably could not conceive of any sane third-grader with glasses and a necktie 
trying to defraud them, given the inevitably brutal consequences. Any sane third-grader. 
But I was no longer a sane third-grader. I lived only to feed the dark thing in my 
personality, which told me any consequences could be forestalled by my gift and grand 
personal aura. 

'But then of course eventually Christmas hove into view.' Gately tries to stop Ewell and 
say 'hove?' and finds to his horror that he can't make any sounds come out, 'The meaty 
Catholic Eastside bad-element lads now wanted to tap their nonexistent Franklin W. 
Dixon account to buy support-hose and sleeveless Ts for their swarthy blue-collar 
families. I held them off as long as I could with pedantic blather on interest penalties 
and fiscal years. Irish Catholic Christmas is no laughing matter, though, and for the first 
time their swarthy eyes began to narrow at me. Things at school grew increasingly 
tense. One afternoon, the largest and swarthiest of them assumed control of the can in 
an ugly dugout coup. It was a blow from which my authority never recovered. I began to 
feel a gnawing fear: my denial broke: I realized I'd gradually embezzled far more than I 
could ever make good. At home, I began talking up the merits of private-school curricula 
at the dinner table. The can's weekly take fell off sharply as holiday expenses drained 
homeowners of change and patience. This bear-market in giving was attributed by some 
of the club's swarthier lads to my deficiencies. The whole club began muttering in the 
dugout. I began to learn that one could perspire heavily even in a bitterly cold open-air 
dugout. Then, on the first day of Advent, the lad now in charge of the can produced 
childish-looking figures and announced the whole club wanted their share of the 
accrued booty in the Dixon account. I bought time with vague allusions to co-signatures 
and a misplaced passbook. I arrived home with chattering teeth and bloodless lips and 
was forced by my mother to swallow fish-oil. I was consumed with puerile fear. I felt 
small and weak and evil and consumed by dread of my embezzlement's exposure. Not 
to mention the brutal consequences. I claimed intestinal distress and stayed home from 
school. The telephone began ringing in the middle of the night. I could hear my father 
saying "Hello? Hello?" I did not sleep. My personality's dark part had grown leathery 
wings and a beak and turned on me. There were still several days until Christmas 
vacation. I'd lie in bed panicked during school hours amid piles of ill-gotten Mad 



magazines and Creeple Peeple figures and listen to the lonely handheld bells of the 
Salvation Army Santas on the street below and think of synonyms for dread and doom. I 
began to know shame, and to know it as grandiosity's aide-de-camp. My unspecific 
digestive illness wore on, and teachers sent cards and concerned notes. On some days 
the door-buzzer would buzz after school hours and my mother would come upstairs and 
say "How sweet, Eldred," that there were swarthy and cuff-frayed but clearly good- 
hearted boys in gray skallycaps on the stoop asking after me and declaring that they 
were keenly awaiting my return to school. I began to gnaw on the bathroom's soap in 
the morning to make a convincing case for staying home. My mother was alarmed at the 
masses of bubbles I vomited and threatened to consult a specialist. I felt myself moving 
closer and closer to some cliff-edge at which everything would come out. I longed to be 
able to lean into my mother's arms and weep and confess all. I could not. For the 
shame. Three or four of the Money-Stealers' Club's harder cases took up afternoon 
positions by the nativity scene in the churchyard across from our house and stared 
stonily up at my bedroom window, pounding their fists in their palms. I began to 
understand what a Belfast Protestant must feel. But even more prospectively dreadful 
than pummellings from Irish Catholics was the prospect of my parents' finding out my 
personality had a dark thing that had driven me to grandiose wickedness and left me 
there.' 

Gately has no idea how Ewell feels about him making no responses, whether Ewell 
doesn't like it or even notices it or what. He can breathe OK, but something in his raped 
throat won't let whatever's supposed to vibrate to speak vibrate. 

'Finally, on the day before my gastroenterologist appointment, when my mother was 
down the street at a speculum party, I crept downstairs from my sick bed and stole over 
a hundred dollars from a shoebox marked I.B.E.W. LOCAL 517 PETTY SLUSH in the back 
of my father's den's closet. I'd never dreamed of resorting to the shoebox before. 
Stealing from my own parents. To remit funds I'd stolen from dull-witted boys with 
whom I'd stolen them from adults I'd lied to. My feelings of fear and despicability only 
increased. I now felt ill for real. I lived and moved in the shadow of something dark that 
hovered just overhead. I vomited without aid of emetic, now, but secretly, so I could 
return to school; I couldn't face the prospect of a whole Christmas vacation of swarthy 
sentries pounding their palms outside the house. I converted my father's union's bills to 
small change and paid off the Money-Stealers' Club and got pummelled anyway. 
Apparently on general bad-element principles. I discovered the latent rage in followers, 
the fate of the leader who falls from the mob's esteem. I was pummelled and given a 
savage wedgie and hung from a hook in my school locker, where I remained for several 
hours, swollen and mortified. And going home was worse; home was no refuge. For 
home was the scene of the third-order crime. Of theft cubed. I couldn't sleep. I tossed 
and turned. There were night terrors. I was unable to eat, no matter how long after 
supper I had to stay at the table. The more worried about me my parents became, the 
greater my shame. I felt a shame and personal despicability no third-grader should have 
to feel. The holidays were not jolly. I looked back over the autumn and failed to 
recognize anyone named Eldred K. Ewell Jr. It no longer seemed a question of insanity or 
dark parts of me. I had stolen from neighbors, slum-children, and family, and bought 



myself sweets and toys. Under any tenable definition of bad, I was bad. I resolved to toe 
the virtuous line from then on. The shame and horror was too awful: I had to remake 
myself. I resolved to do whatever was required to see myself as good, remade. I never 
knowingly committed another felony. The whole shameful interval of the Money- 
Stealers' Club was moved to mental storage and buried there. Don, I'd forgotten it ever 
happened. Until the other night. Don, the other night, after the fracas and your display 
of reluctant se offendendo, 337 after your injury and the whole aftermath ... Don, I 
dreamed the whole mad repressed third-grade interval of grandiose perfidy all over 
again. Vividly and completely. When I awoke, I was somehow minus my goatee and my 
hair was center-parted in a fashion I haven't favored for forty years. The bed was 
soaked, and there was a gnawed-looking cake of McDade's special anti-acne soap in my 
hand.' 

Gately starts to short-term recall that he was offered I.V.-Demerol for the pain of his 
gunshot wound immediately on admission to the E.R. and has been offered Demerol 
twice by shift-Drs. who haven't bothered to read the HISTORY OF NARCOTICS 
DEPENDENCY NO SCHEDULE C-IV+ MEDIC, that Gately'd made Pat Montesian swear 
she'd make them put in italics on his file or chart or whatever, first thing. Last night's 
emergency surgery was remedial, not extractive, because the big pistol's ordnance had 
apparently fragmented on impacting and passed through the meters of muscle that 
surrounded Gately's Humorous ball and Scalpula socket, passing through and missing 
bone but doing great and various damage to soft tissues. The E.R.'s Trauma Specialist 
had prescribed Toradol-IM 338 but had warned that the pain after the surgery's general 
anesthetic wore off was going to be unlike anything Gately had ever imagined. The next 
thing Gately knew he was upstairs in a Trauma Wing room that trembled with sunlight 
and a different Dr. was speculating to either Pat M. or Calvin T. that the invasive foreign 
body had been treated with something unclean, beforehand, possibly, because Gately's 
developed a massive infection, and they're monitoring him for something he heard as 
Noxzema but is really toxemia. Gately also wanted to protest that his body was 100% 
American, but he seemed temporarily unable to vocalize aloud. Later it was nighttime 
and Ewell was there, intoning. It was totally unclear what Ewell wanted from Gately or 
why he was choosing this particular time to share. Gately's right shoulder was almost 
the same size as his head, and he had to roll his eyes up and over like a cow to see 
Ewell's hand on the railing and his face floating above it. 

'And how will I administer the Ninth Step when it comes time to make amends? How 
can I start to make reparations? Even if I could remember the homes of the citizens we 
defrauded, how many could still be there, living? The club lads have doubtless scattered 
into various low-rent districts and dead-end careers. My father lost the I.B.E.W. 339 
account under the Weld administration and has been dead since 1993. And the 
revelations would kill my mother. My mother is very frail. She uses a walker, and 
arthritis has twisted her head nearly all the way around on her neck. My wife jealously 
protects my mother from all unpleasant facts regarding me. She says someone has to do 
it. My mother believes right this minute I'm at a nine-month Banque-de-Geneve- 
sponsored tax-law symposium in the Alsace. She keeps sending me knitted skiwear that 
doesn't fit, from the rest home. 



'Don, this buried interval and the impost I've carried ever since may have informed my 
whole life. Why I was drawn to tax law, helping wealthy suburbanites two-step around 
their fair share. My marriage to a woman who looks at me as if I were a dark stain at the 
back of her child's trousers. My whole descent into somewhat-heavier-than-normal 
drinking may have been some instinctive attempt to bury third-grade feelings of 
despicability, submerge them in an amber sea. 

'I don't know what to do,' Ewell said. 

Gately was on enough Toradol-IM to make his ears ring, plus a saline drip with 
D oryx. 340 

'I don't want to remember despicabilities I can do nothing about. If this is a sample of 
the "More Will Be Revealed," I hereby lodge a complaint. Some things seem better left 
submerged. No?' 

And everything on his right side was on fire. The pain was getting to be emergency- 
type pain, like scream-and-yank-your-charred-hand-off-the-stove-type pain. Parts of him 
kept sending up emergency flares to other parts of him, and he could neither move nor 
call out. 

'I'm scared,' from what seemed somewhere overhead and rising, was the last thing 
Gately heard Ewell whisper as the ceiling bulged down toward them. Gately wanted to 
tell Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D. with Ewell's feelings, and that if he. Tiny, 
could just hang in and tote that bale and put one little well-shined shoe in front of the 
other everything would end up all right, that the God of Ewell's Understanding would 
find some way for Ewell to make things right, and then he could let the despicable 
feelings go instead of keeping them down with Dewars, but Gately couldn't connect the 
impulse to speak with actual speech, still. He settled for trying to reach his left hand 
across and pat Ewell's hand on the railing. But his own breadth was too far to reach 
across. And then the white ceiling came all the way down and made everything white. 

He seemed to sort of sleep. He fever-dreamed of dark writhing storm clouds writhing 
darkly and screaming on down the beach at Beverly MA, the winds increasing over his 
head until Herman the polyurethane vacuole burst from the force, leaving a ragged 
inhaling maw that tugged at Gately's XXL Dr. Dentons. A blue stuffed brontosaurus was 
sucked upward out of the crib and disappeared into the maw, spinning. His mother was 
getting the shit beaten out of her by a man with a shepherd's crook in the kitchen and 
couldn't hear Gately's frantic cries for help. He broke through the crib's bars with his 
head and went to the front door and ran outside. The black clouds up the beach 
lowered and roiled, funnelling sand, and as Gately watched he saw a tornado's snout 
emerge from the clouds and slowly lower. It looked as if the clouds were either giving 
birth or taking a shit. Gately ran across the beach to the water to escape the tornado. 
He ran through the crazed breakers to deep warm water and submerged himself and 
stayed under until he ran out of breath. It was now no longer clear if he was little Bimmy 
or the grown man Don. He kept coming up briefly for a great sucking breath and then 
going back under where it was warm and still. The tornado stayed in one place on the 
beach, bulging and receding, screaming like a jet, its opening a breathing maw, lightning 
coming off the funnel-cloud like hair. He could hear the tiny tattered sounds of his 
mother calling his name. The tornado was right by the beach house and the whole 



house trembled. His mother came out the front door, wild-haired and holding a bloody 
Ginsu knife, calling his name. Gately tried to call for her to come into the deep water 
with him, but even he couldn't hear his calls against the scream of the storm. She 
dropped the knife and held her head as the funnel pointed its pointy maw her way. The 
beach house exploded and his mother flew through the air toward the funnel's intake, 
arms and legs threshing, as if swimming in wind. She vanished into the maw and was 
pulled spinning up into the tornado's vortex. Shingles and boards followed her. No sign 
of the shepherd's crook of the man who'd hurt her. Gately's right lung burned horribly. 
He saw his mother for the last time when lightning lit up the funnel's cone. She was 
whirling around and around like something in a drain, rising, seeming to swim, bluely 
backlit. The burst of lightning was the white of the sunlit room when he came up for air 
and opened his eyes. His mother's tiny rotating imago faded against the ceiling. What 
seemed like heavy breathing was him trying to scream. The skinny bed's sheets were 
soaked and he needed a piss something bad. It was daytime and his right side was in no 
way numb, and he was immediately nostalgic for the warm-cement feeling of when it 
was numb. Tiny Ewell was gone. His every pulse was an assault on his right side. He 
didn't think he could stand it for even another second. He didn't know what would 
happen, but he didn't think he could stand it. 

Later somebody who was either Joelle van D. or a St. E's nurse in a U.H.I.D. veil was 
running a cold washcloth over his face. His face was so big it took some time to cover it 
all. It seemed too tender a touch on the cloth for a nurse, but then Gately heard the 
clink of I.V. bottles being changed or R.N.ishly messed with somewhere overhead 
behind him. He was unable to ask about changing the sheets or going to the bathroom. 
Some time after the veiled lady left, he just gave up and let the piss go, and instead of 
feeling wet heat he heard the rising metallic sound of something filling up somewhere 
near the bed. He couldn't move to lift the covers and see what he was hooked up to. 
The blinds were up, and the room was so bright-white in the sunlight everything looked 
bleached and boiled. The guy with either the square head or the box on his head had 
been taken off someplace, his bed unmade and one crib-railing down. There were no 
ghostish figures or figures in mist. The hallway was no brighter than the room, and 
Gately couldn't see any shadows of anybody in a hat. He didn't even know if last night 
had been real. The pain kept making his lids flutter. He hadn't cried over pain since he 
was four. His last thought before letting his lids stay shut against the brutal white of the 
room was that he'd maybe been castrated, which was how he'd always heard the term 
catheterized. He could smell rubbing alcohol and a kind of vitamin stink, and himself. 

At some point a probably real Pat Montesian came in and got her hair in his eye when 
she kissed his cheek and told him if he could just hang in and concentrate on getting 
well everything would be fine, that everything at the House was back to normal, more 
or less, and essentially fine, that she was so sorry he'd had to handle a situation like that 
alone, without support or counsel, and that she realized full well Lenz and the Canadian 
thugs hadn't given him enough time to call anybody, that he'd done the very best he 
could with what he'd had to work with and had nothing to feel horrid about, to let it go, 
that the violence hadn't been relapse-type thrill-seeking violence but simply doing the 
best he could at that moment and trying to stand up for himself and for a resident of the 



House. Pat Montesian was dressed as usual entirely in black, but formally, as in for 
taking somebody to court, and her formalwear looked like a Mexican widow's. She really 
had said the words thug and horrid. She said not to worry, the House was a community 
and it took care of its own. She kept asking if he was sleepy. Her hair's red was a 
different and less radiant red than the red of Joelle van D.'s hair. The left side of her face 
was very kind. Gately had very little understanding of what she was talking about. He 
was kind of surprised the Finest hadn't come calling already. Pat didn't know about the 
remorseless A.D.A. or the suffocated Nuck: Gately'd tried hard to share openly about 
the wreckage of his past, but some issues still seemed suicidal to share about. Pat said 
that Gately was showing tremendous humility and willingness sticking to his resolution 
about nothing stronger than non-narcotic painkillers, but that she hoped he'd 
remember that he wasn't in charge of anything except putting himself in his Higher 
Power's hands and following the dictates of his heart. That codeine or maybe 
Percoset 341 or maybe even Demerol wouldn't be a relapse unless his heart of hearts that 
knew his motives thought it would be. Her red hair was down and looked uncombed 
and mashed in on the side; she looked frazzled. Gately wanted very much to ask Pat 
about the legal fallout of the other night's thug-fracas. He realized she kept asking if he 
was sleepy because his attempts to speak looked like yawns. His inability to still speak 
was like speechlessness in bad dreams, airless and hellish, horrid. 

What made the whole interface with Pat M. possibly unreal was that right at the end 
for no reason Pat M. burst into tears, and for no reason Gately got so embarrassed he 
pretended to pass out, and slept again, and probably dreamed. 

Almost certainly dreamed and unreal was the interval when Gately came up with a 
start and saw Mrs. Lopate, the objay dart from the Shed that they come and install next 
to the Ennet House viewer some days, sitting there in a gunmetal wheelchair, face 
contorted, head cocked, hair stringy, looking not at him but more like seemingly at 
whatever array of I.V. bottles and signifying monitors hung above and behind his big 
crib, so not speaking or even looking at him but still in some sense being there with him, 
somehow. Even though there was no way she could have really been there, it was the 
first time Gately realized that the catatonic Mrs. L. had been the same lady he'd seen 
touching the tree in #5's front lawn late at night, some nights, when he'd first come on 
Staff. That they were the same person. And that this realization was real even though 
the lady's presence in the room was not, the complexities of which made his eyes roll up 
in his head again as he passed back out again. 

Then at some later point Joelle van Dyne was sitting in a chair just outside the railing 
of the bed, veiled, wearing sweatpants and a sweater that was starting to unravel, in a 
pink-bordered veil, not saying anything, probably looking at him, probably thinking he 
was unconscious with his eyes open, or delirious with Noxzema. The whole right side of 
himself hurt so bad each breath was like a hard decision. He wanted to cry like a small 
child. The girl's silence and the blankness of her veil frightened him after a while, and he 
wished he could ask her to come back later. 

Nobody'd offered him anything to eat, but he wasn't hungry. There were I.V. tubes 
going into the backs of both hands and the crook of his left elbow. Other tubing exited 
him lower down. He didn't want to know. He kept trying to ask his heart if just codeine 



would be a relapse, according to the heart, but his heart was declining to comment. 

Then at some point Ennet House alum and senior counselor Calvin Thrust came 
roaring in and pulled up a chair and straddled it backwards like a slow-tease stripper, 
slumping and draping his arms over the back of the chair, gesturing with an unlit rodney 
as he spoke. He told Gately that man he looked like shit something heavy had fell on. 
But he told Gately he should get a gander of the other guys, the Nucks in Polynesian- 
wear. Thrust and the House Manager had got there before E.M.P.H.H. Security could 
drag the Finest away from issuing midnight street-side citations down on Comm. Ave., 
he told Gately. Lenz and Green and Alfonso Parias-Carbo had dragged/carried the 
passed-out Gately inside and laid him on the black vinyl couch in Pat's office, where 
Gately had come to and told them ixnay on the ambulanceay and to please wake him up 
in five more minutes, and then passed out for serious real. Parias-Carbo seemed like 
he'd suffered a mild intestinal hernia from dragging/carrying Gately, but he was being a 
man about it and had refused codeine downstairs at the E.R. and was expressing 
gratitude for the growth experience, and the thoraxic lump was receding nicely. Calvin 
Thrust's breath smelled of smoke and old scrambled eggs. Gately had once seen a cheap 
bootleg cartridge of a young Calvin Thrust having sex with a lady with only one arm on 
what looked like a crude homemade trapeze. The cartridge's lighting and production 
values had been real low-quality, and Gately had been in and out of a Demerol-nod, but 
he was 98% sure it had been the young Calvin Thrust. Calvin Thrust said how right there 
over Gately's unconscious form in the office Randy Lenz had begun womaning right off 
how of course he, Randy Lenz, was going to somehow get blamed for Gately and the 
Nucks getting fucked up and why didn't they just get it over with and give him the 
administrative Shoe right now without going through the sham motions of deliberating. 
Bruce Green had rammed Lenz up against Pat's cabinets and shaken him like a marga- 
rita, but refused to rat out Lenz or say why irate Canadians might think a specimen as 
dickless as Lenz might have demapped their friend. The matter was under investigation, 
but Thrust confessed to a certain admiration for Green's refusal to eat cheese. Brucie G. 
had suffered a broken nose in the beef and now had a terrific set of twin shiners. Calvin 
Thrust said both he, Calvin Thrust, and the House Manager had immediately on arrival 
pegged Lenz as either coked up or 'drined to the gills on some 'drine, and Thrust said he 
summoned every Oreida of self-control sobriety'd blessed him with and had quietly 
taken Lenz out of the office into the special Disabled Bedroom next door and over the 
sound of Burt F. Smith coughing up little pieces of lung in his sleep he said he'd real 
controlledly given Lenz the choice of voluntarily resigning his Ennet residency on the 
spot or submitting to a spot-urine and a room-search and everything like that, plus to 
questioning by the Finest, who were pretty doubtless even now on route with the fleet 
of ambulances for the Nucks. Meanwhile, Thrust said — gesturing with the gasper and 
occasionally leaning forward to see whether Gately was still conscious and to tell him he 
looked like shit, meanwhile — Gately had been lying there passed out, wedged with two 
full filing cabinets to keep him from rolling off the couch he was wider than, and was 
bleeding in a very big way, and nobody knew how to, like, affix a turnipcut to a shoulder, 
and the good-bodied new girl with the cloth mask was bending over the arm of the 
couch applying pressure to towels on Gately's bleeding, and her partly-open robe was 



yielding a view that even brought Alfonso P.-C. around from his herniated fetal posture 
on the floor, and Thrust and the House Manager were taking turns Asking for Help to 
intuitively know what they ought to do with Gately, because it was well known that he 
was on Probie against a real serious bit, and with all due trust and respect to Don it 
wasn't clear at that point from the scattered damaged Canadian forms still in different 
prone positions out in the street who'd done what to who in defense of whatever or 
not, and the Finest tend to take a keen interest in huge guys who come into E.R.'s with 
spectacular gunshot wounds, and but then when Pat M. pulled up in the Aventura laying 
rubber a couple minutes later she'd screamed rather unserenely at Thrust for not having 
already rikky-ticked Don Gately over to St. E.'s on his own already. Thrust said he'd let 
go of Pat's screaming like water off a duck, revealing that Pat M. had been under felony- 
weight domestic stress at home, he knew. He said and but so Gately was too heavy to 
carry unconscious for more than a few meters, even with the masked girl filling in for 
Parias-Carbo, and they'd just barely got Gately outside still in his wet bowling shirt and 
laid him briefly on the sidewalk and covered him with Pat's black suede car-coat while 
Thrust maneuvered his beloved Corvette up as close to Gately as possible. The sounds of 
sirens on the way up Comm. Ave. mixed with the sounds of severely fucked-up Cana¬ 
dians returning to whatever passed with Nucks for consciousness and calling for what 
they called medecins, and with the crazed-squirrel sound of Lenz trying to start his 
rusted-out brown Duster, which had a bad solenoid. They'd heaved Gately's dead 
weight in the 'Vette and Pat M. drove interference like a madwoman in her 
turbocharged Aventura. Pat let the masked girl ride shotgun with her because the 
masked girl wouldn't quit asking her to let her come too. The House Manager stayed 
behind to represent Ennet House to E.M.P.H.H. Security and the somewhat less 
bullshittable BPD-Finest. The sirens got steadily closer, which added to the confusion 
because senile and mobile-vegetable residents of both Unit #4 and the Shed had been 
drawn out on the frozen lawns by the freakas, and the mix of several kinds of sirens 
didn't do them a bit of good, and they started flapping and shrieking and running 
around and adding to the medical confusion of the whole scene, which by the time him 
and Pat pulled out of there was a fucking millhouse and everything like that. Thrust asks 
rhetorically how much does Don fucking weigh, anyway, because moving the front 
buckets way up to where like dwarfs put them and putting Gately's carcass across the 
back seat of the 'Vette had required all available hands and even Burt F.S.'s stumps, had 
been like trying to get something humongous through a door that's way smaller than 
the humongous thing was and everything like that. Thrust occasionally tapped his 
gasper like he thought it was lit. The first squad cars had come fishtailing around the 
Warren-Comm. corner just as they all came out of the E.M. driveway onto Warren. Pat 
in her car up ahead had made an arm-motion that could have been either waving coolly 
at the passing Finest or uncoolly clutching her head. Thrust said had he mentioned 
Gately's blood? Gately'd bled all over Pat M.'s vinyl couch and filing cabinets and carpet, 
the little E.M. streetlet, the sidewalk, Pat M.'s black suede car-coat, pretty much 
everybody's winter coats, and the beloved upholstery of Thrust's beloved Corvette, 
which upholstery Thrust might add had been new, and dear. But he said not to worry 
about it. Thrust said: the fucking blood was the least of the problems. Gately didn't like 



the sound of that at all, and started trying to blink at him in a kind of crude code, to get 
his attention, but Thrust either didn't notice it or thought it was like a postoperative tic. 
Thrust's hair was always combed straight back like a mobster. Thrust said at the St. E.'s 
E.R. how the E.R. crew had been quick and ingenious about getting Gately out of the 
'Vette and onto a double-width gurney, though they did have some trouble lifting the 
gurney so they could get the legs with wheels set up under it so the guys in white could 
roll him in with more guys in white walking briskly alongside of him and leaning over him 
and applying pressure and barking little orders in terse code like they always do in E.R.s 
and everything like that, in emergencies. Thrust says he couldn't tell if they could tell 
right away it was a spectacular gunshot wound, nobody used the G-word or anything 
like that. Thrust had babbled something about a chainsaw while Pat nodded furiously. 
The chief two things Gately kept blinking rhythmically to try to find out were: did any¬ 
body end up getting killed, meaning the Nucks; and has this one certain A.D.A.-type 
figure that always wore a hat come in from Essex County or given any sign of getting 
wind of Gately's whereabouts or involvement; and — so really three things — and will 
any of the Ennet House residents that were right there on the scene from start to finish 
look respectable enough on paper to have creditibility as like legal witnesses. Plus he 
wouldn't mind knowing what the fuck Thrust was thinking of, scaring Lenz off and letting 
him screw off into the urban night leaving Gately maybe holding the statutory bag. Most 
of Calvin Thrust's legality-experience was filmic and petty-vice. Thrust eventually 
describes that one of the House Manager's key coups of quick thinking was doing a 
quick TP-scan and finding out which of the residents out there milling around with the 
catatonics on the street had up-in-the-air legal issues such that they needed to be se- 
cloistered in the protected area of the House out of legal sight by the time the BPD's 
Finest hit the scene. He says in his view it was lucky for Gately that he (Gately) was such 
a massive son of a bitch and had so much blood, because even so Gately'd lost huge 
volumes of blood all over people's upholstery and was in shock and everything like that 
by the time they got him on the double-width gurney, his face cheese-colored and his 
lips blue and muttering all this shock-type stuff, but even so here he (Gately) was, not 
exactly ready for a GO. cover but still sucking air. Thrust said in the waiting room at the 
E.R., where they wouldn't let a working man smoke down there either, he said then the 
arrogant new girl resident in the white veil had up and tried to take Thrust's inventory 
for letting Randy L. resign and decamp before his part in Gately's legal embryoglio could 
be nailed down, and Pat M. had been pretty unconditionally loving about it but it was 
obvious she wasn't thrilled with Thrust's tactics either and everything like that. Gately 
blinked furiously to signify his agreement with Joelle's position. Calvin Thrust gestured 
stoically with his cigarette and said he'd told Pat M. the truth: he always told the truth, 
no matter how unpleasant for himself, today: he said he'd said he'd encouraged Lenz to 
rikky-tick out of there because otherwise he was afraid that he (Thrust) was going to 
eliminate Lenz's map on the spot, out of rage. Lenz's solenoid appeared to have been on 
the permanent dicky, because the rusty Duster was seen by new resident Amy J. real 
early the next A.M. getting towed from its wrong-side-of-the-street spot in front of #3 
when Amy J. slunk back to the House all jonesy and hung-over to get her Hefty bag full 
of evicted personal shit, Lenz apparently having abandoned his wheels and fleen off by 



foot during all the Finest's confusion and static with the ambulance drivers that who 
could blame them didn't want to take Canadians because of horrible paperwork for 
Health Card reimbursement for Nucks. The House Manager had gone so far as planting 
herself out in front of the House's locked front door with her not-all-that-small arms and 
legs spread out, blocking the door, assertively stating at whatever Finest tried to enter 
that Ennet House was court-mandated Protected by the Commonwealth of MA and 
could only be entered with a Court Order and three working days' mandated time for 
the House to file an injunction and wait for a ruling, and the Finest and even the booger- 
eating morons from E.M.P.H.H. Security were successfully held in bay and kept out, 
therefore, by her, alone, and Pat M. was considering rewarding the House Manager's 
coolness under fire by promoting her to Assistant Director next month when the present 
Assistant Director left to go get certified in jet-engine maintenance at East Coast 
Aerotech on a Mass Rehab grant. Gately's eyes keep rolling up in his head, only partly 
from pain. 

Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being 
only technically wherever he was. There was always this air of imminent departure 
about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound. It's like a lit gasper was 
psychic ballast for him or something. Everything he said to Gately seemed like it was 
going to be the last thing he said right before he looked at his watch and slapped his 
forehead and left. 

Thrust said whatever that Nuck that the residents allege shot him shot him with was 
serious ordnance, because there'd been bits of Gately's shoulder and bowling shirt all 
over the complex's little street. Thrust pointed at the huge bandage and asked whether 
they'd talked to Gately yet about was he going to get to keep what was left of the 
mutilated shoulder and arm. Gately found that the only audible sound he could make 
sounded like a run-over kitten. Thrust mentioned that Danielle S.'d been over to Mass 
Rehab with Burt F.S. and had reported how they were doing miraculous things with 
prosfeces these days. Gately's eyes were rolling around in his head and he was making 
pathetic little scared aspirated sounds as he pictured himself with a hook and parrot and 
patch making piratical 'Arr Matey' sounds from the AA podium. He felt a terrible 
certainty that the whole nerve-assembly network that connected the human voice-box 
to the human mind and let somebody ask for crucial legal and medical feedback must 
run through the right human shoulder. All kinds of fucking shunts and crazy interconnec¬ 
tions with nerves, he knew. He imagined himself with one of those solar-cell electric 
shaver voice-box prosfeces he has to hold up to his throat (maybe with his hook), trying 
to Carry the Message with it from the podium, sounding like an automatic teller or 
ROM-audio interface. Gately wanted to know what day the next day was and whether 
any of Lenz's Nucks had been demapped, and what the official capacity of the guy was in 
the hat who'd been sitting just outside the door to the room either last night or the 
night before, his hat's shadow cast in a kind of parallelogram across the open doorway, 
and if the guy was still there, assuming the sight of the guy's hatted shadow had been 
valid and not phantasmic, and he wondered how they went about cuffing you if one of 
your arms' shoulders was mutilated and the size of your head. If Gately took anything 
deeper than a half-breath, a mind-bending sheet of pain goes down his right side. He 



even breathed like a sick kitten, more like throbbing than breathing. Thrust said Hester 
Thrale had apparently disappeared sometime during the freakas and never came back. 
Gately could remember her running screaming off into the urban night. Thrust said her 
Alfa Romeo got towed the next A.M. right along with Lenz's bum Duster, and her stuff's 
been duly bagged and is on the porch and everything familiar like that. Thrust said they 
found this mysteriously huge stash of high-quality Irish Luggage during the Staff's search 
of Lenz's room, and the House looks to be fixed for trash- and eviction-bags for the next 
fiscal year. Discharged residents' bagged possessions stay on the porch for three days, 
and Gately's trying to calculate the present date from this fact. Thrust says Emil Minty 
got a Full House Restriction for getting observed removing one of Hester Thrale's 
undergarments from her bag on the porch, for reasons nobody much wants to speculate 
about. Kate Gompert and Ruth van Cleve supposedly went to hit an NA meeting in 
Inman Square and got supposedly mugged and separated, and then only Ruth van Cleve 
showed up back at the House, and Pat's sworn out a P.C. warrant for Gompert because 
of the girl's other psych and suicide issues. Gately discovers he doesn't even all that 
much care whether anybody thought to call Stavros L. at the Shattuck about Gately's 
day job. Thrust smoothed his hair back and said what else let's see. Johnette Foltz is so 
far covering Gately's shifts and said to say he's in her prayers. Chandler Foss finished out 
his nine months and graduated but came back the next morning and hung around for 
Morning Meditation, which has to be a good sign sobriety-wise for the old Chandulator. 
Jennifer Belbin did get indicted on the bad-check issue up in Wellfleet Circuit Court, but 
they're going to let her finish out her residency at the House before anything goes to 
trial, which her P.D. said graduating the House is guaranteed to get her bit cut in at least 
half. The Asst. Director had gone up to court with Belbin on her own time. Doony 
Glynn's still laid up with the diveritis thing, and can be neither coaxed nor threatened 
out of his fetal position in bed, and the House Manager's trying to breastwork through 
the red tape at Health to get them to OK him admission to St. E.'s even though he's got 
insurance fraud on his yellow sheet, part of his own past-wreckage. A guy that had gone 
through the House back when Thrust did and had stayed sober in AA for four solid years 
had suddenly out of nowhere slipped up and took The First Drink the same day as the 
Lenz freakas, and predictably ended getting totally shitfaced, and went and fell off the 
end of the Fort Point pier — like literally took a long walk on a short pier, apparently — 
and sank like a rock, and the memorial service is today, which is why Thrust is going to 
have to take off in a second here, he says. The new kid Tingley's coming out of the linen 
closet for up to an hour at a time and is taking solid food and Johnette's quit lobbying to 
have the kid sent over to Met State. The even newer new guy now that's come in to 
take Chandler Foss's spot's name is Dave K. and is one grim story to behold. Thrust 
assures him, a junior executive guy at ATHSCME Air Displacement, an upscale guy with a 
picket house and kids and a worried wife with tall hair, who this Dave K.'s bottom was 
he drank half a liter of Cuerva at some ATHSCME Interdependence Day office party and 
everything like that and got in some insane drunken limbo-dance challenge with a rival 
executive and tried to like limbo under a desk or a chair or something insanely low, and 
got his spine all fucked up in a limbo-lock, maybe permanently: so the newest new guy 
scuttles around the Ennet House living room like a crab, his scalp brushing the floor and 



his knees trembling with effort. Danielle S. 

thinks Burt F.S. might have batorial ammonia or some kind of chronic lung thing, and 
Geoff D.'s trying to get the other residents to sign a petition to get Burt barred from the 
kitchen and dining room because Burt can't cover his mouth when he coughs, 
understandably. Thrust says Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are taking meals in their room 
and are under orders not to come down or go near any windows, because of what 
happened to the map of the Nuck they allegedly stomped and everything like that. 
Gately mews and blinks like mad. Thrust says everybody's being real supportive of Jenny 
B. and encouraging her to turn the Wellfleet indictment over to her Higher Power. The 
Shed staff are still rolling the catatonic lady's wheelchair over from the Shed to the 
House on scheduled A.M.'S, and Thrust says Johnette had to write up Minty and Diehl 
for putting one of those gag-arrows that are curved in the middle and look like there's 
an arrow through your head over the catatonic lady's paralyzed head yesterday and 
leaving her slumped by the TP like that all day. Plus Thrale's panties; so suddenly in 
twelve hours Minty's just one more offense away from getting the Shoe, which Thrust is 
already personally shining the tip of his very sharpest shoe, in hopes. The biggest issue 
at the House Bitch and Complaint meeting was that earlier this week it turns out 
Clenette H. had brung in this whole humongous shitload of cartridges she said they were 
getting ready to throw in the dumpster up at the swank tennis school up the hill she 
works at, and she promoted them and hauled them down to the House, and the 
residents all have a wild hair because Pat says Staff has to preview the cartridges for 
suitability and sex before they can be put out for the residents, and the residents are all 
bitching that this'll take forever and it's just the fucking Staff hoarding the new enter¬ 
tainment when the House's TP's just about on its hands and knees in the entertainment 
desert starving for new entertainment. McDade bitched at the meeting that if he had to 
watch Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence one more time he was going to 
take a brody off the House's roof. 

Plus Thrust says Bruce Green hasn't shared word one to Staff about his feelings about 
anything to do with Lenz or Gately's embryoglio; that he just sits around waiting for 
somebody to read his mind; that his roommates have complained that he thrashes and 
shouts about nuts and cigars in his sleep. 

Calvin Thrust, four years sober, straddling the backwards chair, keeps inclining himself 
ever more forward in the posture of a man who's at any moment going to push up off 
out of the chair and leave. He reports how something deep in the previously hopelessly 
arrogant-seeming 'Tiny' Ewell seems like it's broken and melted, spiritually speaking: the 
guy shaved off his Kentucky Chicken beard, was heard weeping in the 5-Man head, and 
was observed by Johnette taking out the kitchen trash in secret even though his Chore 
this week was Office Windows. Thrust had discovered fine dining in sobriety, and has 
the beginning of chins. His hair is slicked back with odorless stuff at all times, and he has 
a more or less permanent sore on his upper lip. Gately for some reason keeps imagining 
Joelle van Dyne dressed as Madame Psychosis sitting in a plain chair in the 3-Woman 
room eating a peach and looking out the open window at the crucifix atop St. Elizabeth's 
Hospital's prolix roof. The crucifix isn't big, but it's up so high it's visible from most 
anywhere in Enfield-Brighton. Sees Joelle delicately pulling the veil out to get the peach 



up under it. Thrust says Charlotte Treat's T-cell count is down. She's needlepointing 
Gately some kind of GET BETTER A DAY AT A TIME ASSUMING THAT'S GOD'S WILL doily, 
but it's been slow going, because Treat's developed some kind of goopy Virus-related 
eye infection that's got her bumping into walls, and her counselor Maureen N. at the 
Staff Meeting wanted Pat to consider having her transferred to an HIV halfway house up 
in Everett that's got some recovering addicts in there. Morris Hanley, speaking of T-cells, 
has baked some cream-cheese brownies for Gately as a nurturing gesture, but then the 
twats at the Trauma Wing's nurses' station, like, impounded them from Thrust when he 
came up, but he'd had a couple on the way over in the bloodstained 'Vette and he could 
assure Don that Hanley's brownies were worth killing a loved one for and everything like 
that. Gately feels a sudden rush of anxiety over the issue of who's cooking the House 
supper in his absence, like will they know to put corn flakes in the meat loaf, for texture. 
He finds Thrust insufferable and wishes he'd just fucking go already, but has to admit 
he's less conscious of the horrific pain when somebody's there, but that that's mostly 
because the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into 
what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. Thrust puts his unlit 
gasper behind his ear where Gately predicts hair-tonic will render it unsmokable, looks 
conspiratorially around back over each shoulder, leans in so his face is visible between 
two bars of the bed's side-railing, and bathes Gately's face in old eggs and smoke as he 
leans in and quietly says that Gately'll be psyched to hear that all the residents that 
were at the embryoglio — except Lenz and Thrale and the ones that aren't in a legal 
position to step forward and like that, he says — he says they've most of them all come 
forward and filed depositions, that the BPD's Finest, plus some rather weirder Federal 
guys with goofy-looking archaic crew cuts, probably involved because of the like inter- 
O.N.A.N. element of the Nucks — here Gately's big heart skips and sinks — have come 
around and been voluntarily admitted inside, on Pat's written OK, and they took depo¬ 
sitions, which is like testifying on paper, and the depositions look to be basically 110% 
behind Don Gately and support a justifiable senorio of either self-defense or Lenz- 
defense. Several testimonies indicate the Nucks gave the impression of being under the 
influence of aggressive-type Substances. The single biggest problem right now. Thrust 
says Pat says, is the missing alleged Item. As in the .44 Item Gately was plugged with's 
whereabouts are missing. Thrust says. The last resident to depose to seeing it was 
Green, who says he took it away from the Nuck the nigger girls stomped, whereupon he. 
Green, says he dropped it on the lawn. Whereupon it liked vanished from legal view. 
Thrust says that in his legal view the Item's the thing that makes the difference between 
a senorio of ironshod self-defense and one of just maybe a huge fucking beef in which 
Gately got mysteriously plugged at some indefinite point while rearranging a couple 
Canadian maps with his huge bare hands. Gately's heart is now somewhere around his 
bare hairy shins, at the mention of Federal crewcuts. His attempted plea for Thrust to 
come out and say did he actually kill anybody did he sounds like that crushed kitten 
again. The pain of the terror is past standing, and it helps him surrender and quit trying, 
and he relaxes his legs and decides Thrust gets to not say whatever he wants, that the 
reality right this second is that he's mute and powerless over Thrust. Thrust leans in and 
hugs the back of the chair and says Clenette Henderson and Yolanda Willis are on Full 



House Restriction in their room to keep them from coming down and maybe fucking 
themselves over legally in a deposition. Because the Nuck with the plaid hat with the 
ear-flaps and the missing alleged Item had expired on the spot from a spike heel 
through the right eye, as he was getting the shit stomped out of him as only female 
niggers can stomp, and everything like that, and Yolanda Willis had very shrewdly left 
the shoe and spike heel right there protruding from the guy's map with her toe-prints all 
over its insides — meaning presumably the shoe's — so producing the Item was going to 
be in her strong legal interests too, as well, as Thrust analyzes the legal landscape. 
Thrust says Pat's limped around and appealed to every single resident personally, and 
everybody's submitted more or less voluntarily to a room- and property-search and 
everything like that, and still no large-caliber Item has turned up, though Nell Gunther's 
hidden Oriental-knife collection sure made an impression. Thrust predicts it'll be 
strongly in Gately's lego-judicial interest and everything like that to ransack his brain and 
mind for where and with who he last saw the alleged gun. The sun was starting to go 
down over the West Newton hills through the double-sealed windows, now, trembling 
slightly, and the windowlight against the far wall was ruddled and bloody. The heater 
vents kept making a sound like a distant parent gently shushing. When it starts to get 
dark out is when the ceiling breathes. And everything like that. 

Sometime later, at night, backlit by the light of the hall, is the figure of resident 
Geoffrey Day, sitting where Thrust had sat but with the chair turned around the right 
way and with his legs primly crossed, eating a cream-cheese brownie he reports they're 
passing out free to people down at the nurses' station. Day says Johnette F. is certainly 
no Don Gately in the culinary arena. She seems to enjoy some sort of collusive kickback- 
type relationship with the manufacturers of Spam, Day says, is his theory. It might be a 
whole different night. The nighttime ceiling no longer bulges convexly with Gately's own 
shallow breaths, and the improved sounds he can now make have evolved from feline to 
more like bovine. But his right side hurts so bad he can barely hear. It's gone from a fiery 
pain to cold dead deep tight pain with a queer flavor of emotional loss to it. From deep 
inside he can hear the pain laughing at the 90 mg. of Toradol-IM they've got in the I.V. 
drip. As with Ewell, when Gately comes up out of sleep there's no way to tell how long 
Day's been there, or quite why. Day is plowing through a long story it seems about his 
relationship growing up with his younger brother. Gately has a hard time imagining Day 
being blood-related to anybody. Day says his brother was developmentally challenged in 
some way. He had enormous red wet loose lips and wore eyeglasses so thick his eyes 
had looked like an ant's eyes, growing up. Part of his challenge was that Day's brother 
had had a crippling phobic fear of leaves, apparently. As in ordinary leaves, from trees. 
Day's been sucker-punched by an emergent sober memory of how he used to 
emotionally abuse his little brother simply by threatening to touch him with a leaf. Day 
has this way of holding his cheek and jaw when he talks like cutout photos of the late J. 
Benny. It's not at all evident why Day's choosing to share this stuff with a mute and 
feverishly semiconscious Gately. It seems like Don G.'s gotten way more popular as 
somebody to talk to since he's become effectively paralyzed and mute. The ceiling's 
behaving itself, but in the room's gray Gately could still make out a tallly insubstantial 
ghostish figure appearing and disappearing in the mist of his vision's periphery. There 



was some creepy relationship between the figure's postures and the passing nurses' 
noiseless glide. This figure pretty definitely seemed to prefer night to day, though by this 
point Gately could well have been asleep again, as Day began to describe different 
species of hand-held leaves. 

A recurring bad dream Gately's had ever since he gave up and Came In and got 
straight consists simply of a tiny acne-scarred Oriental woman looking down at him. 
Nothing else happens; she's just looking down at Gately. Her acne scars aren't even all 
that bad. The thing is that she's tiny. She's one of those tiny little anonymous Oriental 
women you see all over metro Boston, always seeming to be carrying multiple shopping 
bags. But in the recurring dream she's looking down at him, from his perspective he's 
looking up and she's looking down, which means Gately in the dream is either (a) lying 
down on his back looking vulnerably up at her or (b) is himself even more incredibly tiny 
than the woman. Involved in the dream also in a menacing way somehow is a dog 
standing rigidly in the distance past the Oriental woman, motionless and rigid, in profile, 
standing there still and straight as a toy. The Oriental woman has no particular 
expression and never says anything, though her face's scars have a certain elusive pat¬ 
tern to them that seems like it wants to mean something. When Gately opens his eyes 
again Geoffrey Day's gone, and his hospital bed with its railings and I.V. bottles on 
stands has been moved way over so that it's right up next to the bed of whoever the 
person in the room's other bed is, so it's like Gately and this unknown patient are a 
sexless old couple sleeping together but in separate beds, and Gately's mouth goes oval 
and his eyes bug out with horror, and his effort at yelling hurts enough to wake him up, 
and his eyelids shoot up and rattle like old windowshades, and his hospital bed's back 
where it's always been, and a nurse is giving the anonymous guy in the other bed some 
sort of late-night-type shot you could tell was narcotic, and the patient, who has a very 
deep voice, is crying. Then somewhere later in the couple of hours before midnight's 
parking-switch symphony on Washington St. outside is an unpleasantly detailed dream 
where the ghostish figure that's been flickering in and out of sight around the room 
finally stays in one spot long enough for Gately to really check him out. In the dream it's 
the figure of a very tall sunken-chested man in black-frame glasses and a sweatshirt with 
old stained chinos, leaning back sort of casually or else morosely slumped, resting its 
tailbone against the window sill's ventilator's whispering grille, with its long arms 
hanging at its sides and its ankles casually crossed so that Gately can even see the detail 
that the ghostly chinos aren't long enough for its height, they're the kind kids used to 
call 'Highwaters' in Gately's childhood — a couple of Bimmy Gately's savager pals would 
corner some pencil-necked kid in those-type too-short trousers on the playground and 
go like 'Yo little brother where's the fucking flood?' and then lay the kid out with a head- 
slap or chest-shove so the inevitable violin went skittering ass-over-teakettle across the 
blacktop, in its case. The creepy ghostish figure's arm sometimes, like, vanishes and then 
reappears at the bridge of its nose, pushing the glasses up in a weary unconscious 
morose gesture, just like those kids in the High water pants on the playground always 
did in a weak morose way that always somehow made Gately himself want to shove 
them savagely in the chest. Gately in the dream experienced a painful adrenal flash of 
remorse and entertained the possibility that the figure represented one of the North 



Shore violin-playing kids he'd never kept his savage pals from abusing, now come in an 
adult state when Gately was vulnerable and mute, to exact some kind of payback. The 
ghostly figure shrugged its thin shoulders and said But no, it was nothing of the sort, it 
was just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic 
garden-variety wraith. Gately sarcastically in the dream thought that Oh well then if it 
was just a garden-variety wraith, is all, geez what a fucking relief. The wraith-figure 
smiled apologetically and shrugged, shifting its tailbone on the whispering grille a bit. 
There was an odd quality to its movements in the dream: they were of regulation speed, 
the movements, but they seemed oddly segmented and deliberate, as if more effort 
than necessary were going into them somehow. Then Gately considered that who knew 
what was necessary or normal for a self-proclaimed generic wraith in a pain-and-fever 
dream. Then he considered that this was the only dream he could recall where even in 
the dream he knew that it was a dream, much less lay there considering the fact that he 
was considering the up-front dream quality of the dream he was dreaming. It quickly got 
so multilevelled and confusing that his eyes rolled back in his head. The wraith made a 
weary morose gesture as if not wanting to bother to get into any sort of confusing 
dream-v.-real controversies. The wraith said Gately might as well stop trying to figure it 
out and just capitalize on its presence, the wraith's presence in the room or dream, 
whatever, because Gately, if he'd bothered to notice and appreciate it, at least didn't 
have to speak out loud to be able to interface with the wraith-figure; and also the 
wraith-figure said it was by the way requiring incredible patience and fortitude for him 
(the wraith) to stay in one position long enough for Gately to really see him and 
interface with him, and the wraith was making no promises about how many more 
months he (the wraith) could keep it up, since fortitude had never seemed to have been 
his long suit. The city's aggregate nighttime lights lightened the sky through the room's 
window to the same dark rose shade you see when you close your eyes, adding to the 
dream-of-dream-type ambiguity. Gately in the dream tried the test of pretending to lose 
consciousness so the wraith would go away, and then somewhere during the pretense 
lost consciousness and really did sleep, for a bit, in the dream, because the tiny pocked 
Oriental woman was back and looking wordlessly down at him, plus the creepy rigid 
dog. And then the sedated patient in the next bed woke Gately back up, in the original 
dream, with some kind of narcotized gurgle or snore, and the so-called wraith-figure 
was still there and visible, only now it was standing on top of the railing at the side of 
Gately's bed, looking down at him now from a towering railing-plus-original-tallness 
height, having to exaggerate his shoulders' natural slump in order to clear the ceiling. 
Gately got a clear view of an impressive thatch of nostril-hair, looking up into the 
wraith's nostrils, and also a clear lateral look at the wraith's skinny ankles' like ankle- 
bones bulging in brown socks below the cuffs of the Highwater chinos. As much as his 
shoulder, calf, toe, and whole right side were hurting, it occurred to Gately that you 
don't normally think of wraiths or ghostish phantasms as being tall or short, or having 
bad posture, or wearing certain-colored socks. Much less having anything as specific as 
extrusive nostril-hair. There was a degree of, what, specificness about this figure in this 
dream that Gately found troubling. Much less having the unpleasant old-Oriental- 
woman dream inside this dream right here. He began to wish again that he could call 



out for assistance or to wake himself up. But now not even moos or mews would come, 
all he could seem to do was pant real hard, as if the air was like totally missing his vocal 
box, or like his vocal box was totally demapped from nerve-damage in his shoulder and 
now just sort of hung there all withered and dry like an old hornet nest while air rushed 
out Gately's throat all around it. His throat still didn't feel right. It was exactly the 
suffocated speechlessness in dreams, nightmares, Gately realized. This was both 
terrifying and reassuring, somehow. Evidence for the dream-element and so on and so 
forth. The wraith was looking down at him and nodding sympathetically. The wraith 
could empathize totally, it said. The wraith said Even a garden-variety wraith could 
move at the speed of quanta and be anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic toto the 
thoughts of animate men, but it couldn't ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and 
it could never speak right to anybody, a wraith had no out-loud voice of its own, and 
had to use somebody's like internal brain-voice if it wanted to try to communicate 
something, which was why thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith 
always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith's trying 
to interface with you. The wraith says By way of illustration consider phenomena like 
intuition or inspiration or hunches, or when someone for instance says 'a little voice in¬ 
side' was telling them such-and-such on an intuitive basis. Gately can now take no more 
than a third of a normal breath without wanting to throw up from the pain. The wraith 
was pushing his glasses up and saying Besides, it took incredible discipline and fortitude 
and patient effort to stay stock-still in one place for long enough for an animate man 
actually to see and be in any way affected by a wraith, and very few wraiths had 
anything important enough to interface about to be willing to stand still for this kind of 
time, preferring ordinarily to whiz around at the invisible speed of quanta. The wraith 
says It doesn't really matter whether Gately knows what the term quanta means. He 
says Wraiths by and large exist (putting his arms out slowly and making little quotation- 
mark finger-wiggles as he said exist) in a totally different Heisenbergian dimension of 
rate-change and time-passage. As an example, he goes on, normal animate men's 
actions and motions look, to a wraith, to be occurring at about the rate a clock's hour- 
hand moves, and are just about as interesting to look at. Gately was thinking for fuck's 
sake what was this, now even in unpleasant fever-dreams now somebody else is going 
to tell him their troubles now that Gately can't get away or dialogue back with anything 
about his own experience. He normally couldn't ever get Ewell or Day to sit down for 
any kind of real or honest mutual sharing, and now that he's totally mute and inert and 
passive all of a sudden everybody seems to view him as a sympathetic ear, or not even a 
sympathetic real ear, more like a wooden carving or statue of an ear. An empty 
confessional booth. Don G. as huge empty confessional booth. The wraith disappears 
and instantly reappears in a far corner of the room, waving Hi at him. It was slightly 
reminiscent of 'Bewitched' reruns from Gately's toddlerhood. The wraith disappears 
again and again just as instantly reappears, now holding one of Gately's Ennet House 
basement flea-baggy Staff bedroom's cut-out-and-Scotch-taped celebrity photos, this 
one an old one of U.S. Head of State Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, on stage, wearing 
velour, twirling a mike, from back in the days before he went to a copper-colored 
toupee, when he used a strigil instead of a UV flash-booth and was just a Vegas crooner. 



Again the wraith disappears and instantly reappears holding a can of Coke, with good 
old Coke's distinctive interwoven red and white French curls on it but alien unfamiliar 
Oriental-type writing on it instead of the good old words Coca-Cola and Coke. The unfa¬ 
miliar script on the Coke can is maybe the whole dream's worst moment. The wraith 
walks jerkily and overdeliberately across the floor and then up a wall, occasionally 
disappearing and then reappearing, sort of fluttering mistily, and ends up standing 
upside-down on the hospital room's drop ceiling, directly over Gately, and holds one 
knee to its sunken chest and starts doing what Gately would know were pirouettes if 
he'd ever once been exposed to ballet, pirouetting faster and faster and then so fast the 
wraith's nothing but a long stalk of sweatshirt-and-Coke-can-colored light that seems to 
extrude from the ceiling; and then, in a moment that rivals the Coke-can moment for 
unpleasantness, into Gately's personal mind, in Gately's own brain-voice but with 
roaring and unwilled force, comes the term PIROUETTE , in caps, which term Gately 
knows for a fact he doesn't have any idea what it means and no reason to be thinking it 
with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of 
lexical rape. Gately begins to consider this hopefully nonrecurring dream even more 
unpleasant than the tiny-pocked-Oriental-woman dream, overall. Other terms and 
words Gately knows he doesn't know from a divot in the sod now come crashing 
through his head with the same ghastly intrusive force, e.g. ACCIACCATURA and 
ALEMBIC ; LATRODECTUS MACTANS and NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT ; CHIAROSCURO and 
PROPRIOCEPTION and TESTUDO and ANNULATE and BRICOLAGE and CATALEPT and 
GERRYMANDER and SCOPOPHILIA and LAERTES — and all of a sudden it occurs to Gately 
the aforethought EXTRUDING, STRIGIL and LEXICAL themselves — and LORDOSIS and 
IMPOST and SINISTRAL and MENISCUS and CHRONAXY and POOR YORICK and LUCULUS 
and CERISE MONTCLAIR and then DE SICA NEO-REAL CRANE DOLLY and 
CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMARRIAGE and then more lexical terms and 
words speeding up to chipmunkish and then HELIATED and then all the way up to a 
sound like a mosquito on speed, and Gately tries to clutch both his temples with one 
hand and scream, but nothing comes out. When the wraith reappears, it's seated way 
up behind him where Gately has to let his eyes roll way back in his head to see him, and 
it turns out Gately's heart is being medically monitored and the wraith is seated up on 
the heart monitor in a strange cross-legged posture with his pantcuffs pulled up so high 
Gately could see the actual skinny hairless above-the-sock skin of the wraith's ankles, 
glowing a bit in the spilled light of the Trauma Wing hall. The Oriental can of Coke now 
rests on Gately's broad flat forehead. It's cold and smells a little funny, like low tide, the 
can. Now footsteps and the sound of bubblegum in the hall. An orderly shines a 
flashlight in and plays it over Gately and the narcotized roommate and environs, and 
makes marks on a clipboard while blowing a small orange bubble. It's not like the light 
passes through the wraith or anything dramatic — the wraith simply disappears the 
instant the light hits the heart monitor and reappears the instant it moves away. 
Gately's unpleasant dreams definitely don't normally include specific gum-color and 
intense physical discomfort and invasions of lexical terms he doesn't know from shinola. 
Gately begins to conclude it's not impossible that the garden-variety wraith on the heart 
monitor, though not conventionally real, could be a sort of epiphanyish visitation from 



Gately's personally confused understanding of God, a Higher Power or something, 
maybe sort of like the legendary Pulsing Blue Light that AA founder Bill W. historically 
saw during his last detox, that turned out to be God telling him how to stay sober via 
starting AA and Carrying The Message. The wraith smiles sadly and says something like 
Don't we both wish, young sir. Gately's forehead wrinkling as his eyes keep rolling up 
makes the foreign can wobble coldly: of course there's also the possibility that the tall 
slumped extremely fast wraith might represent the Sergeant at Arms, the Disease, 
exploiting the loose security of Gately's fever-addled mind, getting ready to fuck with his 
motives and persuade him to accept Demerol just once, just one last time, for the totally 
legitimate medical pain. Gately lets himself wonder what it would be like, able to 
quantum off anyplace instantly and stand on ceilings and probably burgle like no 
burglar'd ever dreamed of, but not able to really affect anything or interface with 
anybody, having nobody know you're there, having people's normal rushed daily lives 
look like the movements of planets and suns, having to sit patiently very still in one 
place for a long time even to have some poor addled son of a bitch even be willing to 
entertain your maybe being there. It'd be real free-seeming, but incredibly lonely, he 
imagines. Gately knows a thing or two about loneliness, he feels. Does wraith mean like 
a ghost, as in dead? Is this a message from a Higher Power about sobriety and death? 
What would it be like to try and talk and have the person think it was just their own 
mind talking? Gately could maybe Identify, to an extent, he decides. This is the only time 
he's ever been struck dumb except for a brief but nasty bout of pleuritic laryngitis he'd 
had when he was twenty-four and sleeping on the cold beach up in Gloucester, and he 
doesn't like it a bit, the being struck dumb. It's like some combination of invisibility and 
being buried alive, in terms of the feeling. It's like being strangled somewhere deeper 
inside you than your neck. Gately imagines himself with a piratical hook, unable to 
speak on Commitments because he can only gurgle and pant, doomed to an AA life of 
ashtrays and urns, the wraith reaches down and removes the can of un-American tonic 
from Gately's forehead and assures Gately he can more than Identify with an animate 
man's feelings of communicative impotence and mute strangulation. Gately's thoughts 
become agitated as he tries to yell mentally that he never said a fucking thing about 
impotence. He's got a way clearer and more direct view of the wraith's extreme nostril- 
hair situation than he'd prefer to. The wraith hefts the can absently and says age 
twenty-eight seems old enough for Gately to remember U.S. broadcast television's old 
network situation comedies of the B.S. '80s and '90s, probably. Gately has to smile at 
the wraith's cluelessness: Gately's after all a fucking drug addict, and a drug addict's 
second most meaningful relationship is always with his domestic entertainment unit, 
TV/VCR or HDTP. A drug addict's maybe the only human species whose own personal 
vision has a Vertical Hold, for Christ's sake, he thinks. And Gately, even in recovery, can 
still summon great verbatim chunks not only of drug-addicted adolescence's 'Seinfeld' 
and 'Ren and Stimpy' and 'Oo Is 'E When 'E's at 'Ome' and 'Exposed Northerners' but 
also the syndicated 'Bewitched' and 'Hazel' and ubiquitous 'M*A*S*H' he grew to 
monstrous childhood size in front of, and especially the hometown ensemble-casted 
'Cheers!,' both the late-network version with the stacked brunette and the syndicated 
older ones with the titless blond, which Gately even after the switch over to InterLace 



and HDTP dissemination felt like he had a special personal relationship with 'Cheers!,' 
not only because everybody on the show always had a cold foamer in hand, just like in 
real life, but because Gately's big childhood claim to recognition had been his eerie 
resemblance to the huge neckless simian-browed accountant Norn who more or less 
seemed to live at the bar, and was unkind but not cruel, and drank foamer after foamer 
without once hitting anybody's Mom or pitching over sideways and passing out in vomit 
somebody else had to clean up, and who'd looked — right down to the massive square 
head and Neanderthal brow and paddle-sized thumbs — eerily like the child D. W. 
('Bim') Gately, hulking and neckless and shy, riding his broom handle. Sir Osis of 
Thuliver. And the wraith on the heart monitor looks pensively down at Gately from 
upside-down and asks does Gately remember the myriad thespian extras on for 
example his beloved 'Cheers!,' not the center-stage Sam and Carla and Norn, but the 
nameless patrons always at tables, filling out the bar's crowd, concessions to realism, 
always relegated to back- and foreground; and always having utterly silent 
conversations: their faces would animate and mouths move realistically, but without 
sound; only the name-stars at the bar itself could audibilize. The wraith says these 
fractional actors, human scenery, could be seen (but not heard) in most pieces of filmed 
entertainment. And Gately remembers them, the extras in all public scenes, especially 
like bar and restaurant scenes, or rather remembers how he doesn't quite remember 
them, how it never struck his addled mind as in fact surreal that their mouths moved 
but nothing emerged, and what a miserable fucking bottom-rung job that must be for 
an actor, to be sort of human furniture, figurants the wraith says they're called, these 
surreally mute background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, 
like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who's important enough to be seen and 
heard v. just seen. A term from ballet, originally, figurant, the wraith explains. The 
wraith pushes his glasses up in the vaguely snivelling way of a kid that's just got slapped 
around on the playground and says he personally spent the vast bulk of his own former 
animate life as pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest 
to him, it turned out, and that it's one heck of a crummy way to try to live. Gately, 
whose increasing self-pity leaves little room or patience for anybody else's self-pity, tries 
to lift his left hand and wiggle his pinkie to indicate the world's smallest viola playing the 
theme from The Sorrow and the Pity, but even moving his left arm makes him almost 
faint. And either the wraith is saying or Gately is realizing that you can't appreciate the 
dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he 
is in his mute peripheral status, because like say for example if one of 'Cheers!' 's bar's 
figurants suddenly decided he couldn't take it any more and stood up and started 
shouting and gesturing around wildly in a bid for attention and nonperipheral status on 
the show, Gately realizes, all that would happen is that one of the audibilizing 'name' 
stars of the show would bolt over from stage-center and apply restraints or the 
Heineken Maneuver or CPR, figuring the silent gesturing figurant was choking on a beer- 
nut or something, and that then the whole rest of that episode of 'Cheers!' would be 
about jokes about the name star's life-saving heroics, or else his fuck-up in applying the 
Heineken Maneuver to somebody who wasn't choking on a nut. No way for a figurant to 
win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant. Gately speculates briefly about 



the suicide statistics for bottom-rung actors. The wraith disappears and then reappears 
in the chair by the bed's railing, leaning forward with its chin on its hands on the railing 
in what Gately's coming to regard as the classic tell-your-troubles-to-the-trauma- 
patient-that-can't-interrupt-or-get-away position. The wraith says that he himself, the 
wraith, when animate, had dabbled in filmed entertainments, as in making them, 
cartridges, for Gately's info to either believe or not, and but in the entertainments the 
wraith himself made, he says he goddamn bloody well made sure that either the whole 
entertainment was silent or else if it wasn't silent that you could bloody well hear every 
single performer's voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative 
periphery they were; and that it wasn't just the self-conscious overlapping dialogue of a 
poseur like Schwulst or Altman, i.e. it wasn't just the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it 
was real life's real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world's real 
agora, the babble 342 of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate 
protagonist of his own entertainment. It occurs to Gately he's never had any sort of 
dream where somebody says anything like vast bulk, much less agora, which Gately 
interprets as a kind of expensive sweater. Which was why, the wraith is continuing, the 
complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainment- 
critics always complained that the wraith's entertainments' public-area scenes were 
always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could never hear the 
really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unaltered babble of the 
peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(/babel) was some self-conscious 
viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism. The wraith's grim 
smile almost disappears before it appears. Gately's slight tight smile back is the way you 
can always tell he's not really listening. He's remembering that he used to pretend to 
himself that the unviolent and sarcastic accountant Norn on 'Cheers!' was Gately's own 
organic father, straining to hold young Bimmy on his lap and letting him draw finger- 
pictures in the condensation-rings on the bartop, and when he was pissed off at Gately's 
mother being sarcastic and witty instead of getting her down and administering horribly 
careful U.S.-Navy-brig-type beatings that hurt like hell but would never bruise or show. 
The can of foreign Coke has left a ring on his forehead that's colder than the feverish 
skin around it, and Gately tries to concentrate on the cold of the ring instead of the 
dead cold total ache on his whole right side — DEXTRAL — or the sober memory of his 
mother Mrs. Gately's ex-significant other, the little-eyed former M.P. in khaki skivvies 
hunched drunk over his notebook's record of his Heinekens for the day, his tongue in 
the corner of his mouth and his eyes scrunched as he tries to see a unitary enough 
notebook to write in, Gately's mother on the floor trying to crawl off toward the 
lockable bathroom quietly enough so the M.P. wouldn't notice her again. The wraith 
says Just to give Gately an idea, he, the wraith, in order to appear as visible and 
interface with him, Gately, he, the wraith, has been sitting, still as a root, in the chair by 
Gately's bedside for the wraith-equivalent of three weeks, which Gately can't even 
imagine. It occurs to Gately that none of the people that've dropped by to tell him their 
troubles has bothered to say how many days he's even been in the Trauma Wing now, 
or what day it's going to be when the sun comes up, and so Gately has no idea how long 
he's gone now without an AA meeting. Gately wishes his sponsor Ferocious Francis G. 



would hobble by instead of Ennet Staff that want to talk about prosfeces and residents 
who come just to share remembered wreckage with somebody they don't even think 
can even hear them, sort of the way a little kid confides to a dog. He doesn't let himself 
even contemplate why no Finest or federally crew-cut guys have visited yet, if he's been 
in here a while, if they've been all over the House like hamsters on wheat already, as 
Thrust had said. The seated shadow of somebody in a hat is still there out there in the 
hall, though if the whole interlude was a dream it isn't and has never been there, Gately 
realizes, squinting a little to try to make sure the shadow is the shadow of a hat and not 
a fire-extinguisher box on the hall wall or something. The wraith excuses himself and 
disappears but then reappears two slow blinks later, back in the same position. 'That 
was worth an Excuse Me?' Gately thinks at the wraith dryly, almost laughing. The sheet 
of pain from the near-laugh send his eyes way up back up in his head. The chassis of the 
heart monitor doesn't look broad enough to support even a wraith's ass. The heart 
monitor's the silent kind. It's got the moving white line with big speed bumps moving 
across it for Gately's pulse, but it doesn't make the sterile beeping that old hospital- 
drama monitors did. Patients in hospital-dramas were frequently unconscious figurants, 
Gately reflects. The wraith says he'd just paid a small quantumish call to the old spotless 
Brighton two-decker of one Ferocious Francis Gehaney, and from the way the old 
Crocodile's shaving and putting on a clean white T-shirt, the wraith says, he predicts F.F. 
will be visiting the Trauma Wing soon to offer Gately unconditional empathy and 
fellowship and acerbic Crocodilian counsel. Unless this was just Gately himself thinking 
this up to keep a stiff upper attitude, Gately thinks. The wraith pushes his glasses up 
sadly. You never think of a wraith looking sad or unsad, but this dream-wraith displays 
the whole affective range. Gately can hear the horns and raised voices and U-turn 
squeals way down below on Wash, that indicate it's around OOOOh., the switching hour. 
He wonders what something as brief as a car-horn-honk sounds like to a figurant that 
has to sit still for three weeks to be seen. Wraith, not figurant, Gately meant, he corrects 
himself. He's lying here correcting his thoughts like he was talking. He wonders if his 
brain-voice talks fast enough for the wraith not to have to like tap its foot and look at its 
watch between words. Are they words if they're only in your head, though? The wraith 
blows its nose in a hankie that's visibly seen better epochs and says he, the wraith, 
when alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own personal youngest offspring, 
a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening to him, becoming 
a figurant, toward the end. His end, not the son's end, the wraith clarifies. Gately 
wonders if it offends the wraith when he sometimes refers to it mentally as it. The 
wraith opens and examines the used hankie just like an alive person can never help but 
do and says No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring 
open his mouth and have nothing come out. The wraith says it mars the memory of the 
end of his animate life, this son's retreat to the periphery of life's frame. The wraith 
confesses that he had, at one time, blamed the boy's mother for his silence. But what 
good does that kind of thing do, he said, making a blurred motion that might have been 
shrugging. Gately remembers the former Navy M.P. telling Gately's mother why it was 
her fault he lost his job at the chowder plant. 'Resentment Is The #1 Offender' is another 
Boston AA cliche Gately'd started to believe. That blame's a shell-game. Not that he 



wouldn't mind a private couple of minutes alone in a doorless room with Randy Lenz, 
once he was up and capable again, though. 

The wraith reappears slumped back in the chair with his weight on his tailbone and his 
legs crossed in that Erdedyish upscale way. He says Just imagine the horror of spending 
your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying unsuccessfully to 
convince your father that you even existed, to do something well enough to be heard 
and seen but not so well that you became just a screen for his own (the Dad's) 
projections of his own failure and self-loathing, failing ever to be really seen, gesturing 
wildly through the distilled haze, so that in adulthood you still carried the moist flabby 
weight of your failure ever to make him hear you really speak , carried it on through the 
animate years on your increasingly slumped shoulders — only to find, near the end, that 
your very own child had himself become blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute. I.e. that 
his son had become what he (the wraith) had feared as a child he (the wraith) was. 
Gately's eyes roll up in his head. The boy, who did everything well and with a natural 
unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been 
so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the 
son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; 
and no one else in the wraith and boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, 
the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing right before their eyes. 
They looked but did not see his invisibility. And they listened but did not hear the 
wraith's warning. Gately has that slight tight absent smile again. The wraith says the 
nuclear family had believed he (the wraith) was unstable and was confusing the boy 
with his own (the wraith's) boyhood self, or with the wraith's father's father, the blank 
wooden man who according to family mythology had 'driven' the wraith's father to 'the 
bottle' and unrealized potential and an early cerebral hemorrhage. Toward the end, 
he'd begun privately to fear that his son was experimenting with Substances. The wraith 
keeps having to push its glasses up. The wraith says almost bitterly that when he'd stand 
up and wave his arms for them all to attend to the fact that his youngest and most 
promising son was disappearing, they'd thought all his agitation meant was that he had 
gone bats from Wild Turkey-intake and needed to try to get sober, again, one more 
time. 

This gets Gately's attention. Here at last could be some sort of point to the 
unpleasantness and confusion of the dream. 'You tried to get sober?' he thinks, rolling 
his eyes over to the wraith. 'More than once, you tried? Was it White-Knuckle? 343 Did 
you ever Surrender and Come In?' 

The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days 
of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted 
son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn't simply master 
and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce 
him to open his mouth and come out — even if it was only to ask for more. Games 
hadn't done it, professionals hadn't done it, impersonation of professionals hadn't done 
it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse 
thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A 
magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to 



make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him 'out 
of himself, 1 as they say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, 
VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and 
disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain. 

Gately's not too agonized and feverish not to recognize gross self-pity when he hears 
it, wraith or no. As in the slogan 'Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink.' With all due 
respect, pretty hard to believe this wraith could stay sober, if he needed to get sober, 
with the combination of abstraction and tragically-misunderstood-me attitude he's 
betraying, in the dream. 

He'd been sober as a Mennonite quilter for 89 days, at the very tail-end of his life, the 
wraith avers, now back up on the silent heart monitor, though Boston AA had a 
humorless evangelical rabidity about it that had kept his attendance at meetings spotty. 
And he never could stand the vapid cliches and disdain for abstraction. Not to mention 
the cigarette smoke. The atmosphere of the meeting rooms had been like a poker game 
in hell, had been his impression. The wraith stops and says he bets Gately's struggling to 
hide his curiosity about whether the wraith succeeded in coming up with a figurantless 
entertainment so thoroughly engaging it'd make even an in-bent figurant of a boy laugh 
and cry out for more. 

Father-figure-wise, Gately's tried his best these last few sober months to fend off 
uninvited memories of his own grim conversations and interchanges with the M.P. 

The wraith on the monitor now bends sharply at the waist, way over forward so his 
face is upside-down only cm. from Gately's face — the wraith's face is only about half 
the size of Gately's face, and has no odor — and responds vehemently that No! No! Any 
conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the 
worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or 
hiddenness on either side. The wraith apparently can't tell the difference between 
Gately just thinking to himself and Gately using his brain-voice to sort of think at the 
wraith. His shoulder suddenly sends up a flare of pain so sickening Gately's afraid he 
might shit the bed. The wraith gasps and almost falls off the monitor as if he can totally 
empathize with the dextral flare. Gately wonders if the wraith has to endure the same 
pain as Gately in order to hear his brain-voice and have a conversation with him. Even in 
a dream, that'd be a higher price than anybody's ever paid to interface with D. W. 
Gately. Maybe the pain's supposed to lend credibility to some Diseased argument for 
Demerol the wraith's going to make. Gately feels somehow too self-conscious or stupid 
to ask the wraith if it's here on behalf of the Higher Power or maybe the Disease, so 
instead of thinking at the wraith he simply concentrates on pretending to wonder to 
himself why the wraith is spending probably months of aggregate wraith-time flitting 
around a hospital room and making pirouetted demonstrations with crooner-photos 
and foreign tonic-cans on the ceiling of some drug addict he doesn't know from a rock 
instead of just quantuming over to wherever this alleged youngest son is and holding 
very still for wraith-months and trying to have an interface with the fucking son. Though 
maybe thinking he was seeing his late organic dad as a ghost or wraith would drive the 
youngest son bats, though, might be the thing. The son didn't exactly sound like the 
steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith's shared. Of 



course this was assuming the mute figurant son even existed, this was assuming this 
wasn't all some roundabout way of the Disease starting to talk Gately into succumbing 
to a shot of Demerol. He tries to concentrate on all this instead of remembering what 
Demerol's warm rush of utter well-being felt like, remembering the comfortable sound 
of the clunk of his chin against his chest. Or instead of remembering any of his own 
interchanges with his mother's live-in retired M.P. One of the highest prices of sobriety 
was not being able to keep from remembering things you didn't want to remember, see 
for instance Ewell and the fraudulent-grandiosity thing from his wienieish childhood. 
The ex-M.P. had referred to small children and toddlers as 'rug-rats.' It was not a term of 
gruff affection. The M.P. had made the toddler Don Gately return empty Heineken 
bottles to the neighborhood packy and then haul-ass on back with the bottle-deposits, 
timing him with a U.S.N.-issue chronometer. He never laid a hand on Gately personally, 
that Don could recall. But he'd still been afraid of the M.P. The M.P.'d beaten his mother 
up on an almost daily basis. The most hazardous time for Gately's mother was between 
eight Heinekens and ten Heinekens. When the M.P. threw her on the floor and knelt 
down very intently over her, picking his spots and hitting her very intently, he'd looked 
like a lobsterman pulling at his outboard's rope. The M.P. was slightly shorter than Mrs. 
Gately but was broad and very muscular, and proud of his muscles, going shirtless 
whenever possible. Or in like sleeveless khaki military T's. He had bars and weights and 
benches, and had taught the child Don Gately the fundamentals of free-weight training, 
with special emphasis on control and form as opposed to just sloppily lifting as much 
weight as possible. The weights were old and greasy and their poundage pre-metric. The 
M.P. was very precise and controlled in his approach to things, in a way Gately has 
somehow come to associate with all blond-haired men. When Gately, at age ten, began 
to be able to bench-press more weight than the M.P., the M.P. had not taken it in a 
good spirit and began refusing to spot him on his sets. The M.P. entered his own 
weights and repetitions carefully in a little notebook, pausing to do this after each set. 
He always licked the point of the pencil before he wrote, a habit Gately still finds 
repellent. In a different little notebook, the M.P. noted the date and time of each 
Heineken he consumed. He was the sort of person who equated incredibly careful 
record-keeping with control. In other words he was by nature a turd-counter. Gately 
had realized this at a very young age, and that it was bullshit and maybe crazy. The M.P. 
was very possibly crazy. The circumstances of his leaving the Navy were like: shadowy. 
When Gately involuntarily remembers the M.P. now he also remembers — and wonders 
why, and feels bad — that he never once asked his mother about the M.P. and why the 
fuck was he even there and did she actually love him, and why did she love him when he 
flang her down and beat her up on a more or less daily basis for fucking years on end. 
The intensifying rose-colors behind Gately's closed lids are from the hospital room 
lightening as the light outside the window gets licoricey and predawn. Gately lies below 
the unoccupied heart-monitor snoring so hard the railings on either side of his bed 
shiver and rattle. When the M.P. was sleeping or out of the house, Don Gately and Mrs. 
Gately never once talked about him. His memory is clear on this. It wasn't just that they 
never discussed him, or the notebooks or weights or chronometer or his beating up Mrs. 
Gately. The M.P.'s name was never even mentioned. The M.P. worked nights a lot — 



driving a cheese-and-egg delivery truck for Cheese King Inc. until he was terminated for 
embezzling wheels of Stilton and fencing them, then for a time on a mostly automated 
canning line, pulling a lever that sent New England chowder out of hundreds of spigots 
into hundreds of lidless cans with an indescribable plopping sound — and the Gately 
home was like a different world when the M.P. was working or out: it was like the very 
idea of the M.P. walked out the door with him, leaving Don and his mother not just 
behind but alone, together, at night, she on the couch and he on the floor, both 
gradually losing consciousness in front of broadcast TV's final seasons. Gately tries 
especially hard now not to explore why it never occurred to him to step in and pull the 
M.P. off his mother, even after he could bench-press more than the M.P. The precise 
daily beatings had always seemed in some strangely emphatic way not his business. He 
rarely even felt anything, he remembers, watching him hit her. The M.P. was totally 
unshy about hitting her in front of Gately. It was like everybody unspokenly agreed the 
whole thing was none of Bimmy's beeswax. When he was a toddler he'd flee the room 
and cry about it, he seems to recall. By a certain age, though, all he'd do is raise the 
volume on the television, not even bothering to look over at the beating, watching 
'Cheers!' Sometimes he'd leave the room and go into the garage and lift weights, but 
when he left the room it was never like he was fleeing the room. When he'd been small 
he'd sometimes hear the springs and sounds from their bedroom sometimes in the A.M. 
and worry that the M.P. was beating her up on their bed, but at a certain point without 
anybody taking him aside and explaining anything to him he realized that the sounds 
then didn't mean she was getting hurt. The similarity of her hurt sounds in the kitchen 
and living room and her sex-sounds through the asbestos fiberboard bedroom wall 
troubles Gately, though, when he remembers now, and is one reason why he fends off 
remembering, when awake. 

Shirtless in the summer — and pale, with a blond man's dislike for the sun — the M.P. 
would sit in the little kitchen, at the kitchen table, feet flat on the wood-grain tiling, with 
a patriotic-themed bandanna wrapped around his head, recording Heinekens in his little 
notebook. A previous tenant had thrown something heavy through the kitchen window 
once, and the window's screen was fucked up and not quite flush, and houseflies came 
and went more or less at will. Gately, when small, would be in there in the kitchen with 
the M.P. sometimes; the tile was better for his little cars' suspensions than nubbly 
carpet. What Gately remembers, in pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep, is the 
special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the kitchen. He 
used no swatter or rolled cone of Herald. He had fast hands, the M.P., thick and white 
and fast. He'd whack them as they lit on the kitchen table. The flies. But in a controlled 
way. Not hard enough to kill them. He was very controlled and intent about it. He'd 
whack them just hard enough to disable them. Then he'd pick them up real precisely 
and remove either a wing or like a leg, something important to the fly. He'd take the 
wing or leg over to the beige kitchen wastebasket and very deliberately hike the lid with 
the foot-pedal and deposit the tiny wing or leg in the wastebasket, bending at the waist. 
The memory is unbidden and very clear. The M.P.'d wash his hands at the kitchen sink, 
using green generic dishwashing liquid. The maimed fly itself he'd ignore and allow to 
scuttle in crazed circles on the table until it got stuck in a sticky spot or fell off the edge 



onto the kitchen floor. The conversation with the M.P. that Gately reexperiences in 
minutely dreamed detail was the M.P., at about five Heinekens, explaining that maiming 
a fly was way more effective than killing a fly, for flies. A fly was stuck in a sticky spot of 
dried Heineken and agitating its wing as the M.P. explained that a well-maimed fly pro¬ 
duced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear. Human beings couldn't hear a maimed fly's 
screams, but you could bet your fat little rug-rat ass other flies could, and the screams of 
their maimed colleagues helped keep them away. By the time the M.P. would put his 
head on his big pale arms and grab a little shut-eye among the Heineken bottles on the 
sun-heated table there'd often be several flies trapped in goo or scuttling in circles on 
the table, sometimes giving odd little hops, trying to fly with one wing or no wings. 
Possibly in Denial, these flies, as to their like condition. The ones that fell to the floor 
Gately would hunch directly over on hands and knees, getting one big red ear down just 
as close to the fly as possible, listening, his big pink forehead wrinkled. What makes 
Gately most uncomfortable now as he starts to try to wake up in the lemonlight of true 
hospital morning is that he can't remember putting the maimed flies out of their misery, 
ever, after the M.P. passed out, can't mentally see himself stepping on them or 
wrapping them in paper towels and flushing them down the toilet or something, but he 
feels like he must have; it seems somehow real vital to be able to remember his doing 
something more than just hunkering blankly down amid his Transformer-cars and trying 
to see if he could hear tiny agonized screams, listening very intently. But he can't for the 
life of him remember doing more than trying to hear, and the sheer cerebral stress of 
trying to force a more noble memory should have awakened him, on top of the dextral 
hurt; but he doesn't come all the way awake in the big crib until the memory's realistic 
dream bleeds into a nasty fictional dream where he's wearing Lenz's worsted topcoat 
and leaning very precisely and carefully over the prone figure of the Hawaiian-dressed 
Nuck whose head he's whacked repeatedly against the hood's windshield, he's 
supporting his inclined weight on his good left hand against the warm throbbing hood, 
bent in real close to the maimed head, his ear to the bleeding face, listening very 
intently. The head opens its red mouth. 

The wet start Gately finally wakes with jars his shoulder and side and sends a yellow 
sheet of pain over him that makes him almost scream into the window's light. For about 
a year once at age twenty in Maiden he'd slept most nights in a home-built loft in the 
dorm of a certain graduate R.N.-nursing program in Maiden, with a ragingly addicted 
R.N.-nursing student, in the loft, which you needed a five-rung ladder to get up into this 
loft and the thing was only a couple of feet under the ceiling, and every A.M. Gately'd 
awake out of some bad dream and sit up with a jolt and thwack his head against the 
ceiling, until after some time there was a permanent concavity in the ceiling and a 
flattish spot in the curve of the top of his forehead he can still feel, lying here blinking 
and holding his head with his good left hand. For a second, blinking and red with A.M. 
fever, he thinks he sees Ferocious Francis G. in the bedside chair, chin freshly shaved 
and dotted with bits of Kleenex, posture stolid, his old man's saggy little tits rising slowly 
under a clean white T-, smiling grimly around blue tubes and an unlit cigar between his 
teeth and saying 'Well kid at least you're still on this side of the fuckin' sod, I guess 
there's something to be said for that there. And are you as yet sober, then?' the 



Crocodile says coolly, disappearing and then not reappearing after several blinks. 

The forms and sound in the room is really only three White Flaggers Gately's never 
known or connected with that well, but are apparently here stopping in on their way to 
work, to show empathy and support. Bud 0. and Glenn K. and Jack J. Glenn K. in daytime 
wears the gray jumpsuit and complex utility-belt of a refrigeration technician. 

'And who's the fellow in the hat outside?' he's asking. 

Gately grunts in a frantic way that suggests the phoneme u. 

'Tall, well-dressed, grumpy, cocky-looking, piggy-eyed, wearing a hat. Civil-Service¬ 
looking. Black socks and brown shoes,' Glenn K. says, pointing out toward the door 
where there's sometimes been the ominous shadow of a hat. 

Gately's teeth taste long-unbrushed. 

'Looking settled in for a stay, surrounded with sports pages and the takeout foods of 
many cultures. Laddie,' says Bud 0., who the story from before Gately's time goes once 
hit his wife so hard in the blackout that made him Come In he broke her nose and bent 
it over flat against her face, which he asked her never to have repaired, as a daily visual 
reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. 0. had gone around with her nose 
bent over flat against her left cheek — Bud O.'d tagged her with a left cross — until 
U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which eventually nurtured and supported Mrs. 0. into 
eventually telling Bud 0. to take a flying fuck to the moon and getting her nose 
realigned back out front and leaving him for a male Al-Anon in Birkenstock sandals. 
Gately's bowels have gone watery with dread: he has all-too-clear memories of a certain 
remorseless Revere A.D.A.'s brown shoes, piggy eyes. Stetson w/ feather, and penchant 
for Third World takeout. He keeps grunting pathetically. 

Unsure how to be supportive, for a while the Flaggers try to cheer Gately up by telling 
him CPR jokes. 'CPR' is their term for Al-Anon, which is known to Boston AAs as the 
'Church of Perpetual Revenge.' 

'What's an Al-Anon Relapse?' asks Glenn K. 

'It is a twinge of compassion,' says Jack J., who has a kind of a facial tic. 

'But what is an Al-Anon Salute?' Jack J. asks back. 

The three all pause, and then Jack J. puts the back of his hand to his brow and flutters 
his lashes martyrishly at the drop-ceiling. They all three of them laugh. They have no 
clue that if Gately actually laughs he'll tear his shoulder's sutures. One side of Jack J.'s 
face goes in and out of a tortured grimace that doesn't affect the other side of his face 
one bit, something that's always given Gately the fantods. Bud 0. is waggling his finger 
disapprovingly at Glenn K., to signify an Al-Anon Handshake. Glenn K. gives a lengthy im¬ 
pression of an Al-Anon mom watching her alcoholic kid marching in some parade and 
getting more and more outraged at how everybody's out of step except her kid. Gately 
closes his eyes and moves his chest up and down a few times in a dumbshow of polite 
laughter, so they'll think they've cheered him up and screw. The little thoracic 
movements make his dextral regions make him want to bite the side of his hand in pain. 
It's like a big wooden spoon keeps pushing him just under the surface of sleep and then 
spooning him up for something huge to taste him, again and again. 



19 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 


UNDERGARMENT 


After Remy Marathe and Ossowiecke, and Balbalis also, they all reported back 
negatively for all signs of this veiled performer, M. Fortier and Marathe threw into an 
effect this finally most drastic of the operations for the locating of the Master 
Entertainment. This was to acquire members of the immediate family of the auteur, 
perhaps in public. 

Marathe was charged with this operation's details, for M. BroullTme was now thrust 
into technical trouble-killing on the furthering field-tests of viewer willingness; for one 
of the newly acquired test-subjects — this was an eccentrically dressed and extremely 
irritating without-home man of the streets in a white wig appropriated with large bags 
filled of foreign cookware and extremely small-in-size ladies' undergarments — was 
discovered to have been being severing and pushing beneath the room of storage's 
closed door the severed digits of the second of the newly acquired test-subjects — this 
was a mis-dressed and severely weakened or addicted man dressed in the clothing of a 
gauche woman, carrying multiple purses of suspicious nature — rather than his own 
digits, marring the statistics of BroullTme's field-experiment to such the extent that M. 
Fortier was forced to consider whether to allow BroullTme to conduct a lethal technical 
interview of the wigged substituter of digits for reasons of anger only. Substantially, a 
technical interview of more importance was to be conducted in the city Phoenix far 
across the U.S. to the south, a city's name Fortier had amusement from, and departed 
before incoming weather to attend Mile. Luria P— in this conducting, leaving the 
trusted Remy Marathe to charge details of the preliminary acquisition. 

Marathe, who had made his decision and call, did what he could. A direct assault upon 
the Academy of Tennis itself was impossible. A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere 
except tall and steep hillsides. Their attack must not be direct. Thus the preliminary was 
to acquire and replace the tennis children of Quebec, known by the A.F.R. to be even 
then en route to U.S.A. soil for gala competition with the tennis children of this 
Academy. Marathe selected young Balbalis, the one still with both the legs — albeit 
paralyzed and stickishly withered, them — to lead the A.F.R. field-detail which must 
intercept the provincial players. Marathe, he stayed at the Cambridge shop of the 
Antitois, withdrawing frequently to the jazz nights nearby of Ryle's restaurant. Balbalis 
drove the modified van of Dodge north into the increasingly heavy snowstorm. They 
bypassed the Pongo checkpoint at Methuen MA. They would place a large mirror in the 
deserted road and delude the tennis bus that it must leave the road to avoid impact; its 
own headlights would delude it. An old F.L.Q. trick. Two teams in the van's back 
assembled the mirror's components. Balbalis would not allow to stop for this assembly; 
the snowfall was worse in the Convexity because of the fans to the south. What used to 



be Montpelier in Vermont lay between E.W.D. grids but took bad fallout from the region 
of Champlain and was unoccupied and ghostly white with snow. Balbalis permitted at 
Montpelier a brief stop for final assembly and for those who were incontinent to change 
their bags. Balbalis pressed hard to the former place of St. Johnsbury, where the mirror 
was installed across the southbound lanes of the U.S. Interstate #91. Balbalis did not 
complain that there were no tracks in the snow of the road to be followed. He never 
complained. They arrived well early just south of the checkpoint at which Provincial 
Autoroute #55 became the Interstate #91. There was a brief period of the tension when 
it appeared that the night-vision attachment for the binoculars had been misplaced. Bal¬ 
balis remained cool and it was located. The plan was to intercept the travelling team of 
players and allow A.F.R.s to arrive at the place in their stead. Marathe promised to 
conceive an excellent ruse to explain the wheelchairs and adult beards of the false 
players. There was no smoking in the van while they waited for the children tennis 
players of their country to appear at the checkpoint. The bus was forced to remain at 
the checkpoint for several minutes. The bus was large and chartered and appeared 
warm within. Above its windshield its lit rectangle of destination displayed the English 
word for charter. If the bus survived the swerve from the highway's mirror and was 
operational after the crash of swerving, Balbalis would drive this bus. There was one 
brief argument over who would be required to drive the van, for Balbalis refused to 
leave the van behind them even if the bus was operational. If the bus was not 
operational, no more than six junior children as survivors could be accommodated in the 
van. The rest would be allowed to die for teur rai pays. Balbalis, he showed no 
preference one or the other way. 


Gately dreamed he was with Ennet House resident Joelle van Dyne in a Southern 
motel whose restaurant's authoritarian sign said simply EAT, in the U.S. South, in high 
summer, brutally hot, the foliage outside the room's broken windowscreen a parched 
khaki, the air glassy with heat, the ceiling fan rotating at a second-hand's rate, the 
room's bed a lavish four-poster, tall and squishy, the bedspread nubbly, Gately supine 
with his side on fire while newcomer Joelle v.D. raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat 
off his lids and temples, whispering so the veil flutters around and fans him, promising 
him a P.M. of near-terminal pleasures, undressing at the foot of the old tall bed, slowly, 
her loose light clothes moist with sweat and falling easily to the bare floor, and an 
incredible female body, an inhuman body, the sort of body Gately's only ever seen with 
a staple in its navel, a body like something you'd win in a raffle; and a fifth post forms on 
the four-poster, so to speak, which erect post's long-dormant height obscures the nude 
newcomer's figure; and then when she moves around out of the pulsing shadow to lean 
in close and press her inhuman body's face right up intimately close to his, she removes 
the veil, and on top of this body to die for is the unveiled historical likeness of fucking 
Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls and bulldog scowl, and the ghastliness 
of the shock makes the rest of Gately's body go rigid, the pain of which wakes him with 
a jolted attempt to sit up that itself causes such a blast of pain that he half passes back 
out again and lies there with rolling eyes and a round mouth. 



Gately's also powerless over memories of the older-type lady that had been their 
neighbor when he and his mother shared bed and board with the M.P. A Mrs. Waite. 
There was no Mr. Waite. The smeared window of the little empty garage the M.P. kept 
his weights in was right next to the spiny neglected garden Mrs. Waite kept in the 
narrow strip between the two houses. Mrs. Waite's house had been shall we say 
indifferently maintained. Mrs. Waite's house had made the Gately house look like the 
Taj. There was something wrong about Mrs. Waite. None of the parents said what it 
was, but none of the kids were allowed to play in her yard or ring her bell on Halloween. 
Gately never got clear on what was supposed to be wrong about her, but the little poor 
neighborhood's psyche throbbed with something dire about Mrs. Waite. Older kids 
drove across her lawn and shouted shit that Gately never quite made out, at night. The 
littler kids thought they had it: they were pretty sure Mrs. Waite was a witch. Yes, she 
did look a little witchy, but who over like fifty didn't? But the big thing was she kept jars 
of stuff she'd jarred herself in her little garage, brown-green viscous nameless vegetoid 
stuff in mayonnaise jars stacked on steel shelves and rusty-lidded and bearded with 
dust. The littler kids snuck in and broke some of the jars and stole one and ran away in 
mortal terror to break it elsewhere and then run again. They dared each other to ride 
their bikes in tiny diagonals across the edge of her lawn. They told each other stories of 
seeing Mrs. Waite in a pointy hat roasting missing kids whose pictures were on milk- 
cartons and pouring the juice into jars. Some of the bigger littler kids even tried that 
inevitable gag of putting a paper bag full of dog shit on her stoop and lighting it. It was 
somehow a further indictment of Mrs. Waite that she never complained. She rarely left 
her house. Mrs. Gately would never say what was wrong about Mrs. Waite but 
absolutely forbade Don to fuck with her in any way. Like Mrs. Gately was in any position 
to enforce any, like, forbiddings. Gately never fucked with Mrs. Waite's stored jars or 
rode across her lawn, and never much joined in on the witch-stories, which who needed 
witches to fear and despise when you had the good old M.P. right there at the kitchen 
table. But he was still scared of her. When he'd once seen her gnarly-eyed face up 
against the smeared garage window one P.M. when he had left the M.P. to beating Mrs. 
Gately and gone out to lift weights he screamed and almost dropped the bench-press 
bar on his Adam's apple. But over the long haul of a low-stimulation North Shore 
childhood, he'd gradually developed a slight relationship with Mrs. Waite. He'd never all 
that much liked her; it wasn't like she was this lovable but misunderstood old lady; it's 
not like he ran to her dilapitated house to confide in her, or bond. But he went over 
once or twice, maybe, under circumstances he'd forgot, and had sat in her kitchen, 
interfaced a little. She was lucid, Mrs. Waite, and apparently continent, and there was 
no pointy hat anywhere in sight, but her house smelled bad, and Mrs. Waite herself had 
swollen veiny ankles and little white bits of that dried paste at the corners of her mouth 
and about a million newspapers stacked and mildewing all over the kitchen, and the old 
lady basically radiated whatever mixture of unpleasantness and vulnerability it was that 
made you want to be cruel to people. Gately was never cruel to her, but it's not like he 
loved her or anything. When Gately went over there the couple times it was mostly 
when the M.P. was canning chowder and his mother had passed out in vomit she 
expected somebody else to clean up, and he probably wanted to act out his kid's anger 



by doing something Mrs. G.'d pathetically tried to forbid. He didn't eat much of 
whatever Mrs. Waite offered. She never offered him viscous material from a jar. His 
memories of whatever they discussed are unspecific. She hung herself, eventually, Mrs. 
Waite — as in eliminated her own map — and because it was fall and cool she wasn't 
found for maybe weeks after. It wasn't Gately who found her. A meter-reader guy found 
her several weeks after Gately's eighth or ninth birthday. Gately's birthday was the 
same week as several other kids's in the neighborhood, by some chance. Usually 
Gately'd have his party over with some of the other kids that were having their 
birthdays with a party. Hats and Twister, X-Men videos, cake on Chinette plates, etc. 
Mrs. Gately was together enough to come a couple times. In retrospect, the other kids' 
parents let Gately have birthdays with them because they'd felt sorry for him, he's 
involuntarily realized. But at some sober neighbors' party, part of which was for his own 
eighth or ninth birthday, he remembers how Mrs. Waite had left her house and come 
rung the sober neighbor's bell and had brought a birthday cake. For the birthday. A 
neighborly gesture. Gately'd spilled the beans on the annual mass party at a kitchen- 
table interface with her. The cake was uneven and slightly tilted to one side, but it was 
dark chocolate and decorated with four cursive names and had clearly been made with 
care. Mrs. Waite had spared Gately the humiliation of putting just his name on the cake 
as if the cake was especially for him. But it was. Mrs. Waite had saved up for a long time 
to afford to make the cake, Gately knew. He knew she smoked like a chimney and had 
given up cigarettes for weeks to save up for something; she wouldn't tell him what; 
she'd tried to make her scary eyes twinkle when she wouldn't tell; but he'd seen the 
mayonnaise jar full of quarters on a pile of papers and had wrestled with himself over 
promoting it, and won. But there were only like nine candles on the cake when the 
party's Mom brought it in, and a couple of the kids having birthdays were like twelve, 
was the private tip-off on who the cake was really for. The party's Mom had taken the 
cake at the door and said Thank You but had neglected to invite Mrs. Waite in. Gately 
was in a position during Twister in the garage to see Mrs. Waite walking back home 
across the street, slowly but very straightly and dignified and upright. A lot of the kids 
went to the garage door to look: Mrs. Waite had rarely been seen outside her house 
before, and never off her property. The sober Mom brought the cake in the garage and 
said it was a Touching Gesture from Mrs. Waite across the street; but she wouldn't let 
anybody eat the cake or even come close enough to it to blow out the nine candles. The 
candles didn't all match. The candles burned down far enough so that there was a smell 
of burnt frosting before they went out. The cake sat tilted by itself in a corner of the 
clean garage. Gately didn't defy the sober Mom or any of the kids and eat a piece of the 
cake; he didn't even go near it. He didn't join in the delicious whispery arguments about 
what kind of medical waste or roasted-kid renderings were in the cake, but he didn't 
stand up and argue with the other kids about the fact of the poisoning, either. Before 
the party climaxed and the other kids that had got presents opened their presents, the 
sober Mom had taken the cake into the kitchen when she thought nobody was watching 
and threw it out in the wastebasket. Gately remembers the cake must have landed 
upside-down, because the unfrosted side was facing up in the wastebasket when he 
snuck in and had a look at the cake. Mrs. Waite had disappeared back inside her house 



way before the Mom threw the cake away. There's no way she could have seen the 
Mom take the uneaten cake back inside the house. A couple days later Gately had 
promoted a couple packs of Benson & Hedges 100s from a Store 24 and put them in 
Mrs. Waite's mailbox, where junk mail and utility bills were already piling up. He 
sometimes rang the bell but never saw her. Her bell had been a buzzer instead of a bell, 
he remembers. She got found by a frustrated meter-reader some indefinite number of 
weeks after that. The circumstances of her death and discovery became more dark myth 
for the littler kids. Gately wasn't so into self-torture as to think the cake getting not 
eaten and getting thrown out was in any way connected with Mrs. Waite hanging 
herself. Everybody had their own private troubles, Mrs. Gately had explained to him, 
and even at that age he could see her point. It's not like he'd like mourned Mrs. Waite, 
or missed her, or even thought about her even once for many years after that. Which is 
what makes it somehow worse that his next, even more unpleasant Joelle van Dyne 
pain-and-fever dream takes place in what is, unmistakably and unavoidably, Mrs. 
Waite's kitchen, in great detail, right down to the ceiling's light-fixture full of dried bugs, 
the brimming ashtrays, the bar-graph of stacked Globes , the maddening arrhythmic drip 
of the kitchen sink and the bad smell — a mixture of mildew and putrid fruit. Gately is in 
the ladder-back kitchen chair he used to sit in, the one with one rung broken, and Mrs. 
Waite is in her chair opposite, seated on the thing he thought then was a weird pink 
doughnut instead of a hemorrhoid pillow, except in the dream Gately's feet reach all the 
way to rest on the floor's dank tile, and Mrs. Waite is played by veiled U.H.I.D. House 
resident Joelle van D., except without her veil, and what's more without any clothes, as 
in starkers, gorgeous, with that same incredible body as in the other one except here 
this time with the face not of a jowly British P.M. but of a total female angel, not sexy so 
much as angelic, like all the world's light had gotten together and arranged itself into 
the shape of a face. Or something. It looks like somebody, Joelle's face, but Gately can't 
for the life of him place who, and it's not just the distraction of the inhumanly gorgeous 
naked bod below, because the dream is not like a sex-dream. Because in this dream, 
Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate. Nobody 
comes right out and says so; it's just understood: Gately's sitting here in this depressing 
kitchen interfacing with Death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, 
you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you 
and releases you into the next life. Gately can't quite make out if it's like a monologue or 
if he's asking questions and she's responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain 
woman that kills you is always your next life's mother. This is how it works: didn't he 
know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he'd 
missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death's having to sit here naked 
and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial Reading at 
Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is 
always someone you love, and she's always your next life's mother. This is why Moms 
are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues 
or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their 
own, and why there's always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obssessive 
mother-love: they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite 



remember, except maybe in dreams. As Death's explanation of Death goes on Gately 
understands really important vague stuff more and more, but the more he understands 
the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused and wobbly becomes his 
vision of the Death's Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until near the end it's as 
if he's seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that's the same as the 
wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib, and he 
begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his 
mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait. 


20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR 


I was in a zoo. There were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo. It was close to a 
nightmare and it woke me before 0500h. Mario was still asleep, gently lit by the 
window's view of tiny lights down the hill. He lay very still and soundless as always, his 
poor hands folded on his chest, as if awaiting a lily. I put in a plug of Kodiak. His four 
pillows brought Mario's chin to his chest when he slept. I was still producing excess 
saliva, and my one pillow was moist in a way I didn't want to turn on a light and investi¬ 
gate. I didn't feel good at all. A sort of nausea of the head. The feeling seemed worst 
first thing in the morning. I'd felt for almost a week as if I needed to cry for some reason 
but the tears were somehow stopping just millimeters behind my eyes and staying 
there. And so on. 

I got up and went past the foot of Mario's bed to the window to stand on one foot. 
Sometime during the night heavy snow had begun to fall. I had been ordered by deLint 
and Barry Loach to stand on the left foot for fifteen minutes a day as therapy for the 
ankle. The countless little adjustments necessary to balance on one foot worked 
muscles and ligaments in the ankle that were therapeutically unreachable any other 
way. I always felt sort of dickish, standing on one foot in the dark with nothing to do. 

The snow on the ground had a purple cast to it, but the falling and whirling snow was 
virgin white. Yachting-cap white. I stood on my left foot for maybe five minutes tops. 
The Boards and A.P.s 344 were three weeks from tomorrow at 0800 in the C.B.S. 345 
auditorium at B.U. I could hear a night-custodial crew rolling a mop-bucket somewhere 
on another floor. 

This was to be the first A.M. without dawn drills since Interdependence Day, and 
everybody was invited to sleep in until breakfast. There were to be no classes all 



weekend. 

I'd awakened too early yesterday, too. I'd kept seeing Kevin Bain crawling my way in 
my sleep. 

I straightened up my bed and put the pillow's wet side down and put on clean 
sweatpants and some socks that didn't smell foul. 

The closest Mario comes to snoring is a thin sound he makes at the back of his throat. 
The sound is as if he's drawing out the word key over and over. It's not an unpleasant 
sound. I estimated a good 50 cm. of snow on the ground, and it was really coming down. 
In the purple half-light the West Courts' nets were half-buried. Their top halves 
shuddered in a terrible wind. All over the subdormitory I could hear doors rattling 
slightly in their frames, as they did only in a bad wind. The wind gave the snowfall a 
swirling diagonal aspect. Snow was hitting the exterior of the window with a sandy 
sound. The basic view outside the window was that of a briskly shaken paperweight — 
the kind with the Xmas diorama and shakeable snow. The grounds' trees, fences and 
buildings looked toylike and miniaturized somehow. In fact it was hard to distinguish 
new snow falling from extant snow simply whirling around in the wind. It only then 
occurred to me to wonder whether and where we would play today's exhibition meet. 
The Lung wasn't yet up, but the sixteen courts under the Lung wouldn't have accom¬ 
modated more than an A-only meet anyway. A kind of cold hope flared in me because I 
realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash of this hope was an even 
worse feeling than before: I couldn't remember ever actively hoping not to have to play 
before. I couldn't remember feeling strongly one way or the other about playing for 
quite a long time, in fact. 

Mario and I had begun to make a practice of keeping the phone console's power on at 
night but turning off the ringer. The console's digital recorder had a light that pulsed 
once for each incoming message. The double flash of the recorder's light set up an 
interesting interference pattern with the red battery-light on the ceiling's smoke 
detector, the two lights flashing in synch on every seventh phone-flash and then moving 
slowly apart in a visual Doppler. A formula for the temporal relation between two 
unsyncopated flashes would translate spatially into the algebraic formula for an ellipse, I 
could see. Pemulis had poured a terrific volume of practical pre-Boards math into my 
head for two weeks, taking his own time and not asking for anything in return, being 
almost suspiciously generous about it. Then, since the Wayne debacle, the little tutorials 
had ceased and Pemulis himself had been very scarce, twice missing meals and several 
times taking the truck for long periods without checking with any of the rest of us about 
our truck-needs. I didn't even try to factor in the rapid single flash of the phone's power- 
unit display on the side of the TP; this would make it some sort calculus thing, and even 
Pemulis had conceded that I was not hardwired for anything past algebra and conic 
sections. 

Every November, between I. Day and the WhataBurger Invitational in Tucson AZ, the 
Academy holds a semipublic exhibition meet for the 'benefit' of E.T.A.'s patrons and 
alumni and friends in the Boston area. The exhibition is followed by a semiformal 
cocktail party and dance in the dining hall, where players are required to appear 
showered and semiformal and available for social intercourse with patrons. Some of 



them all but check our teeth. Last year Heath Pearson had appeared for the gala in a red 
vest and bellboy's cap and furry tail, carrying a little organ and inviting patrons to grind 
the organ while he capered around chattering. C.T. was unamused. The whole 
Fundraiser is a Charles Tavis innovation. C.T. is far better at public relations and pump¬ 
priming than was Himself. The exhibition and gala are possibly the climax of C.T.'s whole 
administrative year. He'd determined that mid-November was the best time for a 
fundraiser, with the weather not yet bad and the tax-year drawing to a close but the 
U.S. holiday season, with its own draining system of demands on goodwill, not yet under 
way. For the past three fiscal years, the Fundraiser's proceeds have all but paid for the 
spring's Southeast tour and the European terre-batu-fest of June-July. 

The exhibition meet involved both genders' A and B teams and was always against 
some foreign junior squad, to give the whole Fundraising affair a patriotic kicker. The 
gentle fiction was that the meet was just one stop for the foreign squad on a whole 
vague general U.S. tour, but in truth C.T. usually flew the foreigners in special, and at 
some expense. We had in the past done battle with teams from Wales, Belize, the 
Sudan, and Mozambique. Cynics might point to an absence of tennis juggernauts among 
the opponents. Last year's Mozambique thing was a particular turkey-shoot, 70-2, and 
there'd been an ugly xeno-racist mood among some of the spectators and patrons, a 
couple of whom cheerily compared the meet to Mussolini's tanks rolling over Ethiopian 
spearchuckers. Y.D.A.U.'s opponents were to be the Quebec Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman 
Cup teams, and their arrival from M.I.A.-D'Orval 346 was keenly anticipated by Struck and 
Freer, who claimed that the Quebecois Jr. Wightman girls were normally sequestered 
and saw very few coed venues and would be available for broadening intercultural 
relations of all kinds. 

It was improbable that anything was going to be landing on time at Logan in this kind 
of snow, though. 

The wind also produced a desolate moaning in all the ventilation ducts. Mario said 
'key' and sometimes 'ski,' drawing them out. It occurred to me that without some one- 
hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every 
day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any 
meaning. I stood on one foot for a couple more minutes, spitting into a coffee can I'd 
left on the floor near the phone from the night before. The implied question, then, 
would be whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the 
day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling. The Penn 4 that was my 
hand-strengthening ball for November was on the sill against the window. I'd neither 
carried nor squeezed my ball for several days. No one seemed to have noticed. 

Mario cedes me full control over the phone's ringer and answering machine, since he 
has trouble holding the receiver and the only messages he ever gets are In-House ones 
from the Moms. I enjoyed leaving different outgoing messages on the machine. But I 
refused ever to back the messages with music or digitally altered bits of entertainment. 
None of the E.T.A. phones was video-capable — another C.T. decision. Under C.T. the 
Academy's manual of honor codes, rules, and procedures had almost tripled in length. 
Probably our room's best message ever was Ortho Stice doing his deadly C.T.- 
impression, taking 80 seconds to list possible reasons why Mario and I couldn't answer 



the phone and outlining our probable reactions to all possible caller-emotions provoked 
my our unavailability. But at 80 seconds the thing wore thin after a while. Our outgoing 
this week was something like 'This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose 
body is not now able..., 1 and so on, and then the standard invitation to leave a message. 
It was honesty and abstinence week, after all, and this seemed a more truthful message 
to leave than the pedestrian 'This is Hal Incandenza...,' since the caller would pretty 
obviously be hearing a digital recording of me rather than me. This observation owed a 
debt to Pemulis, who for years and with several different roommates has retained the 
same recursive message — This is Mike Pemulis's answering machine's answering 
machine; Mike Pemulis's answering machine regrets being unavailable to take a first- 
order message for Mike Pemulis, but if you'll leave a second-order message at the sound 
of the clapping hand, Mike Pemulis's answering machine will...,' and so on, which has 
worn so thin that very few of Pemulis's friends or customers can abide waiting through 
the tired thing to leave a message, which Pemulis finds congenial, since no really 
relevant caller would be fool enough to leave his name on any machine of Pemulis's 
anyway. 


Plus it was also creepy that, when the face's effulgence becomes the boiled white of 
the Trauma Wing ceiling as he comes up with a start up for air, the apparently real 
nondream Joelle van D. is leaning over the bed's crib-railing, wetting Gately's big 
forehead and horror-rounded lips with a cool cloth, wearing sweatpants and a sort of 
loose brocaded hulpil whose lavender almost matches the selvage on her clean veil. The 
hulpil's neckline is too high for there to be much cleavage-action as she leans over him, 
which Gately regards as probably kind of a mercy. The two brownies Joelle's got in her 
other hand (and her nails are bitten down to the ragged quick, just like Gately's) she 
says she liberated from the nurses' station and brought down for him, since Morris H. 
meant them for him and they're by all just rights his. But she can see he's in no shape to 
swallow, she says. She smells like peaches and cotton, and there's a sweet evil whiff of 
the discount Canadian gaspers so many of the residents smoke, and underneath those 
smells Gately can detect that she's got on a bit of perfume. 347 

To amuse him she says 'And Lo' several times. Gately makes his chest go up and down 
rapidly to signify amusement. He declines either to moo or mew at her, out of 
embarrassment. Her veil this morning has a springy light-purple around the border, and 
the hair framing the veil seems a darker red, duskier, than when she'd first come into 
the House and refused meat. Gately hadn't been much into WYYY or Madame Psychosis, 
but he'd sometimes run into people who were — Organics men, mostly, opium and 
brown heroin, terrible mulled wine — and he feels on top of the febrile pain and the 
creepiness of the amphetaminic-wraith- and Winston-Churchill-face-Joelle-and angelic- 
maternal-Death-Joelle-dreams an odd vividness in himself at being swabbed and maybe 
even generally admired by someone who's an underground local intellectual-dash-art- 
type celebrity. He doesn't know how to explain it, like as if the fact that she's a public 
personage makes him feel somehow physically actuated, like more there-feeling, 
conscious of the way he's holding his face, hesitant to make his barnyard sounds, even 



breathing through his nose so she won't smell his unbrushed teeth. He feels self- 
conscious with her, Joelle can tell, but what's admirable is he has no idea how heroic or 
even romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated, huge and helpless, wounded in service 
to somebody who did not deserve service, half out of his tree from pain and refusing 
narcotics. The last and pretty much only man Joelle ever let herself admire in a romantic 
way had left and wouldn't even face up to why, instead erecting for himself a pathetic 
jealous fantasy about Joelle and his own poor father, whose only interest in Joelle had 
been first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic. 

Joelle doesn't know that newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion 
that people with more sober time than them are romantic and heroic, instead of 
clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by-day like everybody else in AA is 
(except maybe the fucking Crocodiles). 

Joelle says she can't stay long this time: all nonworking residents have to report for 
the House's A.M. daily-meditation meeting, as Gately knows only too well. He isn't sure 
what she means by 'this time.' She describes the newest male resident's weird limbo- 
injury posture, and the way Johnette Foltz has to cut up this Dave guy's supper and drop 
it into his open mouth bit by bit like a bird with a chick. Lifting her face to the ceiling 
makes the linen veil conform to the features of the face below, mouth open wide in 
imitation of a chick. The crewneckish hulpil makes her hair's loose curls look dark and 
her wrists and hands look pale. Her hands's skin is taut and freckled and treed with 
veins. His bed's metal bars keep Gately's rolling eyes from seeing anything much south 
of her thorax until Joelle finishes with the washcloth and retreats to the edge of the 
other bed, which at some point has become empty and the crying guy's chart removed, 
and its crib-railings folded down, and she sits on the edge of the bed and crosses her 
legs, supporting one huarache's heel on the railing's joint, revealing she's got on white 
socks under flesh-colored huaraches and ancient baggy old birch-colored sweatpants 
with B.U.M. down one leg, which Gately's pretty sure he's seen at the Sunday A.M. Big 
Book meeting on Ken Erdedy, and belong to Erdedy, and he feels a flash of something 
unpleasant that she'd be wearing the upscale kid's pants. The A.M. light outside has 
gone from sunny yellow-white to now a kind of old-dime gray, with what looks like 
serious wind. 

Joelle eats the cream-cheese brownies Gately can't eat and works at pulling a kind of 
big notebookish thing out of her broad cloth purse. She talks about last night's St. 
Columbkill's 348 Meeting, where they'd all gone unsupervised because Johnette F. had to 
stay and keep an eye on Glynn who was sick and on Henderson and Willis, who were 
under legal quarantine upstairs. Gately racks his RAM for which fucking night St. 
Columbkill's is. Joelle says how last night's was St. Collie's once-a-month format where 
instead of a Commitment they had that round-robin discussion where somebody in the 
hall spoke for five minutes and then picked the next speaker out of the hall's crowd. 
There'd been a Kentuckian there, which Gately might recall she was from Kentucky? A 
Kentucky newcomer there, Wayne something, a real damaged-looking boy who hailed 
from the good old Blue Grass State but of late resided in a disconnected drainage pipe 
off a watershed facility down in the Allston Spur, he'd said. This guy, she said, said he 
was nineteen or thereabout, looked 40-some+, had clothes that looked to be 



decomposing on him even as he stood at the podium, had a ripe odor of drainage about 
him that produced hankies as far back as the fourth row, which he explained the odor 
by admitting his residential drainage pipe was in fact 'mostly' disconnected, like as in 
little-used. Joelle's voice is nothing like the hollow resonant radio-voice and she uses her 
hands a lot to talk, trying to recreate the whole thing for Gately. Trying to give him a 
little bit of a meeting, Gately realizes, with a slight tight smile of disbelief that he can't 
dredge up a mental meeting schedule so he'll know what day this is. 

Some of the St. Columbkillers were saying it was the longest single blackout they'd 
ever heard of. This Wayne fellow'd said he had no idea when, why or how he'd ended 
up so far up north as metro Boston ten years after his last memory. Most compelling, 
visually, Wayne had had a deep diagonal furrow in his face, extending from right 
eyebrow to left lip-corner — Joelle traces the length and angle with a ragged-nailed 
finger across her veil — splaying his nose and upper lip and rendering him so violently 
cross-eyed he seemed to address both corners of the front row at the same time. This 
old Wayne boy'd sketched how the facial dent — what Wayne had called 'the Flaw,' 
pointing at it like people might need help seeing what he was talking about — derived 
from his very own personal hard-drinking alcoholic & chicken-farmer Daddy, in the grip 
of the post-binge Horrors and seeing subjective pests in a big way, one day, up and 
hitting Wayne at age nine smack in the face with a hatchet one time when Wayne 
couldn't tell him where a certain Ball jar of distilled spirits had been hidden the day 
before, against the possibility of the Horrors. It had been just him and his Daddy and his 
Maw — "'that was feeble'" — and 7.7 acres of chicken farm, Wayne had said. Wayne 
said the Flaw had just about healed up fine with fresh air and plenty of exercise when 
his Daddy, trying one Monday P.M. to get outside a late lunch of mush and syrup, up 
and clutched his skull, turned red and then blue and then purple, and died. Little Wayne 
had reportedly wiped the face clean of mush, dragged the dead body under the 
farmhouse porch, wrapped it in Purina Chicken-Chow sacks, and told his feeble Maw his 
Daddy had gone off to lay up drunk. The diagonal-dented kid had apparently then gone 
off to school as usual, done some discreet w.o.m. advertising, and had brought home 
with him a different set of boys each day for almost a week, charging them a fiveski a 
head to crawl under the porch and eyeball a bona fried dead man. Late Friday P.M., he 
recollected, he'd set off with hard currency to the billiard establishment where the 
niggers 349 that sold distilled Ball jars to his late Daddy was at, getting set to ' "lay up 
drunk as a cock on jimson." ' The next thing this Wayne boy says he knows, he wakes up 
in the partially disconnected NNE pipe, one millennial decade older and with some ' 
"right nasty"' medical issues the timer's bell prevents him from sharing in detail. 

And this old Wayne boy had up and pointed to Joelle to come speak next. 'Almost as if 
he knew. As if he gut-intuited some sort of kinship, affinity of origin.' 

Gately grunted softly to himself. He figured guys with ten-year blackouts who live in 
pipes probably didn't have to much to go on besides your gut-type intuitions. He knew 
he needed to be reminded that this strange girl was only about three weeks clean and 
still leaching Substances out of her tissues and still utterly clueless, but he felt like he 
resented it whenever he got reminded. Joelle had the big flat book in her lap and was 
looking down at her thumb and flexing it, watching it flex. What was disconcerting was 



that when her head was down the veil hung loose at the same vertical angle as when 
her head was up, only now it was perfectly smooth and untextured, a smooth white 
screen with nothing behind it. A loudspeaker down the hall gave those xylophone dings 
that meant God knows what all the time. 

When Joelle's head came back up, the reassuring little hills and valleys of veiled 
features reappeared behind the screen. Tm going to have to take off here in a second,' 
she said. 'I could come on back after, if you want. I can bring anything you think you'd 
like.' 

Gately hiked an eyebrow at her, to get her to smile. 

'Hopefully since your fever went down they said they'll decide you're out of the woods 
and take that out, finally,' Joelle said, looking at Gately's mouth. 'It's got to hurt, and Pat 
said you'll feel better when you can start quote sharing what you're feeling.' 

Gately hiked both eyebrows. 

'And you can tell me what you'd like brought. Who you'd want to have come. Whom.' 

Moving his left arm north along his chest and throat to get the left hand up to feel at 
his mouth made the whole right side sing with pain. A skin-warmed plastic tube led in 
from the right side and was taped to his right cheek and went into his mouth and went 
down his throat past where his fingers could feel at the back of his mouth. He hadn't 
been able to feel it in his mouth or going down the back of his throat to he didn't want 
to know where, or even the tape on his cheek. He'd had like this like tube in his throat 
the whole time and hadn't even known it. It had been in there so long by the time he 
came up for air he'd gotten like unconsciously used to it and hadn't even known it was 
there. Maybe it was a feeding tube. The tube was probably why he could only mew and 
grunt. He probably didn't have permanent voice damage. Thank God. He made his 
thoughts capitalized and Thanked God several times. He pictured himself at a lavish 
Commitment podium, like at an AA convention, off-handedly saying something that got 
an enormous laugh. 

Either Joelle had some sort of problem with her thumb or she'd just got really 
interested in watching the thumb flex and twiddle. She was saying 'It's strange, not 
knowing it's coming, then standing up there to speak. Folks you don't know. Things I 
don't realize I think til I say them. On the show I was used to knowing quite well what I 
thought before I spoke. This isn't like that.' She seemed to be addressing herself to the 
thumb. 'I took a page from your manual and shared my complaint about the "But For 
the Grace of God," and you were right, they just laughed. But I also ... I hadn't realized til 
I found myself telling them that I'd stopped seeing the "One Day at a Time" and "Keep It 
in the Day" as trite cliches. Patronizing.' Gately noticed she still talks about Recovery- 
issues in a stiff proper intellectualish way she doesn't talk about other stuff with. Her 
way of still keeping it all at arm's length a little. A mental thumb to pretend to look at 
while she talks. It was all right; Gately's own way of keeping it at arm's length at the 
start had involved an actual arm. He pictured her laughing as he tells her that, the veil 
billowing mightily in and out. He smiled around the tube, which Joelle saw as 
encouragement. She said 'And why Pat in counselling keeps telling me just to build a 
wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back. And not to count 
days. Even when you get a chip for 14 days or 30 days, not to add them up. In 



counselling I'd just smile and nod. Being polite. But standing up there last night, I didn't 
even share it aloud, but I realized suddenly that this was why I'd never been able to stay 
off the stuff for more than a couple weeks. I'd always break down, go back. Freebase.' 
She looks up at him. 'I 'based, you know. You knew that. You all see the Intake forms.' 

Gately smiles. 

She said 'This was why I couldn't get off and stay off. Just as the cliche warns. I literally 
wasn't keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.' She cocked her 
head at him. 'Did you ever hear of this fellow Evel Knievel? This motorcycle-jumper?' 

Gately nods slightly, being careful of a tube he now feels. This is why his throat had 
had that raped feeling in it. The tube. He actually has an old cutout action picture of the 
historical Evel Knievel, from an old Life magazine, in a white leather Elvisish suit, in the 
air, aloft, haloed in spotlights, upright on a bike, a row of well-waxed trucks below. 

'At St. Collie only the Crocodiles'd heard of him. My own Daddy'd followed him, cut 
out pictures, as a boy.' Gately can tell she's smiling under there. 'But what I used to do. 
I'd throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking 
witness NEVER AGAIN , os of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.' She also has 
this habit of absently patting the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes 
and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. 'And I'd bunker up all white-knuckled and stay 
straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed 
evidence of something, and I counted them. I'd add them up. Line them up end to end. 
You know?' Gately knows very well but doesn't nod, lets her do this on just her own 
steam. She says 'And soon it would get... improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel 
had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I'd get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it 
would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of 
the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear 
them.' She left her head alone and cocked it. 'Who could do it? How did I ever think 
anyone could do it that way?' 

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Maiden. Bent with 
pleurisy in Salem. MCl/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He 
remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of 
the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot 
but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. 
Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 
92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. 
Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he 
remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60 more of these 
seconds — he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around 
each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory 
down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a 
second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull- 
wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so 
excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk 
about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when 
he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird. 



But this inter-beat Present, this sense of endless Now — it had vanished in Revere 
Holding along with the heaves and chills. He'd returned to himself, moved to sit on the 
bunk's edge, and ceased to Abide because he no longer had to. 

His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird's hurt was. He 
wonders, sometimes, if that's what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk 
toward: Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible 
leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the 
Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis's own sponsor, 
the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: It's a 
gift, the Now: it's AA's real gift: it's no accident they call it The Present. 

'And yet it wasn't til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled 
me up there and I said it that I realized,' Joelle said. 'I don't have to do it that way. I get 
to choose how to do it, and they'll help me stick to the choice. I don't think I'd realized 
before that I could — I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.' 

The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes 
yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at 
him, Gately could tell. But he'd also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own 
thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it 
was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable- 
with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And 
the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third 
World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of 
a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It's too much to think 
about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and 
Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just 
hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and 
live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could 
make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. 
But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless 
noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out 
the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not 
Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with 
unendurable news you then somehow believed. If Gately got out of this, he decided, he 
was going to take the Knievel picture off his wall and mount it and give it to Joelle, and 
they'd laugh, and she'd call him Don or The Bimster, etc. 

Gately rolls his eyes way over to the right to see Joelle again, who she's using both 
pale hands to get the big book open on her sweatpants' lap. Gray windowlight shines on 
clear plastic sheets like little laminates inside the thing. 

'...idea to haul this out last night and was looking at it. I wanted to "show you my own 
personal Daddy,' she says. She's holding the photo album out at him, wide open, like a 
kindergarten teacher at storytime. Gately makes a production of squinting. Joelle comes 
over and rests the big album on the top of Gately's crib-railing, peering down over the 
top and pointing at a snapshot in its little square sleeve. 

'Right there's my Daddy.' In front of a low white porch-railing, a generic lean old guy 



with lines around his nose from squinting into sunlight and the composed smile of 
somebody that's been told to smile. A skinny dog at his side, half in profile. Gately's 
more interested in how the shadow of whoever took the photo is canted into the shot's 
foreground, darkening half the dog. 

'And that's one of the dogs, a pointer that got hit right after that by a UPS truck out to 
104,' she says. 'Where no animal with a lick of sense would think it had business being. 
My Daddy never names dogs. That one's just called the one that got hit by the UPS 
truck.' Her voice is different again. 

Gately tries to Abide in seeing what she's pointing at. Most of the rest of the page's 
pictures are of farm-type animals behind wooden fences, looking the way things look 
that can't smile, that don't know a camera's looking. Joelle said her personal Daddy was 
a low-pH chemist, but her late mother's own Daddy had left them a farm, and Joelle's 
Daddy moved them out there and jick-jacked around with farming, mostly as an excuse 
to keep lots of pets and stick experimental low-pH stuff in the soil. 

At some point in here an all-business nurse comes in and fucks with the I.V. bottles, 
then hunkers down and changes the catheter-receptacle under the bed, and for a 
second Gately likes to die of embarrassment. Joelle seems not even to be pretending 
not to notice. 

'And this right here's a bull we used to call Mr. Man.' Her slim thumb moves from shot 
to shot. The sunlight in Kentucky looks bright-yellower than NNE's. The trees are a 
meaner green and have got weird mossy shit hanging from them. 'And this right here's a 
mule called Chet that could jump the fence and used to get at everybody's flowers out 
along Route 45 til Daddy had to put him down. This is a cow. This right here's Chet's 
mama. It's a mare. I don't recollect any kind of name except "Chet's Mama." Daddy'd let 
her out to neighbors that really did farm, to sort of make up for folks' flowers.' 

Gately nods studiously at each photo, trying to Abide. He hasn't thought about the 
wraith or the wraith-dream once since he woke up from the dream where Joelle was 
Mrs. Waite as a maternal Death-figure. Next life's Chet's Mama. He opens his eyes wide 
to clear his head. Joelle's head is down, looking down at the open album from overhead. 
Her veil hangs loose and blank again, so close he could reach his left hand up and lift it if 
he wanted. The open book she's moving her hand around in gives Gately an idea he 
can't believe he's only having now. Except he worries because he isn't left-handed. 
Which is to say SINISTRAL. Joelle's got her thumb by a weird old sepia shot of the ass 
and hunched back of some guy scrabbling up the slope of a roof. 'Uncle Lum,' she says, 
'Mr. Riney, Lum Riney, my Daddy's partner over to the shop, that breathed some kind of 
fume at the shop when I was little, and got strange, and now he'll always try and climb 
up on top of shit, if you let him.' 

He winces at the pain of moving his left arm to put a hand on her wrist to get her 
attention. Her wrist is thin across the top but oddly deep, thick-seeming. Gately gets her 
to look at him and takes the hand off her wrist and uses it to mime writing awkwardly in 
the air, his eyes rolling a bit from the pain of it. This is his idea. He points at her and then 
out the window and circles his hand back to her. He refuses to grunt or moo to 
emphasize anything. His forefinger is twice the size of her thumb as he again mimes 
holding an implement and writing on the air. He makes such a big slow obvious show of 



it because he can't see her eyes to be sure she gets what he's after. 

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the 
crowded street, Don Gately, like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a 
couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all 
in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee 
while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively 
wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he's going, the drug addict 
has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is 
mentally happily still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big¬ 
headed grandkids on a special porch swing modified for Gately's mass, her legs in 
support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, 
calling each other 'Mother' and 'Papa,' knowing they'll kick within weeks of each other 
because neither could possibly live without the other, is how bonded they've got 
through the years. 

The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle ('M.P.') van Dyne keeps foundering 
on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil, 
however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle's veil in moonlight on their 
honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her 
forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or something. 350 So the addictive mental long-range 
fantasy gets shaky, but he still can't help envisioning the old X, with Joelle well-veiled 
and crying out And Lo! in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm — the 
closest Gately'd ever come to Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student 
with the head-banging loft, who'd borne an incredible resemblance to the young Dean 
Martin. Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind 
right over the second's wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don 
G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak 
Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.'s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him 
from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in 
the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress 
and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles 
under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and 
radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod -type consuming love for Gately. 

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it's so cowardly. And even contemplating a 
romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful. In Boston AA, newcomer-seducing 
is called 13th-Stepping 351 and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It's 
predation. Newcomers come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous 
systems still on the outside of their bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate 
to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of 
something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance. To avoid 
the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. To avoid acknowledging their old dear friend 
the Substance's betrayal, and grieving it. Plus let's not even mention the mirror-and- 
vulnerability issues of a newcomer that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil. One of Boston AA's 
stronger suggestions is that newcomers avoid all romantic relationships for at least a 
year. So somebody with some sober time predating and trying to seduce a newcomer is 



almost tantamount to rape, is the Boston consensus. Not that it isn't done. But the ones 
that do it never have the kind of sobriety anybody else respects or wants for them¬ 
selves. A 13th-Stepper is still running from the mirror himself. 

Not to mention that a Staffer seducing a new resident he's supposed to be there to 
help would be dicking over Pat Montesian and Ennet House on a grand scale. 

Gately sees it's probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident 
with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head's real fantasy is 
this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in like Kentucky on 
a modified porch swing. He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take 
care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his various cages. It's the same 
delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll up in his head 
at disgust with himself, and stay there. 


I went down the hall to take out the tobacco and brush my teeth and rinse out the 
Spiru-Tein can, which had gotten an unpleasant crust along the sides. The subdorm halls 
were curved and had no corners as such, but you can see at most three doors and the 
jamb of the fourth from any point in the hall before the curve extrudes into your line of 
sight. I wondered briefly whether it was true that small children believed their parents 
could see them even around corners and curves. 

The high wind's moan and doors' rattle were worse in the uncarpeted hall. I could 
hear faint sounds of early-morning weeping in certain rooms beyond my line of sight. 
Lots of the top players start the A.M. with a quick fit of crying, then are basically hale 
and well-wrapped for the rest of the day. 

The walls of the subdorms' hallways are dinner-mint blue. The walls of the rooms 
themselves are cream. All the woodwork is dark and varnished, as is the guilloche that 
runs below all E.T.A. ceilings; and the dominant odor in the hallways is always a mixture 
of varnish and tincture of benzoin. 

Someone had left a window open by the sinks in the boys' room, and a hump of snow 
lay on the sill, and on the floor beneath the window by the sink on the end, whose hot- 
water pipe shrieks, was a parabolic dusting of snow, already melting at the apex. I 
turned on the lights and the exhaust fan kicked on with them; for some reason I could 
barely stand its sound. When I put my head out the window the wind came from 
nowhere and everywhere, the snow swirling in funnels and eddies, and there were little 
grains of ice in the snow. It was brutally cold. Across the East Courts, the paths were ob¬ 
scured, and the pine's branches were near horizontal under their snow's weight. 
Schtitt's transom and observation tower looked menacing; it was still dark and snow- 
free on the lee side facing Comm.-Ad. The sight of distant ATHSCME fans displacing 
great volumes of snowy air northward is one of the better winter views from our hilltop, 
but visibility was now too poor to make out the fans, and the liquid hiss of the snow was 
too total to make out whether the fans were even on. The Headmaster's House wasn't 
much more than a humped shape off by the north tree-line, but I could picture poor C.T. 
at the living room window in leather slippers and Scotch-plaid robe, seeming to pace 
even when standing still, raising and lowering the antenna of the phone in his hand. 



with several calls out already to Logan, M.I.A.-Dorval, WeatherNet-9000's recorded 
update, heavy-browed figures in Quebec's O.N.A.N.T.A. office, C.T.'s forehead a wash¬ 
board and lips moving soundless as he brainstormed his way toward a state of Total 
Worry. 

I brought my head back in when I could no longer feel my face. I made my little 
ablutions. I hadn't had to go to the bathroom in a serious way in three days. 

The digital display up next to the ceiling's intercom read 11-18-EST0456. 

When the whap-whap of the bathroom door subsided I heard a quiet voice with an 
odd tone farther up around the curve of the hallway. It turned out that good old Ortho 
Stice was sitting in a bedroom-chair in front of a hall window. He was facing the 
window. The window was closed, and he had his forehead up against the glass, either 
talking or chanting to himself very quietly. The whole lower part of the window was 
fogged with his breath. I came up behind him, listening. The back of his head was that 
shark-belly gray-white of crew cuts so short the scalp shows through. I was more or less 
right behind his chair. I couldn't tell whether he was talking to himself or chanting 
something. He didn't turn around even when I rattled my toothbrush in the NASA glass. 
He had on his classic Darknesswear: black sweatshirt, black sweatpants on which he'd 
had a red and gray E.T.A. silkscreened down both legs. His feet were bare on the cold 
floor. I was standing right beside the chair, and he still didn't look up. 

'Who's that now?' he said, staring straight ahead through the window. 

'Hi Orth. 1 

'Hal. You're up kind of early.' 

I rattled my toothbrush a little to indicate a shrug. 'You know. Up and about.' 

'What's the matter?' 

'What do you mean?' I asked. 

'Your voice. Shoot, are you crying? What's the matter?' 

My voice had been neutral and a bit puzzled. 'I'm not crying, Orth.' 

'Well then.' Stice breathed onto the window. He reached up without moving his head 
and scratched the back of his crew cut. 'Up and around. We going to play some furriners 
out there today or what?' 

For the past ten days I'd always felt worst in the early A.M., before dawn. There's 
something elementally horrific about waking before dawn. The window was unobscured 
above The Darkness's breath-line. The snow wasn't swirling or pummelling the window 
as much on the building's east side, but the lee side's absence of wind showed just how 
hard new snow was coming down. It was like a white curtain endlessly descending. The 
sky was lightening here on the east side, a paler gray-white, not unlike Stice's crew-cut. I 
realized that from his position he could see only condensed breath on the window, no 
reflections. I made a few grotesque, distended, pop-eyed faces at him behind his back. 
They made me feel worse. 

I rattled the brush. 'Well, if we do, it's not going to be out there. It's drifting about up 
to the tape on the west nets. They'll have to try to get us indoors somewhere.' 

Stice breathed. 'There's no indoor place's got thirty-six courts, Inc. Winchester Club's 
got twelve is maybe the most. Fucking Mount Auburn's only got eight.' 

'They'll have to move us around to different sites. It's a pain in the ass, but Schtitt's 



done it before. I think the real variable'll be whether the Quebec kids got into Logan last 
night before whenever it was this hit.' 

'Logan'II be shut down you're saying.' 

'But I think we'd have heard if they got in last night. Freer and Struck were keeping 
tabs on an F.A.A. link ever since supper, Mario said.' 

'Boys are looking to get X'd by some slow-witted hairy-legged foreign girls or what?' 

'My guess is they're stuck up at Dorval. I'll bet C.T. is on the case even now. Get some 
sort of announcement at breakfast, probably.' 

This was a clear opening for The Darkness to do a quick C.T. impression, wondering 
aloud over the phone to the Quebecois coach whether he, C.T., should press for them to 
charter ground transport from Montreal or else rather urge them not to risk travel 
through the Concavity in a storm in such a generous but disappointed gesture the 
Quebecois would think busing the 400 clicks to Boston in a blizzard was his own 
generous idea, C.T. wholly open, opening all different psych-strategies to the coach's 
inspection, with the frantic ruffling sound of the coach's French-English dictionary loud 
in the phone's background. But Stice just sat there with his forehead against the glass. 
His bare feet were tapping some sort of rhythm on the floor. The hallway was freezing, 
and his toes had a faint blue tinge. He blew air out of his lips in a tight sigh, making his 
fat cheeks flap a little; we called this his horse-sound. 

'Were you talking to yourself out here, or chanting, or what?' 

A silence ensued. 

'Heard this one joke,' Stice said finally. 

'Let's hear it.' 

'You want to hear it?' 

'I could use a quality laugh right now. Dark,' I said. 

'You too?' 

Another silence ensued. Two different people were weeping at different pitches 
behind closed doors. A toilet flushed on the second floor. One of the weepers was 
nearly skirling, an inhuman keening sound. There was no way to tell which E.T.A. male it 
was, which door back down past the walls' curve. 

The Darkness scratched the back of his head again without moving his head. His hands 
looked almost luminous against the black sleeves. 

'There's these three statisticians gone duck hunting,' he said. He paused. 'They're like 
statisticians by trade.' 

'I'm with you so far.' 

'And they gone off hunting duck, and they're hunkered down in the muck of a duck 
blind, for hunting, in waders and hats and all, your top-of-the-line Winchester double- 
aughts, so on. And they're quacking into one of them kazoos duck hunters always quack 
into.' 

'Duck-calls,' I said. 

'There you go.' Stice tried to nod against the window. 'Well and here comes this one 
duck come flying on by overhead.' 

'Their quarry. The object of their being out there.' 

'Damn straight, their raisin-debt and what have you, and they're getting set to blast 



the son of a whore into feathers and goo,' Stice said. 'And the first statistician, he brings 
up his Winnie and lets go, and the recoil goes and knocks him back on his ass kersplat in 
the muck, and but he's missed the duck, just low, they saw. And so the second 
statistician he up and fires then, and back he goes too on his ass too, these Winnies got 
a fucker of a recoil on them, and back on his ass the second one goes, from firing, and 
they see his shot goes just high.' 

'Misses the duck as well.' 

'Misses her just high. At which and then the third statistician commences to whooping 
and jumping up and down to beat the band, hollering "We got him, boys, we done got 
him!" 

Someone was crying out in a bad dream and someone else was yelling for quiet. I 
wasn't even pretending to laugh. Stice didn't seem to expect me to. He shrugged 
without moving his head. His forehead had not once left the cold glass. 

I stood next to him in silence and held my NASA glass with the toothbrush and looked 
out over the top of Stice's head through the window's upper half. The snowfall was 
intense and looked silky. The East Courts' pavilion's green canvas roof bowed ominously 
down, its white GATORADE logo obscured. A figure was out there, not under the shelter 
of the pavilion but sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back 
with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched out below, not 
moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting 
buried by snow, just sitting there. It was impossible to tell the person's age or sex. 
Church spires off in Brookline were darkening as the sky lightened behind them. The 
beginning of dawn looked like moonlight through the snow. Several people were at their 
vehicles' windshields with scrapers down along Commonwealth Avenue. Their images 
were tiny and dark and fluttered; the Avenue's line of buried parked cars looked like 
igloo after igloo, some sort of Eskimo tract-housing thing. It had never before snowed 
like this in mid-November. A snow-covered B train labored uphill like a white slug. It 
seemed clear that the T would be suspending routes before long. The snow and cold 
sunrise gave everything a confected quality. The portcullis between the driveway and 
the parking lot was half up, probably to keep it from being frozen closed. I couldn't see 
who was in the portcullis's security booth. The attendants always came and went, most 
of them from the Ennet House place, trying to 'recover.' The flagpole's two flags were 
frozen and stuck right out straight, turning stiffly from side to side in the wind, like 
someone in a neck-brace, instead of flapping. The E.T.A. physical-post mailbox just 
inside the portcullis had a mohawk of snow. The whole scene had an indescribable 
pathos to it. Slice's fogged breath kept me from seeing anything closer than the mailbox 
and East Courts. The light was starting to diffract into colors at the perimeter of Slice's 
breath-fog on the window. 

'Schacht heard that joke down at the Cranial place from some B.U. fellow with just 
terrible facial pain, he said,' Stice said. 

'I'm going to go ahead and ask the question, D-man.' 

'It's a statistics joke. You got to know your medials means and modes.' 

'I get the joke, Orth. The question is how come you've got your forehead all up against 
the window like that when your breath's keeping you from seeing anything. What are 



you trying to look at? And isn't your forehead getting kind of cold?' 

Stice didn't nod. He made his horse-sound again. He had always had the face of a fat 
man on a fit man's lean body. I hadn't noticed before that he had an odd little teardrop 
of extra flesh low down on his right jowl, like a bit of skin with mole-aspirations. He said 
'The forehead stopped feeling cold a couple hours back, when I lost all my feeling in it.' 

'You've been sitting here with bare feet and your forehead against the glass for a 
couple hours?' 

'More like four, I think.' 

I could hear a night-custodial crew laughing and clanking a bucket right below us. Only 
one was laughing. It was Kenkle and Brandt. 

'My next question's pretty obvious, then, Orth.' 

He gave another awkward shrug that didn't involve his head. 'Well. It's sort of 
embarrassing, here, Inc,' he said. He paused. 'It's stuck is what it is.' 

'Your forehead's stuck to the window?' 

'Best as I can recollect I wake up, it's just after 0100, fuckin Coyle's having them 
discharges again and there's no sleeping through that, boy.' 

'I shudder to think, Orth.' 

'And Coyle 'course just doesn't even hit the light just hauls out a fresh sheet from the 
stack under his bunk and goes right back to sawing logs. And I'm wide awake by this 
point in time, though, and then I couldn't get back under.' 

'Couldn't get back to sleep.' 

'Something's real wrong, I can tell,' The Darkness said. 'Pre-Fundraiser nerves? The 
WhataBurger coming up? You feel yourself starting to climb plateaux, starting to play 
the way you came here hoping one day to play, and part of you doesn't believe it, it 
feels wrong. I went through this. Believe me, I can und—' 

Stice automatically tried to shake his head and then gave a small cry of pain. 'Not that. 
None of that. Long fucking story. I'm not even sure I'd want anybody to believe it. Forget 
that part. The point's I'm up there — I'm lying there real sweaty and hot and jittered. I 
jump on down and got a chair and brang it out here to set where it's cool.' 

'And where you don't have to lie there and contemplate Coyle's sheet slowly ripening 
under his bunk,' I said, shuddering a little. 

'And it's just starting to snow, then, out. It's about maybe like 0100. I thought how I'd 
just set and watch the snow a little and settle on down and then go grab some sack 
down in the V.R.' He scratched at the reddening back of his scalp again. 

'And as you watched, you rested your head pensively against the glass for just a 
second.' 

'And that was all she wrote. Forgot the forehead was sweated up. Whammo. 
Kertwanged my own self. Just like remember when Rader and them got IngersolI to 
touch his tongue on that net-post last New Year's? Stuck here fucking tight as that 
tongue, Hal. Hell of a lot more total stuck area, too, than Ingersoll. He only did lose that 
smidgeon off the tip. Inc, I tried to pull her off her about 0230, and there was this 
fucking... sound. This sound and a feeling like the skin'll give before the bind will, sure. 
Frozen stuck. And this here's more skin than I care to say goodbye to, buddy-ruff.' He 
was speaking just above a whisper. 



'Jesus, and you've just been sitting here all this time.' 

'Well shit I was embarrassed. And it never got quite bad enough to yell out. I kept 
thinking if it gets a little worse I'll go on and yell out. And then along about 03 I quit 
feeling the forehead altogether.' 

'You've just been sitting here waiting for someone to happen along. Chanting quietly 
to keep up your courage.' 

'I was just praying like hell it wouldn't be Pemulis. God only knows what that son of a 
whore'd've thunk of to do to me here all helpless and immobilated. And Troeltsch is 
sawing logs just inside that door there, with his fucking mike and cable and ambitions. 
I've been praying he don't wake up. And let's don't even mention that son of a bitch 
Freer.' 

I looked at the door. 'But that's Axhandle's single. What would Troeltsch be doing 
sleeping in Axhandle's room?' 

Ortho shrugged. 'Trust that I've had plenty of time to listen and identify different folks' 
snores, Inc.' 

I looked from Stice to Axford's door and back. 'So you've just been sitting here 
listening to sleep-noises and watching your breath expand and freeze on the window?' I 
said. Imagining it seemed somehow unendurable: me just sitting there, stuck, well 
before sunrise, alone, too embarrassed to call out, my own exhalations fouling the 
window and denying me even a view to divert attention from the horror. I stood there 
horrified, admiring The Darkness's ballsy calm. 

'There was a kind of real bad half-hour when my upper lip up and got stuck too, in the 
breath, when the breath froze. But I breathed the sucker loose. I breathed real hot and 
fast. Goddamn near hyper-v'd. I was scared if I passed out I'd slump on forward and the 
whole face'd get stuck. Goddamn forehead's bad enough.' 

I put my toothbrush and NASA glass down on the cantilevered vent-module. Rooms' 
vents were recessed, hallway-vents protrusive. E.T.A.'s annular heating system 
produced a lubricated hum I had stopped really hearing years ago. The Headmaster's 
House still had oil heat; it always sounded like a maniac was hammering at the pipes far 
below. 

'Dark, prepare yourself mentally,' I said. 'I'm going to help pull you loose.' 

Stice didn't seem to hear this. He seemed oddly preoccupied for a man occlusively 
sealed to a frozen window. He was feeling at the back of his head with real vigor, which 
is what he did when he was preoccupied. 'You believe in shit, Hal?' 

'Shit?' 

'I don't know. Little-kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit.' 

'Just going to get around behind you and yank and we'll pop you right off,' I said. 

'Somebody did come by before,' he said. 'There was somebody standing back there 
about maybe an hour back. But he just stood there. Then he went away. Or... it.' A full- 
body shiver. 

'It'll be like that last little bit of ankle-tape. We'll pull you back so hard and fast you 
won't feel a thing.' 

'I'm getting these real unpleasant memories of that piece of IngersolPs tongue on 
Nine's net-post that stayed there til spring.' 



'This is no saliva-and-subzero-metal situation. Dark. This is some freakish occlusive 
seal. Glass doesn't conduct heat like metal conducts heat.' 

'There ain't too fucking much heat involved in this window right here, buddy-ruff.' 

'And I'm not sure what you mean, paranormal. I believed in vampires when I was 
small. Himself allegedly used to see his father's ghost on stairways sometimes, but then 
again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I 
wasn't speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him. So we kind of 
wrote it all off. Orth, I guess I don't know what to think about paranormal shit.' 

Then plus I think something bit me. On the back of the head here, some bug that knew 
I was helpless and couldn't see.' Stice dug again at the red area behind his ear. There 
was a kind of weltish bump there. It wasn't in a vampire-related area of the neck. 

'And good old Mario says he's seen paranormal figures, and he's not kidding, and 
Mario doesn't lie,' I said. 'So belief-wise I don't know what to think. Subhadronic 
particles behave ghostishly. I think I withhold all pre-judgment on the whole thing.' 

'Well all right then. It was good it was you come by then.' 

'The big thing's going to be to stiffen the old neck. Dark, to avoid whiplash. We'll pull 
you off there like a cork from a bottle of Moet.' 

'Pull my sorry ass off here, Inc, and I'll take and show you some parabnormal shit 
that'll shake your personal tree but good,' Stice said, bracing, "n't said nothing to 
nobody but Lyle about it, and I'm sick of the secretness of it. You won't pre-formulize 
any judgments, Inc, I know.' 

'You're going to be fine,' I said. I got right behind Stice and bent slightly and got an arm 
around his chest. His wooden chair creaked as I braced my knee against it. Stice began 
breathing fast and hard. His parotitic jowls flapped a little as he breathed. Our cheeks 
were almost pressed together. I told him I was going to pull on the count of Three. I 
actually pulled on Two, so he couldn't brace himself. I pulled back as hard as I could, and 
after a stutter of resistance Stice pulled back with me. 

There was a horrible sound. The skin of his forehead distended as we yanked his head 
back. It stretched and distended until a sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh half a 
meter long extended from his head to the window. The sound was like some sort of 
elastic from hell. The dermis of Slice's forehead was still stuck fast, but the abundant 
loose flesh of Stice's bulldog face had risen and gathered to stretch and connect his 
head to the window. And for a second I saw what might be considered Stice's real face, 
his features as they would be if not encased in loose jowly prairie flesh: as every mm. of 
spare flesh was pulled up to his forehead and stretched, I got a glimpse of Stice as he 
would appear after a radical face-lift: a narrow, fine-featured, and slightly rodential face, 
aflame with some sort of revelation, looked out at the window from beneath the pink 
visor of stretched spare skin. 

All this took place in less than second. For just an instant we both stayed there, 
straining backward, listening to the little Rice-Krispie sound of his skin's collagen- 
bundles stretching and popping. His chair was leaning way back on its two rear legs. 
Then Stice shrieked in pain: 'Jesus God put it back!' The little second face's blue eyes 
protruded like cartoon eyes. The fine little thin-lipped second mouth was a round coin 
of pain and fear. 



'Put it back put it back put it back! 1 Stice yelled. 

I couldn't just let go, though, for fear that the elastic stretch would snap Stice forward 
into the window and send his face through the glass. I eased him forward, watching the 
chair's front legs descend slowly to the floor; and the tension of the forehead's skin 
decreased, and Slice's full fleshy round face reappeared over the small second face, and 
covered it, and we eased him forward until nothing but a few centimeters of 
decollagenated forehead-skin hanging and sagging at about eyelash-level remained as 
evidence of the horrific stretch. 

'Jesus God,' Stice panted. 

'You are really and truly stuck, Orth.' 

'Fuck me skating did that ever hurt.' 

I tried to rotate a kink out of my shoulder. 'We're going to have to thaw it off. Dark.' 

'You're not getting close to this forehead with a saw, bud. I'll set right-cheer till spring 
first, see if I don't.' 

Then Jim Troeltsch's towering A.M.-cowlick and then face and fist emerged through 
Axford's doorway just over Stice's hunched shoulder. Stice had been right. Being in 
somebody else's room even after Lights Out was an infraction; staying there overnight 
was too far out even to mention in the regulations. 'Reports of screaming have reached 
us here in the Eyewitness News-Center,' Troeltsch said into his fist. 

'The fuck out of here, Troeltsch,' Stice said. 

'Thaw, Ortho. Warm water. Heat the window. Hot water. Dissolve the adhesion. 
Heating pad. Hot pack from Loach's office or something.' 

'Loach's door can't be dickied,' Stice said. 'Don't wake him up on Fundraiser day yet.' 

Troeltsch extended the fist. 'Reports of high-pitched screams have led this reporter to 
an unfolding scene of dramatic crisis, and we're going to attempt to get a word with the 
youngster at the center of all the commotion.' 

'Tell him to pipe down and get back with that hand or so help me Jesus, Hal.' 

'The Darkness accidentally put his forehead against the window here when it was wet 
and it froze and he's been out here stuck all night,' I told Troeltsch, ignoring the big fist 
he held to my face. I squeezed Stice's shoulder. Til go get Brandt to rig something 
warm.' 

It was as if some tacit agreement had been reached not even to bring up Troeltsch's 
being in Axford's room or where Axford was. It was hard to know which would be more 
disturbing, Axford's not being in his room all night or Axford being in there behind the 
ajar door, meaning Troeltsch and Axford had both spent the night in one small single 
with exactly one bed. The universe seemed to have aligned itself so that even 
acknowledging it would violate some tacit law. Troeltsch seemed oblivious to any 
appearance of impropriety or unthinkable possibilities. It was hard to imagine he'd be 
this obnoxious if he felt he had something to be discreet about. He was standing on 
tiptoe to see over the window's breath-line, one hand cupped over his ear as if to hold a 
headset. He whistled softly. 'Plus in addition now reports of mind-boggling snowfall are 
coming in to the News-Center.' 

I grabbed my toothbrush and NASA glass from the vent's protrusion; since the Betel 
Caper, 352 only the worst kind of naif leaves his toothbrush unattended around E.T.A. 



'Keep an eye on Stice and my NASA glass right there, Jim, if you would.' 

'Any comment on the mixture of pain, cold, embarrassment, and weather-related 
feelings you must be feeling, Mr. Stice is it?' 

'Don't leave me immobilated with Troeltsch, man, Hal. He's going to make me talk to 
his hand.' 

'A weather-related drama unfolding around the original plight of an embarrassed man 
trapped by his own forehead,' Troeltsch was saying into his fist, facing his own reflection 
in the window, trying with the other big hand to quash the cowlick, as I trotted and slid 
to a stop in my socks just past the door to the stairwell. 

Kenkle and Brandt were ageless in the special desiccated way janitors are ageless, 
somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. They were inseparable and essentially 
unemployable. Boredom had years ago led us to Lateral Alice Moore's minimally crypto- 
protected employee files, and Brandt's file had listed his S.-B. I.Q. as Submoronic-to- 
Moronic. He was bald and somehow at once overweight and wiry. Both right and left 
temples carried red jagged surgical scars of unknown origin. His affective range 
consisted of different intensities of grin. He lived with Kenkle in an attic apartment in 
Roxbury Crossing overlooking Madison Park High School's locked and cordoned 
playground, famed site of unsolved ritual mutilations in the Year of the Perdue 
Wonderchicken. His major attraction for Kenkle seemed to consist in the fact that he 
neither walked away nor interrupted when Kenkle was speaking. Even in the stairwell I 
could hear Kenkle discoursing on their Thanksgiving plans and directing Brandt's mop- 
work. Kenkle was technically black, as in Negroid, though he was more the burnt-sienna 
color of a spoiled pumpkin. But his hair was a black person's hair, and he wore it in thick 
dreadlocks that looked like a crown of wet cigars. An academic diamond in the very 
rough Roxbury Crossing, he'd received his doctorate in low-temperature physics from 
U.Mass. at twenty-one and taken a prestigious sinecure at the U.S. Office of Naval 
Research, then at twenty-three had been court-martialed out of the O.N.R. for offenses 
that changed each time you asked him. Some event between twenty-one and twenty- 
three seemed to have broken him at several strategic points, and he'd retreated from 
Bethesda back to the front stoop of his old Roxbury Crossing apartment building, where 
he read Ba'hai texts whose jackets he covered with intricately folded newspaper, and 
spat spectacular parabolas of quivering phlegm into New Dudley Street. He was dark- 
freckled and carbuncular and afflicted with excess phlegm. He was an incredible spitter, 
and alleged his missing incisors had been removed 'for facilitating the expectoratory 
process.' We all suspected he was either hypomanic or 'drine-addicted or both. His 
expression was very serious at all times. He discoursed nonstop to poor Brandt, using 
spit as a sort of conjunction between clauses. He spoke loudly because they both wore 
earplugs of expanding foam — people's nightmare-cries gave them the fantods. Their 
custodial technique consisted of Kenkle spitting with pinpoint accuracy onto whatever 
surface Brandt was to clean next and Brandt trotting like a fine hunting dog from glob to 
glob, listening and grinning, laughing when appropriate. They were moving away from 
me down the hall toward the second floor's east window, Brandt making great shining 
arcs with his doll's-head mop, Kenkle pulling the gunmetal bucket and lobbing signifying 
phlegm over Brandt's bent back. 



'And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt — Christmas — Christmas 
morning — What is the essence of Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of 
venereal interface, for a child? — A present, Brandt — Something you have not earned 
and which formerly was out of your possession is now in your possession — Can you sit 
there and try to say there is no symbolic relation between unwrapping a Christmas 
present and undressing a young lady?' 

Brandt bobbed and mopped, uncertain whether to laugh. 

Himself had met Kenkle and Brandt on the T (Kenkle and Brandt apparently rode the T 
at night, recreationally), trying somehow to make it up to Enfield from the Back Bay via 
the Orange Line, 353 and somewhat the worse for wear. Kenkle and Brandt not only got 
Himself onto the right color train and kept him propped up between them all the way 
up the eternity of Comm. Ave., they'd seen him safely down the T-stop's steep iron 
stairs and across traffic and up the hill's serpentine driveway to the portcullis, and had 
been invited in at 0200 by Himself to continue whatever low-temperature discussion he 
and Kenkle had been having as Brandt carried Himself up the hill in a fireman's carry 
(Kenkle recalls that night's discussion being about the human nose as an erectile organ, 
but the only really sure bet is that it was one-sided); and the duo had ended up being 
cast as black-veiled Noh-style attendants in Himself's Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and 
had been menially employed at E.T.A. ever since, though always on the graveyard shift, 
since Mr. Harde loathed Kenkle with a passion. 

Kenkle hawked and hit a small strip of dust at the crease of baseboard and floor that 
the mop's arc had missed. 'For I am a missionary man, Brandt, is what I am — Brandt — 
as in give me the straight-forward venereal interface of missionary congress or give me 
nihil and zilch — You know what I am saying? — Give me your best thoughts on 
alternative positions, Brandt — Brandt — For me, for my part at least, I say nix and nihil 
on the rear-entry or you might hear it termed Dog- or Canine-Style interface so favored 
in huts, blue car-tridges, Tantric etchings — Brandt, it's animalistic — Why? — Why you 
say? — Brandt, it is an essentially hunched way to have interface — She hunches, you 
hunch over her — In-ord/notely too much hunching, to my own way of—' 

It was Brandt who heard me as I came up behind them in socks, trying to keep to the 
drier patches. I almost slipped twice. It was still coming down hard outside the east 
window. 

'Otto Brandt here!' Brandt called to me, extending a hand, though I was still several 
meters away. 

Kenkle's dreadlocks protruded from under a plaid hat. He turned with Brandt and 
raised his hand Indianishly in greeting. 'Good prince Hal. Up and dressed in dawn's ear- 
a-ly.' 

'Let me introduce myself,' Brandt said. I shook his hand. 

'In his socks and toothbrush. E.T.A.'s athe-ling, Brandt, whom I will wager rar-e-ly 
hunches.' 

'The Darkness needs you guys upstairs ASAP,' I said, trying to dry a sock against a pant- 
leg. 'Dark's face is stuck to the window and he's in terrible pain and we couldn't pull it 
off and it's going to take hot water, but not too hot.' I indicated the bucket at Kenkle's 
feet. I noticed Kenkle's shoes didn't match. 



'What may we ask is so amusing, then? 1 Kenkle asked. 

'Name's Brandt and pleased to meet you,' Brandt said, out with the hand again. He 
dropped the mop where Kenkle pointed. 

'Troeltsch is with him now, but he's in a bad way,' I said, shaking Brandt's hand. 

'We are in route,' Kenkle said, 'but why the hilarity?' 

'What hilarity?' 

Kenkle looked from me to Brandt to me. 'What hilarity he says. Your face is a hilarity- 
face. It's working hilariously. At first it merely looked a-mused. Now it is open-ly cach- 
inated. You are almost doubled over. You can barely get your words out. You're all but 
slapping your knee. That hilarity, good Prince atheling Hal. I thought all you players were 
compadre-mundos in civilian life.' 

Brandt beamed as he backed down the hall. Kenkle pushed his plaid cap back to 
scratch at some sort of eruption at the hairline. I drew myself up to full height and 
consciously composed my face into something deadly-somber. 'How about now?' 

Brandt had the custodial closet unlocked. There was the sound of a metal bucket 
being filled at the closet's industrial tap. 

Kenkle brought his cap back forward and narrowed his eyes at me. He came up close. 
His eyelashes were clotted with small crisp yellow flakes. There were Struck-like facial 
cysts in various stages of development. Kenkle's breath always smelled vaguely of egg 
salad. He felt at his mouth speculatively for a moment and said 'Somewheres now 
between amused and cach-inated. Mirth-ful, perhaps. The crinkled eyes. The dimples of 
mirth. The exposed gums. We can bounce this off Brandt's best thinking as well, if—' 

From directly overhead came a ceiling-rattling 'GYAAAAAAA' from Stice. I was feeling 
at my face. Some doors opened along the hall, heads protruding. Brandt had a full metal 
bucket and was trying to run to the stairwell, the weight of the bucket canting his 
shoulder and steaming water sloshing onto the clean floor. He stopped with his hand on 
the stairwell door and looked back over his shoulder at us, reluctant to proceed without 
Kenkle. 

'I elect to go with mirthful,' Kenkle said, giving my shoulder a little squeeze as he 
stepped past. I heard him saying different things to the heads in the doorways all the 
way down the hall. 

'Jesus,' I said. Socks or no, I went forward into the really wet mopped area and tried to 
make out my face's expression in the east window. It was now too light, though, 
outside, off all the snow. I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly 
against all that blazing white. 


PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF WEATHER-DELAYED MEETING BETWEEN: 

(1) MR. RODNEY TINE SR., CHIEF OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES & WHITE HOUSE ADVISER 
ON INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONS; 

(2) MS. MAUREEN HOOLEY, VICE-PRESIDENT FOR CHILDREN'S ENTERTAINMENT, 
INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT, INC.; 

(3) MR. CARL E. ('BUSTER') YEE, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND PRODUCT- 
PERCEPTION, GLAD FLACCID RECEPTACLE CORPORATION; 



(4) MR. R. TINE JR., DEPUTY REGIONAL COORDINATOR, U.S. OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED 
SERVICES; AND 

(5) MR. P. TOM VEALS, VINEY AND VEALS ADVERTISING, UNLTD. 

8TH FLOOR STATE HOUSE ANNEX BOSTON MA, U.S.A 

20 NOVEMBER - YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 

MR. TINE SR.: Tom. Buster. Mo. 

MR. VEALS: R. the G. 

MR. YEE: Rod. 

MR. TINE SR.: Guys. 

MR. TINE JR.: Afternoon, Chief! 

MR. TINE SR.: Mmmph. 

Ms. HooLEY: Glad you could finally get in. Rod. May I say we're all extremely excited, 
on our end. 

MR. TINE SR.: Never seen snow like this. Any of you ever seen snow remotely 
approaching anything like this? 

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes.] Fucking town. 

MR. YEE: Like an extra dimension out there. Less an element than its own dimension. 

SOMEONE: [Shoe makes a squelching noise under the table.] 

MR. YEE: With its own rules, laws. Awe-inspiring. Fearsome. 

MR. VEALS: Cold. Wet. Deep. Slippery. More like. 

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping the edge of a ruler against the tabletop.] Their limo in from 
Logan did a 180 on Storrow. Mr. Yee was just telling — 

MR. TINE SR.: [Tapping a telescoping weatherman's pointer against the edge of the 
tabletop.] So what's the poop. The skinny. What are we talking. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Spot ready for previewing. We need your go. I'm in from Phoenix via 
New New York. 

MR. YEE: I'm in from Ohio. Choppered up from NNY with Mo here. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Spot's master's in the post-production lab down at V&V. All ready except 
for some final bugs with the matteing. 

MR. VEALS: Maureen says we need you and Buster's green light to disseminate. 

Ms. HOOLEY: You and the titular sponsor here green-light it, we can have 
disseminatable product by the end of the weekend. 

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes.] Assuming this fucking snow doesn't shut down our power. 

MR. TINE SR.: [Motioning with weatherman's pointer to U.S.O. stenographer to 
transcribe verbatim.] Seen it yet, Buster? 

MR. YEE: Negative, Rod. Just in with these folks here. Kennedy completely socked in. 
Mo had to charter a chopper. I'm sitting here cherry. 

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping edge of ruler on tabletop.] How'd you fare getting up here. Sir, 
if I may? 

MR. TINE SR.: Mountain comes to Mohammed, eh Tom? 

MR. VEALS: How come I only came two clicks down here and I'm the one with a 
fucking cold? 

MR. TINE JR.: I've been here in Boston as well. 

MR. VEALS: [Checking connections on Infernatron 210-Y Digital Player and Viewer 



System.] So shall we? 

MR. TINE SR.: OK, for the record. Mo. Demographic target? 

Ms. HOOLEY: Ages six to ten, with marginally reduced efficacy four to six and ten to 
thirteen. Let's say target's four to twelve, white, native English-speaking, median income 
and above, capacity on Kruger Abstraction Scale three or above. [Refers to notes.] 
Advertable attention-span of sixteen seconds with a geometric fall-off commencing at 
thirteen seconds. 

MR. TINE SR.: Spot-length? 

Ms. HOOLEY: Thirty seconds with a traumatic graphic at fourteen seconds. 

MR. VEALS: [Hawks phlegm.] 

MR. YEE: Proposed insertion-vehicle. Mo? 

Ms. HOOLEY: The 'Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show,' spontaneous dissemination at 1600 M 
to F. 1500 Central and Mountain. Cream of the crop. 82 Share on spontaneous 
receptions for the slot. 

MR. YEE: Any data on what percentage of total viewing in the slot is Spontaneous 
versus Recorded cartridge? 

Ms. HOOLEY: We had 47% plus or minus two as of Year of the Yushityu 2007. That's 
the last year the data's firmed up for. 

MR. TINE SR.: So say 40% of total viewing for the spot. 

MR. YEE: Give or take. Impressive. 

MR. TINE SR.: So check, check, check. We got rough costs? 

MR. YEE: Production just over half a meg. Post-production — 

MR. VEALS: Bupkus. 150K before matteing. 

MR. YEE: I might add that Tom's pro-bonoing his part of the production. 

MR. VEALS: So you all ready to eyeball this or what? 

Ms. HOOLEY: Since 'Mr. B-B 1 's contracted as a no-public-service-spot vehicle, 
dissemination charge'll come out around 18 OK per slot. 

MR. YEE: Which we're still of the position this seems a bit steep. 

MR. TINE JR.: The upcoming year's Glad's year, Buster. You wanted the year. You want 
the Year of Glad to be the year half the nation stopped doing anything but staring bug¬ 
eyed at some sinister cartridge while little whorls went around in their eyes until they 
died of starvation in the middle of their own exc—? 

MR. TINE SR.: Shut up, Rodney. And quit with the ruler-tapping. Buster I'm sure knows 
the incredible good will that's even now accruing from their proud sponsorship of 
probably the most important public-service spots ever conceived, given the potential 
threat here. 

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes twice in abrupt succession.] [Comment unintelligible.] 

MR. TINE SR.: [Taps telescoping weatherman's pointer on edge of table-top.] Righto 
then. The spot itself, then. The spokesfigure icon thing. Still the singing Kleenex? 

MR. YEE: The what-was-it, Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie, warning kids to say No 
Thankee to unlabelled or suspicious cartridges? 

Ms. HOOLEY: [Clears throat.] Tom? 

MR. TINE JR.: [Taps ruler on edge of tabletop.] 

MR. VEALS: [Hawks.] No. Had to shit-can the dancing Kleenex after the response 



groups' test data were analyzed. Various problems. The phrase 'No Thankee' itself 
perceived as archaic. Uncool. Crotchety-adult. Too New England or something. 
Summoned images of a leathery-faced old guy in overalls. Took attention away from 
what they're supposed to say No Thanks to. Plus phrase-recognition data was way under 
minimum slogan-parameters. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Problems with the icon itself. 

MR. VEALS: [Blowing nose one nostril at a time.] Kids hated Frankie the Hankie. We're 
talking levels past ambivalence. Associated the hankie with snot, basically. The word 
booger kept coming up. The singing didn't help. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Which is why in this case thank God for response-group testing. 

MR. YEE: This business'll make you old. 

MR. VEALS: Had to go back and completely reboot at square one. 

MR. YEE: Does anyone else smell a peculiar citrusy floral odor? 

Ms. HOOLEY: Tom's boys've been at it twenty-four/seven. We're extremely excited at 
the result. 

MR. VEALS: It's previewable but rough. Not really quite there yet. The first Phil's 
digitals had a bug. 

MR. TINE JR.: Phil? 

MR. VEALS: A small bug, but nasty. Dregs of a turbovirus in the graphic encoder. Phil's 
head kept detaching and floating off to the upper right. Not a good effect at all, given 
the message we want to send. 

MR. YEE: Like orange blossoms, but with a kind of sick sweetness. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Oh dear. 

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes.] And debugging put us behind on some of the fonts, so you're 
going to have to use some imagination here. Has this 210 unit been downloaded for 
schematic matteing? 

MR. TINE JR.: Excuse me. Phil? 

MR. VEALS: Introducing Fully Functional Phil, the prancing ass. 

Ms. HOOLEY: More like a mule, a burro. A burro. 

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping like mad.] An ass? 

Ms. HOOLEY: Horse-characters were copyrighted by ChildSearch. Their 'Patch the Pony 
Who Says Nay to Strangers' spots. 

MR. TINE JR.: A prancing ass? 

Ms. HOOLEY: The perception of naivete and clumsiness about a mule-icon provoked a 
kind of empathy in the response groups. Phil's not coming off as an authority-figure-joy- 
killer type. More like a peer. So the cartridge he warns against gets none of the 
forbidden-fruit-type boost of being warned against by an authority figure. 

MR. VEALS: Plus the kid market's a frigging horror show. Near every species was 
copyrighted. Garfield. McGruff the freaking crime dog. Toucan Sam. The O.N.A.N. bird of 
prey. Let's not even get into the bears or bunnies. It was basically either an ass or a 
cockroach. Never again the kid's market as God is my witness. [Sneezes.] 

Ms. HOOLEY: Once we went with the burro, Tom opted to accentuate the clumsy- 
incompetence factor. To almost ironize the icon. Buck teeth, crossed eyes — 

MR. VEALS: Extravagantly crossed. Like he's just been whacked with a sock full of 



nickels. Eye-response was through the roof. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Ears that won't stay upright. Legs keep getting all rubbery and tangled 
when he tries to prance. 

MR. VEALS: But prance he does. 

MR. YEE: But surely it doesn't present itself as an ass. Surely it doesn't prance out and 
say, 'Take it from me, an ass.' 

MR. VEALS: A fully functional ass. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Tom's rather ingeniously played up the functionality angle. The energy 
and verve versus passivity angle. He's never just Phil. He's Fully Functional Phil. He's a 
blur of kid-type activity — school, playing, teleputer-interfacing, prancing. Tom's got him 
storyboarded for a number of thirty-second activity-packed little adventures. He's a 
goof, an iconic child, but he's active. He stands for the attraction of capacity, agency, 
choice. As versus the spot's animated adult who we see in a recliner ostensibly watching 
the Canadian cartridge, little spirals going around and around in his eyes as his body sort 
of melts and his head starts growing and distending until the passive watching adult's 
image is just a huge five-o'clock-shadowed head in the recliner, his eyeballs huge and 
whirling. 

MR. TINE JR.: [Taps his ruler against the edge of the tabletop.] 

MR. VEALS: Let's just roll the thing for them. Mo. 

MR. TINE SR.: I've got to say I foresee trouble selling a certain Commander in Chief on 
a prancing ass as an improvement over a singing Kleenex. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Phil's message is that not every entertainment cartridge out there is 
necessarily a good old safe pre-approved InterLace TelEntertainment product. He says 
word's reached him during his fun-filled fully functional daily activities of a certain very 
wicked and sneaky cartridge that even has a little smiling face on the case and when you 
first start watching it looks like it promises to be more fun to watch than anything 
you've ever wished on a star or blown out a birthday-cake candle for. In a thought- 
bubble that becomes visible when Phil's ears flop down again — 

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes.] Not yet matted in all the way — 

MR. TINE SR.: You know how he is about Kleenex. 

Ms. HOOLEY: — will be an image of an iconic cartridge case with a friendly smile and 
pudgy little harmless Pillsbury Doughboy arms and legs. 

MR. YEE: [Loosening his collar.] Not the actual copyrighted Pillsbury iconic-limb 
animation-codes, though. 

MR. VEALS: Relax. More like a reference. An allusion to plumpness, cuteness. Pudgy 
and harmless-looking limbs, is the thing. 

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping edge of tabletop with ruler.] 

MR. TINE SR.: [Pointing at tapping ruler with weatherman's pointer.] You're close to 
losing that hand, bucko. 

Ms. HOOLEY: [Referring to notes.] Then Phil looks up and pops the thought-bubble 
with a needle and says But it's a liar, this smiling cartridge is, a wicked thing, lying, like 
the stranger who leans out of his car and offers you a ride home to your Mommy and 
Daddy but really wants to grab you and put his sweaty hand over your mouth and lock 
you in the car and take you far away with him to where you'll never see your Mommy, 



Daddy, or Mr. Bouncety-Bounce ever again. 

MR. VEALS: Which and here's the traumatic graphic at fourteen, a dark-bordered new 
thought-bubble over Phil in which now the cartridge's limbs are like a dockworker's, it's 
a swart leering cartridge with yellow fangs and long nails in a plaid cap and overalls 
driving off with an animated kid splayed all screaming and horrified against the car's 
rear window, spirals starting to roll in the kid's eyes. Wait'll you see it. 

Ms. HOOLEY: It's so scary it's positively riveting. 

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes twice.] Stuff of fucking nightmares. 

MR. YEE: Urgle. Urgle urgle. Splarg. /Coo. [Falls from chair.] 

MR. TINE JR.: Holy mackerel. 

MR. TINE SR.: Buster? Buster? 

Ms. HOOLEY: Mr. Yee's epileptic. Severe. Untreatable. Happened twice on the chopper 
in. Stress or embarrassment brings it on. He'll be back up in a minute. Just act natural 
when he comes back up. 

MR. YEE: [Heels drumming on terrazzo State House Annex floor tile.] Ack. Kaa. 

MR. TINE SR.: Jesus. 

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping ruler on tabletop's edge.] Jesus W. Christ. 

MR. TINE SR.: [Rising, indicating tapping ruler with extended weatherman's pointer.] 
All right, God damn it. Give me that thing. Give it here. 

MR. TINE JR.: But Chief— 

MR. TINE SR.: You heard me God damn it. You know it drives me bats. You'll get it back 
when we're done. Drives me up the wall. Always has. What is it with you and that ruler. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Be up and back in the game in a jiff. He won't remember the fit. Just 
don't mention it. The embarrassment of mentioning it'll set it off again. That's why twice 
on the chopper. I learned the hard way. 

MR. YEE: Splar. Kak. 

MR. VEALS: [Hawking.] For Christ's sake. 

Ms. HOOLEY: [Referring to notes.] As the cartridge in the car in the thought-bubble 
drives the splayed kid away, Phil prances a bit and warns that we don't even know for 
sure what the cartridge to watch out for is even about. He warns that the police only 
know that it's something that looks like you'd really want to watch it. He says all we 
know is it looks really entertaining. But that it really just wants to take away your 
functionality. He says we know it's... Canadian. 

MR. VEALS: That's why the plaid cap in the traumatic graphic. Response data indicates 
a plaid cap with earflaps signifies the Big C to over 70% of the spot's target. The overalls 
drive the association home. 

Ms. HOOLEY: At nineteen seconds. Fully Functional Phil then dances his Warning 
Dance, a Native-American-cum-Breakdance-type dance we're hoping will catch on 
among younger dancers. His rhetorical thrust is to play it functional and safe and make 
sure and check with Mommy and/or Daddy before watching any entertainment you 
haven't seen before. I.e. to accept no Spontaneous Dissemination and play no post- 
delivered entertainment without checking with an authority figure. 

MR. TINE JR.: But as a peer. More like, 'I'm thinking this is what / better do, if I want to 
stay fully functional.' 



MR. YEE: [Back upright in chair.] Somebody's mentioned the floppy-ear and plastic- 
buck-teeth product tie-ins. 

MR. TINE JR.: Jesus Mr. Yee, are you sure you're OK? 

Ms. HOOLEY: Ixnay on the entionmay. 

MR. YEE: [Sweat-soaked, looking around.] What did he mean? He didn't mean... ? 

MR. TINE SR.: God damn it, Rodney. 

MR. YEE: Urg. Splarg. [Falls from chair.] 

Ms. HOOLEY: [Clears throat.] And finally, direly — can I say direly? 

MR. VEALS: This is at 25.35 seconds. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Emphatically warns that if Mommy and/or Daddy have been observed 
sitting in one position in front of the home's viewer for an unusually long period of time 

MR. VEALS: — Without speaking. Without responding to stimuli. 

Ms. HOOLEY: — or acting in any way unusual or distracted or creepy or spooky with 
respect to an entertainment on the viewer — 

MR. VEALS: We cut spooky on the last pass. 

MR. YEE: Sklah. Nnngg. 

Ms. HOOLEY: — that the fully functional kid'll never attempt to rouse them himself, 
and Fully Functional Phil leans way in in a kind offish-eye-lens close-up and says 'No-ho- 
ho-ho way' would he ever be so dumb as to even for a second plunk himself passively 
down and have a look at what it is his parents are so silently, creepily engrossed by, but 
to vacate the premises and prance as fast as he can to get a policeman, who'll know just 
how to cut the premises' power and help Mum and Dad. 

MR. VEALS: His trademark expression is 'No-ho-ho-ho way.' He works it in whenever 
possible. 

MR. TINE JR.: His equivalent to the Kleenex's 'No-Thankee.' 

MR. TINE SR.: We're ready to view, I think. 

MR. YEE: [Back in seat, necktie now wrapped all the way around neck like aviator's 
scarf.] Still hashing out the tie-ins with Hasbro et al. 

MR. VEALS: We're all cued and ready. 

MR. TINE SR.: Let's have a look at the sucker. 

Ms. HOOLEY: Since Tom's too modest to say so, I should say that Tom's already 
storyboarded an extremely exciting adolescent-targeted version of Fully Functional Phil, 
for music-video and soft-core disseminations, where Phil engages in a great deal more 
ironic self-parody, and in this version his trademark expression becomes 'It's your ass, 
ace.' 

MR. TINE JR.: So let's have a look at the bastard. 

MR. TINE SR.: Kid, your job here from here on out is to pipe down, now do you —? 

MR. YEE: I've been asked to say for transcription how pleased the Glad Flaccid 
Receptacle Corporation is, during this potentially grave interval, to be a proud — 

MR. VEALS: [At the Infernatron 210 Viewer.] Hit those lights over behind you, kid. 

MR. TINE JR.: This'll make it difficult for the transcriber to transcribe, can I say. 

MR. YEE: This spot doesn't happen to in any way optically pulse or strobe, does it? 

MR. VEALS: Are we all set? 



MR. TINE SR.: So lights already. 


Gately's memories of 'Cheers!' 's Norn now are clearer and vivider than any memory of 
the wraith-dream or the whirling wraith who said death was just everything outside you 
getting really slow. The implication that there might at any given time in any room be 
whole swarms of wraiths flitting around the hospital on errands that couldn't affect 
anybody living, all way too fast to see and dropping by to watch Gately's chest rise and 
fall at the rate of the sun, none of this has sunk in enough to give him the howlers, not 
in the wake of Joelle's visit and the fantasies of romance and rescue, and the 
consequent shame. There's now a sandy sound of gritty sleetish stuff wind-driven 
against the room's window, the hiss of the heater, sounds of gunfire and brass bands 
from cartridge viewers on in other rooms. The room's other bed's still empty and tightly 
made. The intercom gives that triple ding every few minutes; he wonders if they just do 
it to bug people. The fact that he couldn't even finish Ethan From in lOth-grade English 
and hasn't got clue one about where ghostwords like SINISTRAL or LIEBESTOD mean or 
come from, much less OMMATOPHORIC, is just starting to percolate up to awareness 
when there's a cold hand on his good shoulder and he opens his eyes. Not to mention 
ghostwords, which is a real and esoteric word. He's been floating just under sleep's lid 
again. Joelle van D.'s gone. The hand is the nurse that had changed the catheter-bag. 
She looks hassled and unserene, and one cheekbone sticks out farther than the other, 
and her little slot of a mouth's got little vertical wrinkles all around it from being held 
tight all the time, not unlike the basicaIly-late Mrs. G.'s tight little mouth. 

'The visitor said you'd requested this, because of the tube.' It's a little stenographic 
notebook and Bic. 'Are you left-handed?' The nurse means sinistra!. She's penguin¬ 
shaped and smells of cheap soap. The notebook is STENOGRAPHIC because its pages 
turn over at the top instead of to the side. Gately shakes his head gingerly and opens his 
left hand for the stuff. It makes him feel good all over again that Joelle had understood 
what he'd meant. She hadn't just come to tell her troubles to somebody that couldn't 
make human judgment-noises. Shaking his head slowly lets him see past the nurse's 
white hip. Ferocious Francis is sitting in the chair that the wraith and Ewell and Calvin 
Thrust had all sat in, his skinny legs uncrossed, gnarled and crew-cutted and clear-eyed 
behind his glasses and totally relaxed, holding his portable 0 2 -tank, his chest rising and 
falling at about the rate a phone rings, watching the nurse waddle tensely out. Gately 
can see a clean white T- under the open buttons of Ferocious Francis's flannel shirt. 
Coughing is F.F.'s way of saying hello. 

'Still sucking air I see,' Ferocious Francis says when the fit's passed, making sure the 
little blue tubes are still taped under his nose. 

Gately struggles with one hand to flip the notebook open and write' YO!' in block caps. 
Except there's nothing to really hold the notebook up against and write; he has to sort 
of balance it flat on one thigh, so he can't see what he's writing, and writing with his left 
hand makes him feel like a stroke-victim must feel, and what he holds up at his sponsor 

looks more like 


'Figured God needed a little help the other night did you?' Francis says, leaning way 
out to the side to get a red bandanna hankie out of a back pocket. 'What I heard.' 

Gately tries to shrug, can't, smiles weakly. His right shoulder is so thickly bandaged it 
looks like a turbanned head. The old man probes a nostril and then examines the hankie 
with interest, just like the dream-wraith did. His fingers are swollen and misshapen and 
his nails are long and square and the color of old turtleshell. 

'Poor sick bastard going around cutting up people's pets, cut up the wrong people's 
pets. This is the way I heard it.' 

Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he's discovered how no one second of even 
unnarcotized post-trauma-infection-pain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must. 
Fie wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now that 
somebody he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and 
tell how bad the pain of it is, how he doesn't think he can stand it one more second. 

'You saw yourself as in charge. Thought you'd step in. Protect your fellowman from his 
consequences. Which poor sick green Ennet Flouse fuck was it?' 

Gately struggles to try and get his knee up so he can see to write 'LENZ. WFIITE WIG. 
ALWAYS NORTH. ALWAYS ON PHONE.' Again it looks cuneiform though, illegible. 
Ferocious Francis blows out a nostril and replaces the little tube. The tank in his lap 
makes no sound. It has a little valve but no dial or needles. 

'You stepped in against six armed Hawaiians, I hear. Marshall Plan. Captain 
Courageous. God's personal Shane.' F.F. likes to send air through his nose's tubes in a 
mirthless burst, a kind of anti-laugh. His nose is large and cucumber-shaped and wide- 
pored, and pretty much its whole circulatory system is visible. 'Glenny Kubitz calls me 
and describes the thing blow by blowjob. Says I should see the other guys. Says about 
breaking a Hawaiian's nose, shoving the bits up into the brain. The old chop-and-stiff- 
arm he says. Big Don G.'s a Satanically tough motherfuck: this was his assessment. Said 
the way he heard it you could fight like you was born in a barfight. I tell Glenny I say I'm 
sure you'll be proud to hear him say it.' 

Gately was trying with maddening sinistral care to write out 'HURT? DEAD ANY? 
FIN 1ST? WHO HAT IN HALL?,' more like drawing than writing, when without warning one 
of the day-shift Trauma M.D.s sweeps in, radiating brisk health and painless cheer. 
Gately remembers dealing with this one M.D. some days ago in a kind of gray post- 
surgical fog. This M.D. is Indian or Pakistani and is glossily dark but with a sort of weirdly 
classically white-type face you could easily imagine profiling on a coin, plus teeth you 
could read by the gleam of. Gately hates him. 

'So I am here with you again in this room!' The M.D. sings, kind of, when he talks. The 
name in gold piping on his white coat has a D and a K and a shitload of vowels. Gately 
almost had to reach up and swat this M.D. after surgery to keep him from hooking up a 
Demerol drip. That was between let's say four and eight days ago. It's probably But for 
the Grace that his Crocodilian sponsor Ferocious Francis G.'s sitting here watching 
blandly when the Pakistani M.D. sweeps in this time. 

Plus they all have this flourishy M.D. way of sweeping Gately's chart up off their hip 
and holding it up to read it. The Pakistani purses his lips and puffs them out absently and 
sucks off his pen a little. 



'Grade-two toxemia. Synovial inflammation. The pain of the trauma is very much 
worse today, yes?' the M.D. says to the chart. He looks up, the teeth emerge. 'Synovial 
inflammation: nasty nasty. The pain of synovial inflammation is compared in the medical 
literature to renal calculus and ectopic labor.' Partly it's the darkness of the classic face 
around them that makes the teeth seem so high-watt. The smile widens steadily 
without seeming to run out of new teeth to expose. 'And so you are now ready to let us 
provide the level of analgesia the trauma warrants instead of Toradol, simple headache 
ibuprofen, which these medications are boys doing a large man's duty here, yes? There 
has been reconsidering in light of the level? Yes?' 

Gately is inscribing an enormous vowel in the notebook with incredible care. 

'I make you aware of synthetic anipyretic analgesics which are no higher than 
Category C-lll 354 for dependence.' Gately imagines the M.D. smiling incandescently as he 
wields a shepherd's crook. The guy has that odd clipped singsong way of talking of 
skinny guys in loincloths on mountains in films. Gately superimposes a big skull and 
crossbones over the glossy face, mentally. He holds up a palsied page-high A and 
brandishes it at the M.D. and then brings the notebook back down and swiftly up again, 
spells it out, figuring Ferocious Francis will step in and set this ad-man for the Disease 
straight once and for all, so Gately'll never have to face this kind of Pakistani temptation 
again with maybe nobody supportive here next time. C-lll his ass. Fucking Talwin's C-lll, 
too. 

'Oramorph SR for an instance. Very safe, very much relief. Fast relief.' 

This is just morphine sulfate with a fancy corporate name, Gately knows. This raghead 
doesn't know who he's dealing with, or what he's. 

'Now I must tell tell, I would make the personal first choice of titrated hydromorphone 
hydrochloride, in this case —' 

Christ, this is Dilaudid. Blues. Fackelmann's Mount Doom. Kite's steep-angled decline, 
as well. Death on a Ritz. The Blue Bayou. Gene Fackelmann's killer, by and large. And 
also Gately pictures good old Nooch, tall skinny Vinnie Nucci, from the beach at Salem, 
who favored Dilaudid and spent over a year without ever taking the belt off his wing, 
dropping through Osco skylights at night on a rope with the belt all tight and ready just 
over his elbow already, Nucci never eating and getting skinnier and skinnier until he 
seemed to be just two cheekbones raised to a great silent height, even the whites of his 
eyes finally turning the blue of the bayou; and Fackelmann's eliminated map after the 
insane scam on Sorkin and a disastrous two nights of Dilaudid, when Sorkin'd — 

'— though I say yes, this in truth is a C-ll medication, and I wish to respect all wishes 
and concerns,' the M.D. half-sings, inclined at the waist now by Gately's railings, looking 
closely at the shoulder's dressing but not seeming at all disposed to even touch it, his 
hands behind his back. His ass is more or less right in Ferocious Francis's face, who's just 
sitting there. The M.D. doesn't even seem to be aware 34-year-sober Ferocious Francis 
is there. And Francis isn't making a peep. 

It also occurs to Gately that esoteric is another ghostword he's got no rights to throw 
around, mentally. 

'For I am Moslem, and abstain also, by religious law, from all abusive compounds as 
well,' the M.D. says. 'Yet if I have suffered trauma, or the dentist of my teeth proposes 



to perform a painful process, I submit as a Moslem to the imperative of my pain and will 
accept relief, knowing no established religion's God wills needless suffering for His 
children. 1 

Gately has made two shaky smaller A's together on the next sheet and is stabbing 
emphatically at the sheet with his Bic. He wishes if the M.D. wouldn't shut up he'd at 
least move, so Gately could shoot a desperate Please-Jump-ln-Here look at Ferocious 
Francis. The drug-question has nothing to do with established Gods. 

The M.D.'s bobbing a little as he leans, his face coming in and then receding. 'This is a 
Grade-ll trauma we are looking at in this room. Allow me to explain that the discomfort 
of right now will only intensify as the synovial nerves begin to reanimate. The laws of 
trauma dictate that the pain will intensify as healing begins to commence. I am a 
professional at my job, sir, as well as a Moslem. Hydrocodone bitartrate 355 — C-lll. 
Levorphanol tartrate 356 — C-lll. Oxymorphone hydrochloride 357 — admittedly, yes, C-ll, 
but more than indicated in this degree of needless suffering.' 

Gately can hear Ferocious Francis blowing his nose again behind the M.D. Gately's 
mouth floods with spittle at the memory of the sick-sweet antiseptic taste of 
hydrochloride that rises to the tongue with an injection of Demerol, the taste Kite and 
the lesbian burglars and even Equus (Til Stick Anything in Any Part of My Body') Reese 
all gagged at but that poor old Nooch and Gene Fackelmann and Gately himself had 
loved, came to love like a mother's warm hand. Gately's eyes wobble and his tongue 
protrudes from a shiny mouth-corner as he draws a crude syringe and arm and belt and 
then tries to draw a skull-and-bones over the whole shaky ensemble, but the skull looks 
more like a plain old smiley-face. He holds it out to the foreigner anyway. The dextral 
pain's so bad he wants to throw up, throat-tube or no. 

The M.D. studies the palsied drawing, nodding the exact way Gately used to nod at 
Alfonso Parias-Carbo the totally ununderstandable Cuban. 'Oxycodone-nalaxone 
compound, 358 with a short half-life but only a C-lll grading of abuse.' There's no way the 
guy could be like intentionally making his voice this wheedly-sounding; it's got to be 
Gately's own Disease. The Spider. Gately envisions his brain struggling in a silk cocoon. 
He keeps summoning to mind the little detox-story Ferocious Francis tells from the 
Commitment podium, how they gave him Librium 359 to help with the discomfort of 
Withdrawal, and how Francis says he just threw the Librium hard over his left shoulder, 
for luck, and has had very good luck ever since. 

'Likewise as well the time-tested pentazocine lactate, which I can offer with 
assurances as a Moslem trauma-professional standing here in this room in person with 
you at your bed's side.' 

Pentazocine lactate is Talwin, Gately's #2 trusted standard when he was Out There, 
which 120 mg. on an empty gut was like floating in oil the exact same temperature as 
your body, just like Percocet 360 except without the maddening back-of-the-eyeball itch 
that always wrecked a Percocet high for him. 

'Surrender your courageous fear of dependence and let us do our profession, young 
sir,' the Pakistani sums up, standing right up next to the bed, the left side, his 
professional lab-coat hiding F.F., hands behind his back, the dull glint of the metal 
corner of Gately's chart just visible between his legs, immaculate of posture, smiling 



cheerily down, the whites of his eyes as ungodly white as his teeth. The memory of 
Talwin makes parts of his body Gately didn't know could drool drool. He knows what's 
coming next, Gately does. And if the Pakistani goes ahead and offers Demerol again 
Gately won't resist. And who the fuck'll be able to blame him, after all. Why should he 
have to resist? He'd received a bona fide Grade-Whatever dextral synovial trauma. Shot 
with a professionally modified .44 Item. He's post-trauma, in terrible pain, and everyone 
heard the guy say it: it was going to get worse, the pain. This was a trauma-pro in a 
white coat here making reassurances of legitimate fucking use. Gehaney heard him; 
what the fuck did the Flaggers want from him? This wasn't hardly like slipping over to 
Unit #7 with a syringe and a bottle of Visine. This was a stop-term measure, a short-gap- 
type measure, the probable intervention of a compassionate unjudging God. A quick Rx- 
squirt of Demerol — probably at the outside two, three days of a Demerol drip, maybe 
even one where they'd hook the drip to a rubber bulb he could hold and self-administer 
the Demerol only As Needed. Maybe it was the Disease itself telling him to be scared a 
medically necessary squirt would pull all his old triggers again, put him back in the cage. 
Gately pictures himself trying to shunt through a magnetic-contact burglar alarm with a 
hand and a hook. But surely if Ferocious Francis thought a medically advised short-term 
squirt suspect, at all, the old reptilian bastard would say something, do his fucking job as 
a Crocodile and sponsor, instead of just sitting there playing with his nostril's little 
noninvasive tube. 

'Look kid. I'm gonna screw and let you settle this bullshit and come back up later,' 
comes Francis's voice, subdued and neutral, signifying nothing, and then the rasp of the 
chair's legs and the system of grunts that always accompanies F.F.'s getting up from a 
chair. His white crew cut rises like a slow moon over the Pakistani's shoulder, which the 
M.D.'s only sign of acknowledgment of Francis is to sort of tuck his chin down into his 
shoulder like a violinist, addressing Gately's sponsor for the first time: 

'Then perhaps you would please, Mr. Gately Senior, if you please help us help your 
concerned and brave boy here but a boy I believe whose cavalier attitude 
underestimates the level of coming discomfort which is sadly unnecessary altogether if 
he will let us help him, sir,' the Pakistani sings over his shoulder to Ferocious Francis, as 
if they were the room's only adults. He's assuming Ferocious Francis is Gately's organic 
Dad. 

Gately knows a Crocodile never bothers to correct anybody's misimpression. He's 
halfway to the door, moving with maddening slow care like always, as if walking on ice, 
twisted and seeming to limp off both legs and heartbreakingly assless in the baggy seat- 
shiny wide-waled old man's corduroys he always wears, the back of his red neck 
complexly creased as he moves off away, lifting one hand in a gesture of 
acknowledgment and dismissal of the M.D.'s request: 

'Not my business to say one way or the other. Kid's gonna do what he decides he 
needs to do for himself. He's the one that's feeling it. He's the only one can decide.' He 
either pauses or slows down even further at the open door, looking back at Gately but 
not meeting his wide eyes. 'You keep your pecker up, kid, and I'll bring some of the son 
of a bitches by to look in again later.' He slips in 'Might want to Ask For Some Help, 
deciding.' The last of this comes from the white hall as the Pakistani's glossy head comes 



back in close with now a tight strained-patience smile, and Gately can hear him inhaling 
to get ready to say that of course in Grade-ll traumas of this severe type the treatment 
of preferred indication is the admittedly C-ll and highly abusable but unsurpassed for 
effectiveness and tightly controlled administration of one 50-mg. tab in a diluting saline 
drip q. 3-4 hours of mep— 

Gately's good left hand skins a knuckle shooting out between the bars of the bedside 
crib-railing and plunging under the M.D.'s lab-coat and fastening onto the guy's balls and 
bearing down. The Pakistani pharmacologist screams like a woman. It isn't rage or the 
will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering 
something Gately knows that he's powerless at this moment to refuse. The sudden 
exertion sends a blue-green sheet of pain over Gately that makes his eyes roll up as he 
bears down on the balls, but not enough to crush. The Pakistani curtsies deeply and 
bends forward, crumpling around Gately's hand, showing all 112 teeth as he screams 
higher and higher until he hits a jagged high note like a big opera lady in a Viking helmet 
so shattering it makes the crib-railings and windowglass shiver and woke Don Gately up 
with a start, his left arm through the railing and twisted with the force of his attempt to 
sit up so that the pain now made him hit almost the same high note as the dream's 
foreign M.D. The sky outside the window was gorgeous, Dilaudid-colored; the room was 
full of serious A.M. light; no sleet on the window. The ceiling throbbed a little but did 
not breathe. The one visitor-chair was back over by the wall. He looked down. Either the 
stenographer's notebook and pen had got knocked off his bed or the dream had made 
up that part, too. The next bed was still empty and made up tight. It came to him all of a 
sudden why they called them hospital corners. But the railing Joelle van D. had folded 
down to sit on the bunk in the fucking Erdedy kid's sweats was still folded down, and the 
other railing was still up. So there was some like evidence of the one part, that she'd 
been really there, showing him the pictures. Gately brought his skinned hand gingerly 
back inside the railing and felt to make sure there really was a big invasive tube going 
into his mouth, and there was. He could roll his eyes way up and see his heart monitor 
going silently nuts. Sweat was coming off every part of him, and for the first time in the 
Trauma Wing he felt like he needed to take a shit, and he had no idea what 
arrangements there were for taking a shit but suspected they weren't going to be 
appetizing at all. Second. Second. He tried to Abide. No single second was past enduring. 
The intercom was giving triple dings. There really were sounds of other rooms' TPs, and 
of a meal cart being rolled down the hall, and the metally smell of food for the edible 
patients. He couldn't see anything like a hat-shadow in the hall, but it could have been 
all the sunlight. 

The dream's vividness had been either fever or Disease, but either way it had fucking 
seriously rattled his cage. He heard the singsong voice promising about increasing 
discomfort. His shoulder beat like a big heart, and the pain was sickeninger than ever. 
No single second was past standing. Memories of good old Demerol rose up, clamoring 
to be Entertained. The thing in Boston AA is they try to teach you to accept occasional 
cravings, the sudden thoughts of the Substance; they tell you that sudden Substance- 
cravings will rise unbidden in a true addict's mind like bubbles in a toddler's bath. It's a 
lifelong Disease: you can't keep the thoughts from popping in there. The thing they try 



to teach you is just to Let Them Go, the thoughts. Let them come as they will, but do not 
Entertain them. No need to invite a Substance-thought or -memory in, offer it a tonic 
and your favorite chair, and chat with it about old times. The thing about Demerol 
wasn't just the womb-warm buzz of a serious narcotic. It was more like the, what, the 
aesthetics of the buzz. Gately'd always found Demerol with a slight Talwin kicker such a 
smooth and orderly buzz. A somehow deliciously symmetrical buzz: the mind floats easy 
in the exact center of a brain that floats cushioned in a warm skull that itself sits 
perfectly centered on a cushion of soft air some neckless distance above the shoulders, 
and inside all is a somnolent hum. Chest rises and falls on its own, far away. The easy 
squeak of your head's blood is like bedsprings in the friendly distance. The sun itself 
seems to be smiling. And when you nod off, you sleep like a man of wax, and awaken in 
the same last position you remember falling asleep in. 

And pain of all sorts becomes a theory, a news-item in the distant colder climes way 
below the warm air you hum on, and what you feel is mostly gratitude at your abstract 
distance from anything that doesn't sit inside concentric circles and love what's 
happening. 

Gately takes advantage of the fact that he's already facing ceilingward to seriously Ask 
For Help with the obsession. He thinks hard about anything else at all. Heading out w/ 
old Gary Carty in the pre-dawn reek of low tide off Beverly to bring up lobster traps. The 
M.P. and the flies. His mother sleeping slack-mouthed on a chintz divan. Cleaning the 
very grossest corner of the Shattuck Shelter. The billow of the veiled girl's veil. The traps' 
little cages of cross-hatched bars, the lobsters' eyes' stalks always poking through the 
squares so the eyes looked out at open sea. Or the bumper stickers on the M.P.'s old 
Ford —SEEEEE YAAAAAAAI! and DON'T TAILGATE ME OR I'LL FLICK A BOOGER ON YOUR 

WINDSHIELD! and MIA: ■ Jj and , HAV en'T HAD SEX IN SO LONG I FORGET 
WHO GETS TIED UP! The fish asking about what's water. The sharp-nosed round¬ 
cheeked dead-eyed nurse with a weird Germanish accent that would sell Gately little 
sampler bottles of Sanofi-Winthrop Demerol syrup, 80 mg./bottle, vilely banana- 
flavored, then would lie back slack and dead-eyed while Gately X'd her, barely 
breathing, in an airless Ipswich apartment whose weird brown windowshades filled the 
place with light the color of weak tea. Named Egede or Egette, she eventually started 
telling Gately she couldn't come close to coming unless he burned her with a cigarette, 
which marked the first time Gately seriously tried to quit smoking. 

Now a black outside-linebacker of a St. E.'s nurse rumbles in and checks his drips and 
writes on his chart and points the artillery of her tits down at him to ask how he's doing, 
and calls him 'Baby,' which nobody minds from enormous black nurses. Gately points at 
his lower abdomen in the area of his colon and tries to make a broad explosive gesture 
with just one arm, slightly less mortified than if it had been a human-size white nurse, at 
least. 

Gately happened onto Demerol at age twenty-three when intra-ocular itching finally 
forced him to abandon Percocets and explore new vistas. Demerol was more expensive 
mg. for mg. than most synthetic narcs, but it was also easier to get, being the treatment 
of medical choice for mind-bending post-operative pain. Gately can't for the life of him 




remember who or just where in Salem he was first introduced to what the boys on the 
North Shore called Pebbles and Bam-Bams, 50 and 100 mg. Demerol tablets, respec¬ 
tively very tiny and tiny, chalky white scored discs with on one,side and Sanofi- 
Winthrop Co.'s very-soon-beloved trademark, a kind o® on the other, that rakish 
just puncturing the square envelope of itchy-eyed North-Shore life. And remembering 


even the ^ feels like Entertaining the obsession. He knows it was not long after 
Nooch's funeral, because he'd been alone and crewless at whatever moment whoever 
handed him two 50 mg. tablets way too tiny for his big-fingered hands, in lieu of 
whatever else it was he'd wanted, laughing when Gately said What the fuck and They 
look like Bufferin for ants or some shit, saying: Trust Me. 

It must have been his twenty-third summer Out There, because he remembers being 
shirtless and driving down 93 when he ran out of everything else and pulled off into the 
JFK Library lot to take them, so small and tasteless he had to check his open mouth in 
the rearview to make sure he'd gotten them down. And he remembers not wearing a 
shirt because he'd gotten to study his big bare hairless chest for a long time. And from 
that somnolent P.M. in the JFK lot on he'd been a faithful attendant at the goddess 
Demerol's temple, right to the very finish. 

Gately remembers crewing — for good bits of both the Percocet and Demerol eras — 
with two other North Shore narcotics addicts, who Gately'd grown up with one and had 
broke digits for Whitey Sorkin the migrainous bookie with the other. They weren't 
burglars, either of them, these guys: Fackelmann and Kite. Fackelmann had a 
background in creative-type checks, plus access to equipment for manufacturing I.D., 
and Kite's background was he'd been a computer-wienie at Salem State before he got 
the Shoe for hacking the phone bills of certain guys deep in trouble over 900 sex-lines 
into the S.S. Administration's WATS account, and they became naturals at crewing 
together, F. and K., and had their own unambitious but elegant scam going that Gately 
was ever only marginally in on. What Fackelmann and Kite'd do, they'd rig up an identity 
and credit record sufficient to rent them a luxury furnished apt., then they'd rent a lot of 
upscale-type appliances from like Rent-A-Center or Rent 2 Own down in Boston, then 
they'd sell the luxury appliances and furnishings off to one of a couple dependable 
fences, then they'd bring in their own air mattresses and sleeping bags and canvas 
chairs and little legit-bought TP and viewer and speakers and camp out in the empty 
luxury apartment, getting very high on the rented goods' net proceeds, until they got 
their second Overdue Notice on the rent; then they'd rig up another identity and move 
on and do it all over. Gately took his turn being the one to bathe and shave and answer 
a luxury-apt.-rental ad in borrowed Yuppiewear and meet the property management 
people and sweep them off their Banfis with his I.D. and credit rating, and forge some 
name on the lease; and he usually crashed and got high in the apts. with Fackelmann 
and Kite, though he, Gately, had had his own digit-breaking and then later burglary 
career, and his own fences, and tended more and more to cop his own scrips and his 
own Percocets and then later Demerol. 

Lying there, working on Abiding and not-Entertaining, Gately remembers how good 
old doomed Gene Fackelmann — that for a narcotics addict had had a truly raging libido 




— used to like to bring different girls home to whatever apt. they were scamming at the 
time, and how Fax'd open the door and look around in pretend-astonishment at the 
empty and carpetless luxury apt. and shout 'We been fuckin robbed!' 

For Fackelmann and Kite, the rap on Gately was that he was a great and (for a 
narcotics addict, which places limits on rational trusting) stand-up guy, and a ferociously 
good friend and crewmate, but they just didn't for their lives see why Gately chose to be 
a narcotics man, why these were his Substances of his choice, because he was a great 
and cheerful stand-up jolly-type guy off the nod, but when he was Pebbled or 
narculated in any way he'd become this totally taciturn withdrawn dead-like person, 
they always said, like a totally different Gately, sitting for hours real low in his canvas 
chair, practically lying in this chair whose canvas bulged and legs bowed out, speaking 
barely at all, and then only the necessariest word or two, and then without ever 
seeming to open his mouth. Fie made whoever he got high with feel lonely. Fie got real, 
like, interior. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's term was 'Other-Directed.' And it was worse when 
he shot anything up. You'd have to almost pry his chin off his chest. Kite used to say it 
was like Gately shot cement instead of narcotics. 

McDade and Diehl come in around llOOh. from visiting Doony Glynn down 
somewheres in the Gastroenterology Dept, and try to give Gately's left hand archaic old 
unhip high fives as a goof and say the Bowel guys've got Glynn on a megadrip of a 
Levsin 361 -codeine diverticulitis compound, and the Doon seemed to have undergone a 
kind of spiritual experience vis-a-vis this compound, and was giving them ebubblient 
high fives and saying the Bowel M.D.s were saying that there was a chance the condition 
might be inoperable and chronic and that D.G.'d have to be on the compound for life, 
with a rubber bulb for Self-Administration, and the formerly fetal Doon was sitting up in 
a lotus position and seemed to be a very happy camper indeed. Gately makes pathetic 
sounds around his oral tube as McDade and Diehl start to interrupt each other 
apologizing for how it's looking like they might not be able to stand up and legally 
depose for Gately like they'd be ready to do in a fucking hatbeat if it weren't for various 
legal issues they're still under the clouds of that their P.D. and P.O. respectively say that 
walking voluntarily into Norfolk District Court in Enfield would be tittymount to like 
judicio-penal suicide, they're told. 

Diehl looks at McDade and then says there's also disparaging news about the .44 Item, 
that by everybody's reconstruction of events it's more than likely Lenz might have 
promoted the Item up off the lawn when he legged it off the E.M.P.H.H. complex just 
ahead of the Finest. Because it's fucking vanished, and nobody'd have rat-holed it and 
not given it up knowing what's at stake for the good old G-Man in the deal. Gately 
makes a whole new kind of noise. 

McDade says the more upbeat news is that Lenz has been possibly spotted, that Ken E. 
and Burt F. Smith had seen what looked like either R. Lenz or C. Romero after a wasting 
illness on their way back from wheeling Burt F.S. to a meeting in Kenmore Square, 
mostly from the side of the back they'd seen him, wearing a back-split tux and sombrero 
w/ balls, and apparently officially relapsed, back Out There, drunk as a maroon, so 
totally legless when they saw him he was doing a drunk's old hurricane-walk, fighting his 
way from parking meter to parking meter and clinging to each parking meter. Wade 



McDade here thinks to insert that the confirmed scuttlebutt is that E.M.P.H.H. is getting 
ready to rent out Unit #3 to a long-term mental-health agency caring for people with 
incapacitating agoraphobia, and that everybody at the House is speculating on what a 
constantly crowded and cabin-feverish place that's going to be, what with the 
terribleness of the predicted winter coming up. Diehl says his nasal sinus can always tell 
when it's going to snow, and his sinus is starting to predict at least flurries for maybe as 
early as tonight. They never think to tell Gately what day it is. That Gately can't 
communicate even this most basic of requests makes him want to scream. McDade, in 
what's either an intimate aside or a knife-twist at a Staffer who's in no position to 
enforce anything, confides that he and Emil Minty are arranging with Parias-Carbo — 
who works for an Ennet House alum at All-Bright Printing down near the Jackson-Mann 
School — for engraved-looking formal invitations for the agoraphobic folks in Unit #3 to 
all just come on out and over to Ennet House for a crowded noisy outdoor Welcome-to- 
the-E.M.P.H.H.-Neighborhood bash. And now Gately knows for sure it was McDade and 
Minty that put the HELP WANTED sign up under the window of the lady in Unit #4 that 
shouts for Help. The general level of tension in the room increases. Gavin Diehl clears 
his throat and says everybody says to say Gately's like wicked missed back at the House 
and everybody said to say''s up?' and that they hope the G-Man's up and back kicking 
residential ass very soon; and McDade produces an unsigned Get Well card from his 
pocket and puts it carefully through the railing's bars, where it lies next to Gately's arm 
and begins to open up from being folded and shoved in a pocket. It's clear the thing was 
shoplifted. 

It's probably the pathetic unsigned folded hot card, but Gately's suddenly stricken by 
the heat of the waves of self-pity and resentment he feels about not only the card but 
about the prospect of these booger-chewing clowns not standing up to eyewitness for 
his se offendendo after he just tried to do his sober job on one of their behalf and is now 
lying here in a level of increasing dextral discomfort these limp punks couldn't imagine if 
they tried, getting ready to have to say no to grinning Pakistanis about his Disease's drug 
of choice with an invasive tube down his mouth and no notebook after he asked for one, 
and needing to shit and to know the day and no big black nurse in view, and unable to 
move — it suddenly seems awful starry-eyed to be willing to look on the course of 
events as evidence of the protection and care of a Higher Power — it's a bit hard to see 
why a quote Loving God would have him go through the sausage-grinder of getting 
straight just to lie here in total discomfort and have to say no to medically advised 
Substances and get ready to go to jail just because Pat M. doesn't have the brass to 
make these selfish bottom-feeding dipshits stand up and do the right thing for once. The 
resentment and fear make cords stand out on Gately's purple neck, and he looks 
ferocious but not at all jolly. — Because what if God is really the cruel and vengeful 
figurant Boston AA swears up and down He isn't, and He gets you straight just so you 
can feel all the more keenly every bevel and edge of the special punishments He's got 
lined up for you? — Because why the fuck say no to a whole rubber bulbful of Demerol's 
somnolent hum, if these are the quote rewards of sobriety and rabidly-active work in 
AA? The resentment, fear and self-pity are almost narcotizing. Way beyond anything 
he'd felt when hapless Canadians punched or shot him. This was a sudden total bitter 



impotent Job-type rage that always sends any sober addict falling back and up inside 
himself, like vapor up a chimney. Diehl and McDade were backing away from him. As 
well they fucking might. Gately's big head felt hot and cold, and his pulse-line on the 
overhead monitor started to look like the Rockies. 

The residents, between Gately and the door, wide-eyed, now suddenly parted to let 
someone pass. At first all Gately could see between them was the kidney-shaped plastic 
bedpan and a cylindrical syringe-snouted ketchup-bottlish thing with FLEET down the 
side in cheery green. It took this equipment a second to signify. Then he saw the nurse 
that came forward bearing the stuff, and his raging heart fell out of him with a thud. 
Diehl and McDade made hearty-farewell noises and melted out the door with the vague 
alacrity of seasoned drug-addicts. The nurse was no slot-mouthed penguin or booming 
mammy. This nurse looked like something out of a racy-nursewear catalogue, like 
somebody that had to detour blocks out of her way to avoid construction sites at 
lunchtime. Gately's projected image of his and this gorgeous nurse's union unfolded and 
became instantly grotesque: him prone and ass-up on the porch swing, she white-haired 
and angelic and bearing something away in a kidney-shaped pan to the towering pile 
behind the retirement-cottage. Everything angry in him evaporated as he got ready to 
just fucking die of mortification. The nurse stood there and twirled the bedpan on one 
finger and flexed the long Fleet cylinder a couple times and made an arc of clear fluid 
come out the tip and hang in the windowlight, like a gunslinger twirling his six-shooter 
around to casually show off, smiling in a way that simply snapped Gately's spine. He 
began to mentally recite the Serenity Prayer. When he moved he could smell his own 
sour smell. Not to mention the time and pain involved in rolling onto his left side and 
exposing his ass and pulling his knees to his chest with one arm — 'Hug those knees like 
they were your Sweetie, is what we say,' she said, putting a terribly soft cool hand on 
Gately's ass — without jostling the catheter or I.V.s, or the thick taped tube that went 
down his mouth to God knows where. 


I was going to go back up to see about Stice's defenestration, to check on Mario and 
change my socks and examine my expression in the mirror for unintentional hilarity, to 
listen to Orin's phone-messages and then the protracted-death aria from Tosca once or 
twice. There is no music for free-floating misery like Tosca. 

I was moving down the damp hall when it hit. I don't know where it came from. It was 
some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating during 
a match. I'd never felt quite this way off-court before. It wasn't wholly unpleasant. 
Unexplained panic sharpens the senses almost past enduring. Lyle had taught us this. 
You perceive things very intensely. Lyle's counsel had been to turn the perception and 
attention on the fear itself, but he'd shown us how to do this only on-court, in play. 
Everything came at too many frames per second. Everything had too many aspects. But 
it wasn't disorienting. The intensity wasn't unmanageable. It was just intense and vivid. 
It wasn't like being high, but it was still very: lucid. The world seemed suddenly almost 
edible, there for the ingesting. The thin skin of light over the baseboards' varnish. The 
cream of the ceiling's acoustic tile. The deerskin-brown longitudinal grain in the rooms' 



doors' darker wood. The dull brass gleam of the knobs. It was without the abstract, 
cognitive quality of Bob or Star. The turn-signal red of the stairwell's lit EXIT sign. Sleepy 
T. P. Peterson came out of the bathroom in a dazzling plaid robe, his face and feet 
salmon-colored from the showers' heat, and vanished across the hall into his room 
without seeing me wobbling, leaning against the cool mint wall of the hallway. 

But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with an overcognitive, bad- 
trip-like element that I didn't recognize from the very visceral on-court attacks of fear. 
Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world. The 
concentration of attention did something to it. What didn't seem fresh and unfamiliar 
seemed suddenly old as stone. It all happened in the space of a few seconds. The 
familiarity of Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect. The total number 
of times I'd schlepped up the rough cement steps of the stairwell, seen my faint red 
reflection in the paint of the fire door, walked the 56 steps down the hall to our room, 
opened the door and eased it gently back flush in the jamb to keep from waking Mario. I 
reexperienced the years' total number of steps, movements, the breaths and pulses 
involved. Then the number of times I would have to repeat the same processes, day 
after day, in all kinds of light, until I graduated and moved away and then began the 
same exhausting process of exit and return in some dormitory at some tennis-power 
university somewhere. Maybe the worst part of the cognitions involved the incredible 
volume of food I was going to have to consume over the rest of my life. Meal after meal, 
plus snacks. Day after day after day. Experiencing this food in toto. Just the thought of 
the meat alone. One megagram? Two megagrams? I experienced, vividly, the image of a 
broad cool well-lit room piled floor to ceiling with nothing but the lightly breaded 
chicken fillets I was going to consume over the next sixty years. The number of fowl viv¬ 
isected for a lifetime's meat. The amount of hydrochloric acid and bilirubin and glucose 
and glycogen and gloconol produced and absorbed and produced in my body. And 
another, dimmer room, filled with the rising mass of the excrement I'd produce, the 
room's double-locked steel door gradually bowing outward with the mounting 
pressure... I had to put my hand out against the wall and stand there hunched until the 
worst of it passed. I watched the floor dry. Its dull shine brightened behind me in the 
snowlight from the east window. The wall's baby blue was complexly filigreed with 
bumps and clots of paint. An unmopped glob of Kenkle's spit sat by the corner of V.R.5's 
door's jamb, quivering slightly as the door rattled in its frame. There were scuffles and 
thumps from upstairs. It was still snowing like hell. 

I lay on my back on the carpet of Viewing Room 5, still on the second floor, fighting 
the sense that I'd either never been here before or had spent lifetimes just here. The 
entire room was panelled in a cool yellow shimmering material called Kevlon. The 
viewer took up half the south wall and was dead and gray-green. The carpet's green was 
close to this color, too. The instructional and motivational cartridges were in a large 
glass bookcase whose central shelves were long and whose top and bottom shelving 
tapered down to almost nothing. Ovoid would convey the case's shape. I had the NASA 
glass with my toothbrush in it balanced on my chest. It rose whenever I inhaled. I'd had 
the NASA glass since I was a little boy, and its decal of white-helmeted figures waving 
authoritatively through the windows of a prototype shuttle was faded and incomplete. 



After a time. Sleepy T.P. Peterson put his wet-combed head in the door and said 
LaMont Chu wanted to know whether what was happening outside qualified as a 
blizzard. It took over a minute of my not saying anything for him to go away. The ceiling 
panels were grotesquely detailed. They seemed to come after you like some invasive 
E.T.A. patron backing you up against the wall at a party. The ankle throbbed dully in the 
snowstorm's low pressure. I relaxed my throat and simply let the excess saliva run post- 
nasally back and down. The Moms's mother had been ethnic Quebecois, her father 
Anglo-Canadian. The term used in the Yale Journal of Alcohol Studies for this man was 
binge-drinker. All my grandparents were deceased. Himself's middle name had been 
Orin, his father's own father's name. The V.R.'s entertainment cartridges were arrayed 
on wall-length shelves of translucent polyethylene. Their individual cases were all either 
clear plastic or glossy black plastic. My full name is Harold James Incandenza, and I am 
183.6 cm. tall in stocking feet. Himself designed the Academy's indirect lighting, which is 
ingenious and close to full-spectrum. V.R.5 contained a large couch, four reclining chairs, 
a midsized recumbency, six green corduroy spectation-pillows stacked in a corner, three 
end tables, and a coffee table of mylar with inlaid coasters. The overhead lighting in 
every E.T.A. room came from a small carbon-graphite spotlight directed upward at a 
complexly alloyed reflecting plate above it. No rheostat was required; a small joystick 
controlled the brightness by altering the little spot's angle of incidence to the plate. 
Himself's films were arranged on the third shelf of the entertainment-case. The Moms's 
full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza, Ed.D., Ph.D. She is 197 cm. tall in flats 
and still came up only to Himself's ear when he straightened and stood erect. For almost 
a month in the weight room, Lyle had been saying that the most advanced level of 
Vaipassana or 'Insight' meditation consisted in sitting in fully awakened contemplation 
of one's own death. I had held Big Buddy sessions in V.R.5 throughout the month of 
September. The Moms had grown up without a middle name. The etymology of the 
term blizzard is essentially unknown. The full-spectrum lighting system had been a labor 
of love from Himself to the Moms, who'd agreed to leave Brandeis and head up the 
Academy's academics and had an ethnic Canadian's horror of fluorescent light; but by 
the time the system had been installed and de-bugged, the gestalt of the Moms's 
lumiphobia had extended to all overhead lighting, and she never used her office's spot- 
and-plate system. 

Petropolis Kahn put his large shaggy head in and asked what was all this brooha 
upstairs, the thumps and cryings-out. He asked whether I was going to breakfast. The 
scuttlebutt on breakfast was sausage-analog and OJ with palpable pulp, he said. I closed 
my eyes and recalled that I'd known Petropolis Kahn for three years and three months. 
Kahn went away. I could feel his head's withdrawal from the doorway: a very slight 
suction in the room's air. I needed to fart but had not so far farted. The atomic weight of 
carbon is 12.01 and change. A small and carefully monitored game of Eschaton slated 
for the mid-A.M., with (according to rumor) Pemulis himself as game-master, was 
certain to be snowed out. It had begun to occur to me, driving back from Natick on 
Tuesday, that if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis 
and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. 
The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me. The founder of the 



sub-14's' Tunnel Club had been Heath Pearson as a very little boy. The rumor that 
Pemulis himself would don the beanie for the next Eschaton came from Kent Blott; 
Pemulis had been avoiding me ever since I returned from Natick on Tuesday — as if he 
sensed something. The woman behind the register at the Shell station last night had 
recoiled as I approached to present my card before pumping, as if she too had seen 
something in my expression I hadn't known was there. The North American Collegiate 
Dictionary claimed that any 'very heavy' snowstorm with 'high winds' qualified as a 
blizzard. Himself, for two years before his death, had had this delusion of silence when I 
spoke: I believed I was speaking and he believed I was not speaking. Mario averred that 
Himself had never accused him of not speaking. I tried to recall whether I had ever 
brought the subject up with the Moms. The Moms was at pains to be completely 
approachable on all subjects except Himself and what had been going on between her 
and Himself as Himself withdrew more and more. She never forbade questions about it; 
she just got so pained and blurry-faced that you felt cruel asking her anything. I 
considered whether Pemulis's cessation of the math-tutorials was perhaps an oblique 
affirmation, a kind of You Are Ready. Pemulis often communicated in a kind of esoteric 
code. It was true that I had kept mostly to myself in the room since Tuesday. The 
condensed O.E.D., in a rare bit of florid imprecision, defined blizzard as 'A furious blast 
of frost-wind and blinding snow in which man and beast frequently perish,' claiming the 
word was either a neologism or a corruption of the French blesser , coined in English by a 
reporter for Iowa's Northern Vindicator in B.S. 1864. Orin alleged in Y.T.M.P. that when 
he took the Moms's car in the morning he sometimes observed the smeared prints of 
nude human feet on the inside of the windshield. V.R.5's heating duct's grille gave off a 
sterile hiss. All up and down the hall were sounds of the Academy coming to life, making 
competitive ablutions, venting anxiety and complaints at the possible blizzard outside — 
wanting to play. There was heavy foot-traffic in the third-floor hall above me. Orin was 
going through a period where he was attracted only to young mothers of small children. 
A hunched way: she hunches; you hunch. John Wayne had had a violent allergic reaction 
to a decongestant and had commandeered the WETA microphone and publicly 
embarrassed himself on Troeltsch's Tuesday broadcast, apparently, and had been taken 
to St. Elizabeth's overnight for observation, but had recovered quickly enough to come 
home and then finish ahead even of Stice in Wednesday's conditioning run. I missed the 
entire thing and was filled in by Mario on my return from Natick — Wayne had 
apparently said unkind things about various E.T.A. staff and administration, none of 
which anyone who knew Wayne and all he stood for had taken seriously. Relief that he 
was OK had dominated everyone's accounts of the whole incident; the Moms herself 
had apparently stayed by Wayne's side late into the night at St. E.'s, which Booboo felt 
was estimable and just like the Moms. Simply imagining the total number of times my 
chest will rise and fall and rise. If you want prescriptive specificity you go to a hard-ass: 
Sitney and Schneewind's Dictionary of Environmental Sciences required 12 cm./hour of 
continuous snowfall, minimum winds of 60 kph., and visibility of less than 500 meters; 
and only if these conditions obtained for more than three hours was it a blizzard; less 
than three hours was 'C-IV Squall.' The dedication and sustained energy that go into true 
perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about. 



It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could 
actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years 
on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time 
pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, 
politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to 
give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something 
pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? 
These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why 
they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the 
questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern 
German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its 
mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, 
either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice 
had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It's always seemed a little preposterous that 
Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of 
the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. 
Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be 
only feigning feigning. I kept thinking of the Film and Cartridge Studies professor's final 
soliloquy in Himself's unfinished Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize 
Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, the sour parody of 
academia that the Moms had taken as an odd personal slap. I kept thinking I really 
should go up and check on The Darkness. There seemed to be so many implications 
even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain 
variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell door, on and on, 
that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor. 

I was on the floor. I felt the Nile-green carpet with the back of each hand. I was 
completely horizontal. I was comfortable lying perfectly still and staring at the ceiling. I 
was enjoying being one horizontal object in a room filled with horizontality. Charles 
Tavis is probably not related to the Moms by actual blood. Her extremely tall French- 
Canadian mother died when the Moms was eight. Her father left their potato farm on 
'business' a few months later and was gone for several weeks. He did this sort of thing 
with some frequency. A binge-drinker. Eventually there would be a telephone call from 
some distant province or U.S. state, and one of the hired men would go off to bail him 
out. From this disappearance, though, he returned with a new bride the Moms had 
known nothing about, an American widow named Elizabeth Tavis, who in the stilted 
Vermont wedding photo seems almost certainly to have been a dwarf — the huge 
square head, the relative length of the trunk compared to the legs, the sunken nasal 
bridge and protruding eyes, the stunted phocomelic arms around squire Mondragon's 
right thigh, one khaki-colored cheek pressed affectionately against his belt-buckle. C.T. 
was the infant son she'd brought to the new union, his father a ne'er-do-well killed in a 
freak accident playing competitive darts in a Brattleboro tavern just as they were trying 
to adjust the obstetric stirrups for the achondroplastic Mrs. Tavis's labor and delivery. 
Her smile in the wedding photo is homodontic. According to Orin, though, C.T. and the 
Moms claim Mrs. T. was not a true homodont the way — for instance — Mario is a true 



homodont. Every single one of Mario's teeth is a second bicuspid. So it was all rather up 
in the air. The account of the disappearance, darts-accident, and dental incongruity 
comes from Orin, who claimed to have decocted it all out of an extended one-sided 
conversation he had with a distraught C.T. in the waiting room of Brigham and Women's 
OB/GYN while the Moms was prematurely delivering Mario. Orin had been seven years 
old; Himself had been in the delivery room, where apparently Mario's birth was quite a 
touch-and-go thing. The fact that Orin was our one and only source for data shrouded 
the whole thing in further ambiguity, as far as I was concerned. Pinpoint accuracy had 
never been Orin's forte. The wedding photo was available for inspection, of course, and 
confirmed Mrs. Tavis as huge-headed and wildly short. Neither Mario nor I had ever 
approached the Moms on the issue, possibly out of fear of reopening psychic wounds 
from a childhood that had always sounded unhappy. All I knew for sure was that I had 
never approached her about it. 

For their part, the Moms and C.T. have never represented themselves as anything 
other than unrelated but extremely close. 

The attack of panic and prophylactic focus's last spasm now suddenly almost 
overwhelmed me with the intense horizontality that was all around me in the Viewing 
Room — the ceiling, floor, carpet, table-tops, the chairs' seats and the shelves at their 
backs' tops. And much more — the shimmering horizontal lines in the Kevlon wall-fabric, 
the very long top of the viewer, the top and bottom borders of the door, the spectation 
pillows, the viewer's bottom, the squat black cartridge-drive's top and bottom and the 
little push-down controls that protruded like stunted tongues. The seemingly endless 
horizontality of the couch's and chairs' and recumbency's seats, the wall of shelves' 
every line, the varied horizontal shelving of the ovoid case, two of every cartridge-case's 
four sides, on and on. I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality piled 
up all around me. I was the meat in the room's sandwich. I felt awakened to a basic 
dimension I'd neglected during years of upright movement, of standing and running and 
stopping and jumping, of walking endlessly upright from one side of the court to the 
other. I had understood myself for years as basically vertical, an odd forked stalk of stuff 
and blood. I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I 
was impossible to knock down. 


Gately's cognomen growing up and moving through public grades had been Bim or 
Bimmy, or The Simulator, etc., from the acronymic B.I.M., 'Big Indestructible Moron.' 
This was on Boston's North Shore, mostly Beverly and Salem. His head had been huge, 
even as a kid. By the time he hit puberty at twelve the head seemed a yard wide. A 
regulation football helmet was like a beanie on him. His coaches had to order special 
helmets. Gately was worth the cost. Every coach past 6th grade told him he was a lock 
for a Division 1 college team if he bore down and kept his eye on the prize. Memories of 
half a dozen different neckless, buzz-cut, and pre-infarcted coaches all condense around 
a raspy emphasis on bearing down and predictions of a limitless future for Don G., 
Bimmy G., right up until he dropped out in high school's junior year. 

Gately went both ways — fullback on offense, outside linebacker on D. He was big 



enough for the line, but his speed would have been wasted there. Already carrying 230 
pounds and bench-pressing well over that, Gately clocked a 4.4 40 in 7th grade, and the 
legend is that the Beverly Middle School coach ran even faster than that into the locker 
room to jack off over the stopwatch. And his biggest asset was his outsized head. 
Gately's. The head was indestructible. When they needed yards, they'd shift to isolate 
Gately on one defender and get him the ball and he'd lower his head and charge, eyes 
on the turf. The top of his special helmet was like a train's cowcatcher coming at you. 
Defenders, pads, helmets, and cleats bounced off the head, often in different directions. 
And the head was fearless. It was like it had no nerve endings or pain receptors or 
whatever. Gately amused teammates by letting them open and close elevator doors on 
the head. He let people break things over the head — lunchboxes, cafeteria trays, 
bespectacled wienies' violin cases, lacrosse sticks. By age thirteen he never had to buy 
beers: he'd bet some kid a six he could take a shot with this or that object to the head. 
His left ear is permanently kind of gnarled from elevator-door impacts, and Gately 
favors a kind of long-sided Prince Valiantish bowl-cut to help cover the misshapen ear. 
One cheekbone still has a dented violet cast from 10th grade when a North Reading kid 
at a party bet him a twelve-pack on a shot with a sock full of nickels and then clocked 
him under the eye with it instead of the skull. It took Beverly's whole offensive line to 
pull Gately off what was left of the kid. The juvenile line on Gately was that he was 
totally jolly and laid-back and easygoing up to a certain point but that if you crossed that 
point with him you better be able to beat a 4.4 40. 

He was always kind of a boys' boy. He had a jolly ferocity about him that scared girls. 
And he had no idea how to deal with girls except to try and impress them by letting 
them watch somebody do something to his head. He was never what you'd call a ladies' 
man. At parties he was always at the center of the crowd that drank instead of dancing. 

It was surprising, maybe, given Gately's size and domestic situation, that he wasn't a 
bully. He wasn't kindly or heroic or a defender of the weak; it's not like he stepped 
kindly in to protect wienies and misfits from the predations of those kids that were 
bullies. He just had no interest in brutalizing the weak. It's still not clear to him if this 
was to his credit or not. Things might have been different if the M.P. had ever knocked 
Gately around instead of focusing all his attention on the progressively weaker Mrs. G. 

He smoked his first duBois at age nine, a hard little needle-thin joint bought off jr.-high 
niggers and smoked with three other grade-school football players in a vacant summer 
cottage one had the key to, watching broadcast-televised niggers run amok in a flaming 
L.A. CA after some Finest got home-movied crewing on a nigger in the worst way. Then 
his first real drunk a few months later, after he and the players'd hooked up with an 
Orkin man that liked to get kids all blunt on screwdrivers and that wore brownshirts and 
jackboots in his off-hours and lectured them about Zog and The Turner Diaries while 
they'd drink the OJ and vodka he'd bought them and look at him blandly and roll their 
eyes at each other. Soon none of the football players Gately hung with were interested 
in much of anything except trying to get high and holding air-guitar and pissing contests 
and talking theoretically about Xing big-haired North Shore girls, and trying to think up 
things to break over Gately's head. They all had like domestic situations too. Gately was 
the only one of them truly dedicated to football, and that was probably just because 



he'd been told over and over that he had real talent and limitless futures. He was 
classified Attention-Deficit and Special-Ed, from grade school on, with particular Deficits 
in 'Language Arts,' but that was at least partly because Mrs. G. could barely read and 
Gately wasn't interested in making her feel worse. And but there was no Deficit in his 
attention to ball, or to cold foamers or screwdrivers or high-resin desBois, or especially 
to applied pharmacology, not once he'd done his first Quaalude 362 at age thirteen. 

Just as Gately's whole recall of his screwdriver-and-sinsemilla beginnings tends to 
telescope into one memory of pissing orange juice into the Atlantic (he and the blunt 
cruel Beverly players and bullies he partied with drinking whole quarts of throat¬ 
warming OJ at a shot and standing ankle-deep in grit on a North Shore shore, facing east 
and sending long arcs of legal-pad-yellow piss into onrushing breakers that came in and 
creamed around their feet, the foam warm and yellow-shot with their piss — like 
spitting into the wind — Gately at the podium had started saying it turns out he was 
pissing on himself right from the start, with alcohol), in just the same way, the whole 
couple years before he discovered oral narcotics, the whole period 13-15 when he was a 
devotee of Quaaludes and Hefenreffer-brand beer collapses and gathers itself under 
what he still recalls as 'The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks.' Quaaludes and Hefenreffer 
also marked Gately's entree into a whole new rather more sinister and less athletic 
social set at B.M.S., one member of which was Trent Kite, 363 a dyed-in-wool laptop¬ 
carrying wienie, chinless and with a nose like a tapir, and pretty much the last fanatical 
Grateful Dead fan under age forty on the U.S. East Coast, whose place of honor in the 
sinister Beverly Middle School drug-set was due entirely to his gift for transforming the 
kitchen of any vacationing parents' house into a rudimentary pharmaceutical laboratory, 
using like BBQ-sauce bottles as Erlenmeyer Flasks and microwave ovens to cyclize OH 
and carbon into three-ring compounds, synthesizing methylenedioxy psychedelics 364 
from nutmeg and sassafras oil, ether from charcoal-starter, designer meth from 
Tryptophan and L-Histidine, sometimes using only a gas-top range and parental 
Farberware, able even to decoct usable concentrations of tetra-hydrofruan from PVC 
Pipe Cleaner — which at that time best of British luck ordering tetrahydrofruan from 
any chemical company in the 48 con tigs/6 provinces without getting paid an immediate 
visit by D.E.A. guys in three-piece suits and reflecting shades — and then using the 
tetrahydrofruan and ethanol and any protein-binding catalyst to turn plain old Sominex 
into something just one H 3 C molecule away from good old biphasic methaqualone, 
a.k.a. the intrepid Quaalude. Kite had called his Quaalude-isotopes 'QuoVadis,' and they 
were a great favorite for 13-15-year-old Bimmy G. and the slouched sharp-haired 
sinister set he dropped Ludes and QuoVadises with, washing them down with 
Hefenreffers, resulting in a kind of mnemonic brown-out where the entire two-year 
interval — the same interval during which the ex-M.P. found somebody else, a 
Newburyport divorcee who apparently put up a more sporting fight than Mrs. G., and 
decamped in his sticker-covered Ford with his seaman's bag and pea-coat — the whole 
period's become in Gately's sober memory just the vague era of The Attack of the Killer 
Sidewalks. Quaaludes and 16-oz. Hefenreffers awakened Gately and his new droogs to 
the usually-dormant-but-apparently-ever-lurking ill will of innocent-seeming public 
sidewalks everywhere. You didn't have to be brainy Trent Kite to figure out the equation 



(Quaaludes) + (not even that many beers) = getting whapped by the nearest sidewalk — 
as in you're walking innocently along down a sidewalk and out of nowhere the sidewalk 
comes rushing up to meet you: WHAP. Happened time after fucking time. It made the 
whole crew resent having to walk anywhere on QuoVadises because of not having 
driver's licenses yet, which gives you some idea of the sum-total I.Q. brought to bear on 
the problem of the Attacks. A tiny permanent cast in his left eye and what looks like a 
chin-dimple are Gately's legacy from the period before moving up to Percocets, which 
one advantage of the move deeper into oral narcs was that Percocets + Hefenreffers 
didn't allow you even enough upright mobility to make you vulnerable Co sidewalks' 
ever-lurking ill will. 

It was amazing that none of this stuff seemed much to hurt Gately's performance 
playing ball, but then he was as devoted to football as he was to oral CNS-depressants. 
At least for a while. He had disciplined personal rules back then. He absorbed 
Substances only at night, after practice. Not so much as a fractional foamer between 
0900h. and 1800h. during the seasons of practice and play, and he settled for just a 
single duBois on Thursday evenings before actual games. During football season he 
ruled himself with an iron hand until the sun set, then threw himself on the mercy of 
sidewalks and the somnolent hum. He used class to catch up on REM-sleep. By fresh¬ 
man year he was starting on the Beverly-Salem H.S. Minutemen Varsity and was on 
academic probation. Most of the sinister set he'd hung with were expelled for truancy 
or trafficking or worse by sophomore year. Gately kept hanging in and on til seventeen. 

But Quaaludes and QuoVadis and Percocets are lethal in terms of homework, 
especially washed down with Hefenreffer, and extra-especially if you're academically 
ambivalent and A.D.D.-classified and already using every particle of your self-discipline 
protecting football from the Substances. And — unhappily — high school is totally unlike 
higher education in terms of major-sport coaches' influence over instructors, athletes- 
and-grades-wise. Kite got Gately through math and Special Ed. science, and the French 
teacher was getting her strabysmic eyeballs fucked out by the Minutemen's tanned 
lounge-lizard of an Offensive Coordinator on the behalf of Gately and a semi-retarded 
tight end. But English just fucking killed him, Gately. All four of the English teachers the 
Athletic Dept, tried Gately on had this sieg-heil idea that it was somehow cruel to pass a 
kid that couldn't do the work. And the Athletic Dept, pointing out to them that Gately 
had an especially challenging domestic situation and that flunking Gately and rendering 
him ineligible for ball would eliminate his one reason even to stay on in school — these 
were to no, like, aveil. English was his sink-or-swim situation, what he then termed his 
'Water Lou.' Term papers he could more or less swing; the football coach had wienies on 
retainer. But the in-class themes and tests killed Gately, who simply didn't have enough 
will left over after sunset to choose like the crushingly dull Ethan From over QuoVadis 
and Hefenreffer. Plus by this time three different schools' authorities had him convinced 
he was basically dumb, anyway. But mostly it was the Substances. This one particular B.- 
S.H.S.-Athletic-Dept.-hired wienie of an English tutor spent a sophomore-year March's 
worth of evenings in Gately's company, and by Easter the kid weighed 95 pounds and 
had a nose-ring and hand-tremors and was placed by his frantic, functional parents in a 
juvenile-intervention rehab, where the wienie's whole first week of Withdrawal was 



spent in a corner reciting Howl in high-volume Chaucerian English. Gately flunked 
Sophomore Comp, in May and lost the fall's eligibility and withdrew from school for a 
year to preserve his junior season. And but then, without the only other thing he'd been 
devoted to, the psychic emergency-brake was off, and Gately's sixteenth year is still 
mostly a gray blank, except for his mother's new red chintz TV-watching couch, and also 
the acquaintance of an accommodating Rite-Aid pharmacist's assistant with disfiguring 
eczema and serious gambling debts. Plus memories of terrible rear-ocular itching and of 
a basic diet of convenience-store crud, plus the vegetables from his mother's vodka 
glass, while she slept. When he finally returned for his sophomore year of class and 
junior year of ball at seventeen and 284 lbs., Gately was enervated, flabby, apparently 
narcoleptic, and on a need-schedule so inflexible that he needed 15 mg. of good old 
oxycodone hydrochloride out of his pocket's Tylenol bottle every three hours to keep 
the shakes off. He was like a huge confused kitten out on the field — the coach made 
him go in for P.E.T. Scans, fearing M.S. or Lou Gehrig's — and even the Classic Comics 
version of Ethan From was now beyond his abilities; and good old Kite was gone by that 
last September of Unsubsidized Time, admitted early on a full ride in Comp. Science by 
Salem State U., meaning Gately was now on his own in remedial math and chem. On 
offense, Gately lost his starting spot in the third game to a big clear-eyed freshman the 
coach said showed nearly limitless potential. Then Mrs. Gately suffered her cirrhotic 
hemorrhage and cerebral-blood thing in late October, just before the midterms Gately 
was getting ready to fail. Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded 
her in the back of a leisurely sirenless ambulance and took her first to the hospital and 
then to a Medicaid L.T.I. 365 out across the Yirrell Beach span in Pt. Shirley. The backs of 
Gately's eyes were too itchy for him to even be able to stand out on the red pocked 
stoop's steps and see to wave adios. The first gasper he ever smoked was that day, a 
100 out of a half-finished pack of his mother's generics, that she left. He didn't even 
ever go back to B.-S.H.S. to clean out his lockers. He never played organized ball again. 


I may have been dozing. Some more heads came and awaited response and left. I may 
have dozed. It occurred to me that I didn't have to eat if I was not hungry. This 
presented itself as almost a revelation. I hadn't been hungry in over a week. I could 
remember when I was always hungry, constantly hungry. 

Then at some point Pemulis's head appeared in the doorway, his strange twin- 
towered A.M. cowlick bobbing as he looked back over each shoulder out into the hall. 
His right eye was either twitchy or swollen from sleep; something was wrong with it. 

'Mmyellow,' he said. 

I pretended to shade my eyes. 'Howdy there stranger.' 

It is not Pemulis's way to apologize or explain or worry that you might think ill of him. 
In this he reminded me of Mario. This almost regal lack of insecurity is hard to put 
together with his crippling neurasthenia on-court. 

"s up?' he said, not moving from the doorway. 

I could see my asking him where he'd been all week leading to so many different 
possible responses and further questions that the prospect was almost overwhelming. 



so enervating I could barely get out that I'd just been lying here on the floor. 

'Lying here is all, 1 1 told him. 

'So I just got told,' he said. 'The Petropulator mentioned hysterics.' 

It was almost impossible to shrug lying supine on thick shag. 'See for yourself,' I said. 

Pemulis came all the way in. He became the only thing in the room that understood 
itself as basically vertical. He didn't look very good; his color wasn't good. He had not 
shaved, and a dozen little black bristles jutted from the ball of his chin. He gave the 
impression of chewing gum even though he was not chewing gum. 

He said 'Thinking?' 

'The opposite. Thought-prophylaxis.' 

'Feeling a little punk?' 

'Can't complain.' I rolled my eyes up at him. 

He made a sharp glottal stop. He moved toward the periphery of my vision and fit 
himself into the seam of two walls behind me; I heard him sliding down to assume the 
back-supported squat he sometimes liked. 

The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn. I was thinking of the final film-lecture in Good- 
Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms ... and then of C.T.'s misadventure at Himself's 
funeral. The Moms had had Himself interred in her family's traditional plot in L'lslet 
Province. I heard a whoop and two crashes directly overhead. My rib cage contracted 
and expanded. 

'Incster?' Pemulis said after a time. 

A noteworthy thing turned out to be that the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave 
seems airy and risen and plump, like dough. 

'Hal?' Pemulis said. 

'Javol 

'We've got some really important interfacing to do, brother.' 

I didn't say anything. There were too many potential responses, both witty ones and 
earnest ones. I could hear Pemulis's cowlicks brush each wall as he looked to either side, 
and the slight sound of a small zipper being played with. 

'I'm thinking we could go someplace discreet and really interface.' 

'I'm a highly tuned horizontal antenna tuned in to you lying right here.' 

'I was meaning could we go somewheres.' 

'So this urgency all of a sudden?' I was trying to make my intonation Jewish-motherish, 
that melodic dip-rise-dip. 'All week: not a call, not a card. Now I should hear this about 
urgency?' 

'Seen your Mums around lately?' 

'Haven't seen her all week. Doubtless she's over helping C.T. arrange a weather- 
venue.' I paused. 'I haven't seen him all week either, come to think,' I said. 

'The Eschaton's a no-go,' Pemulis said. 'The map's a mess out there.' 

'We're going to get an announcement about the Quebec kids very soon, I can feel it,' I 
said. 'I'm that highly tuned in this position.' 

'What say let's skip the sausage-analog and whip down to Steak 'N Sundae and eat.' 

There was an extended pause as I ran a response-tree. Pemulis was zipping and 
unzipping something with a short zipper. I couldn't decide. I finally had to choose almost 



at random. 'I'm trying to cut down on patronizing places with '"N" in their name.' 

'Listen.' I heard his knees creak as he leaned in toward the top of my head. 'About the 
tu-savez-quoi 

'The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That's definitely off, Mike. Talk 
about the map being a mess.' 

'That's part of what we need to interface about, if you'd get off your literally your ass 
here.' 

I spent a minute watching the NASA glass fall and rise. 'Don't even start, M.M.' 

'What start?' 

'We're on hiatus, remember? We're living like Shi'ite Moslems for the thirty days you 
miraculously blarneyed the guy into giving us.' 

'Blarney wasn't why we got it, Inc, is the thing.' 

'And now, what, twenty days to go. We're going to produce urine like a mullah's babe, 
we agreed.' 

'This isn't—' Pemulis started. 

I farted, but it didn't produce a noise. I was bored. I couldn't remember a time when 
Pemulis had bored me. 'And I do not need you launching temptation-rhetoric my way,' I 
said. 

Keith Freer appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his bare arms 
crossed. He was still wearing the weird unitard he slept in, which made him look like 
someone who tore phone books in half at a sideshow. 

'Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window 
upstairs?' he said. 

'We're conversing here,' Pemulis told him. 

I half sat up. 'Flesh?' 

Freer looked down at me. 'This is nothing to laugh at I don't think Hal. There's I swear 
to fucking God a human strip of forehead-flesh upstairs on the hall window, and what 
looks like two eyebrows, and bits of nose. And now Tall Paul says down in the lobby 
Stice was seen coming out of the infirmary wearing something out of Zorro.' 

Pemulis was completely vertical, standing again; I could hear his knees as he rose. 'It's 
like a tete-a-tete in here, brother. We're in here bunkered, mano a—' 

'Stice got stuck to the window,' I explained, lying all the way back down. 'Kenkle and 
Brandt were going to detach him with warm water from a janitorial bucket.' 

Pemulis said 'How do you get stuck to a window?' 

'Well from the looks it looks like they detached half his face from his head,' Freer said, 
feeling at his own forehead and shuddering a little. 

Kieran McKenna's little porcine snout appeared in a gap under Freer's arm. He still 
wore his stupid full-head gauze wrap for his supposed bruised skull. 'Did you guys get to 
see The Darkness? Gopnik said he looks like a piece of cheese pizza where somebody 
tore the cheese off. Gopnik said Troeltsch is charging two bucks a look.' He ran off 
toward the stairwell without waiting for a reply, his pocket jingling madly. Freer looked 
at Pemulis and opened his mouth, then apparently reconsidered and followed off down 
the hall. We could hear a couple of sarcastic whistles at Freer's unitard. 

Pemulis reappeared at the top of my vision; his right eye was definitely twitching. 'This 



is what I meant about going someplace discreet. When have I ever urgently asked you to 
dialogue before, Inc?' 

'Certainly not within the last few days, Mike, that's for sure.' 

There was an extended pause. I raised my hands over my face and looked at their 
shapes against the indirect lights. 

Pemulis finally said 'Well, I'm going to go make sure I eat before I have to see Stice 
without a fucking forehead.' 

'Have an analog for me,' I said. 'Let me know if there's word on the meet. I'll eat if I'm 
going to have to play.' 

Pemulis licked his palm and tried to get his cowlicks to behave. From my vantage he 
was high overhead and upside-down. 'So are you going to get up and go up and get 
dressed and stand on one foot with that opera thing on at some point? Because I could 
eat and then come up. We can tell Mario we need to mano-a-tete.' 

Now I was making a cage of my hands and watching the light through its shape as I 
rotated it. 'Will you do me a favor? Get Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That 
Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency out for me. It's 
about a dozen cartridges in from the right on the third shelf down in the entertainment- 
case. Cue it up to about 2300, 2350 maybe? The last five minutes or so.' 

'The third shelf down,' I said as he scanned, tapping a foot. 'They've got all Himself's 
stuff together on the third shelf.' 

He scanned. 'Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators? Fun with Teeth? Annular Fusion Is 
Our Fiend? I haven't even heard of half your Dad's shit that's here.' 

'It's Friend, not Fiend. Either it's mislabeled or the label's peeling. And they're 
supposed to be alphabetized. It ought to be right next to Flux in a Box' 

'And me using the poor guy's lab,' Pemulis said. He loaded the player and turned on 
the viewer, his knees popping again as he squatted to set the cue to 2350. The huge 
screen hummed in a low pitch that ascended as it began to warm up, the screen taking 
on a milky blue aspect like the eye of a dead bird. Pemulis's feet were bare and I looked 
at the calluses on his heels. He tossed the cartridge's case carelessly on a couch or chair 
behind me and looked down. 'What the fuck's Fun with Teeth supposed to be about?' 

I tried to shrug against the friction of the carpet. 'Pretty much what it says it's about.' 
The funeral had been held on 5 or 6 April in St. Adalbert, a small town built around 
spud-storage facilities fewer than five clicks west of the Great Concavity. We'd all had to 
fly up by way of Newfoundland because of the volume of waste-displacement launches 
that spring. And commercial airlines hadn't yet had data on high-altitude Dioxin levels 
over the Concavity. Cloud-cover prevented our seeing much of the New Brunswick 
coast, which I'm told was a mercy. What happened at the funeral service itself was 
simply that a circling gull scored a direct white hit on the shoulder of C.T.'s blue blazer, 
and that when he opened his mouth in shock at the direct hit, a large blue-bodied fly 
flew right into his mouth and was hard to extract. Several persons laughed. It was no 
huge or dramatic thing. The Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone. 

The TP's tracker chugged and clicked, and the viewer bloomed. Pemulis had been 
wearing parachute pants and a tam-o'-shanter and lensless spectacles, but no shoes. 
The cartridge started close to what I'd wanted to review, the protagonist's climactic 



lecture. Paul Anthony Heaven, all 50 kilos of him, gripping the lectern with both hands 
so you could see that he was missing his thumbs, the sad dyed strands combed over his 
bald spot visible because he had his head down, reading the lecture in the deadening 
academic monotone that Himself so loved. The monotone was the reason why Himself 
used Paul Anthony Heaven, a nonprofessional, by trade a data-entry drone for Ocean 
Spray, in anything that required a deadening institutional presence — Paul Anthony 
Heaven had also played the threatening supervisor in Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat , 
the Massachusetts State Commissioner for Beach and Water Safety in Safe Boating Is No 
Accident , and a Parkinsonian corporate auditor in Low-Temperature Civics. 

'Thus the Flood's real consequence is revealed to be desiccation, generations of 
hydrophobia on a pandemic scale,' the protagonist was reading aloud. Peterson's The 
Cage was running on a large screen behind the lectern. A number of shots of 
undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami 
animals, picking at their faces with blank intensity, established that the climactic lecture 
wasn't coming off as all that climactic to the audience within the film. 'We thus become, 
in the absence of death as ideologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some 
essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of 
God,' the academic read in a deadly drone, his eyes never leaving his lectern's text. The 
art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside 
Himself's films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb and 
unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap betrays more than a 
little hostility on the part of an 'auteuf pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull 
and plotless and static and not entertaining enough — these academics' arguments 
seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul 
Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves 
and drawing vacant airplane- and genitalia-doodles on their college-rule note-pads, 
reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit 366 — 'For while clinamen and tessera strive to 
revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress 
consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which 
represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead' — in a 
monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave — and yet all the time weeping, Paul 
Anthony Heaven, as an upward hall full of kids all scan their mail, the film-teacher not 
sobbing or wiping his nose on his tweed sleeve but silently weeping, very steadily, so 
that tears run down Heaven's gaunt face and gather on his underslung chin and fall from 
view, glistening slightly, below the lectern's frame of sight. Then this too began to seem 
familiar. 


He hadn't in the beginning burgled, Gately, as a full-time drug addict, though he did 
sometimes promote small valuables from the apartments of the strung-out nurses he 
X'd and copped samples from. After the bailout from school, Gately worked full-time for 
a time for a North Shore bookmaker, a guy that also owned several titty clubs down Rte. 
1 in Saugus, Whitey Sorkin, that had sort of casually befriended him when Gately was 
still playing high-profile ball. His professional association with Whitey Sorkin continued 



part-time even after Gately discovered his real B&E vocation, though he tended more 
and more toward less taxing nonviolent crime. 

But from age like eighteen to twenty-three, Gately and the prenominate Gene 
Fackelmann — a towering, slope-shouldered, wide-hipped, prematurely potbellied, 
oddly priapistic, and congenitally high-strung Dilaudid addict with a walrusy mustache 
that seemed to have a nervous life of its own — these two served as like Whitey Sorkin's 
operatives in the field, taking bets and phoning them in to Saugus, delivering winnings, 
and collecting debts. It was never clear to Gately why Whitey Sorkin was called Whitey, 
because he spent a huge amount of time under ultraviolet lamps as part of an esoteric 
cluster-headache-treatment regimen and so was the constant shiny color of a sort of 
like dark soap, with almost the same color and coin-of-the-realm classic profile as the 
cheery young Pakistani M.D. who'd told Gately at Our Lady of Solace Hospital in Beverly 
how Teddibly Soddy he was that Mrs. G.'s cirrhosis and cirrhotic stroke had left her at 
roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout and then given him public- 
transportation directions to the Point Shirley L.T.I. 

Eugene ('Fax') Fackelmann, who'd dropped out of the Lynn MA educational system at 
like ten, had met Whitey Sorkin through the same eczematic, gamble-happy 
pharmacist's assistant Gately had first met Sorkin through. Gately was now no longer 
called Bimmy or Doshka. He was Don now, nicknameless. Sometimes Donny. Sorkin 
referred to Gately and Fackelmann as his Twin Towers. They were more or less Sorkin's 
paid muscle. Except not in any sort of way important crime figures' paid muscle is por¬ 
trayed in popular entertainment. They didn't stand impassively flanking Sorkin at crime- 
figure meetings or light his cigar or call him 'Boss' or anything. They weren't his 
bodyguards. In fact they weren't physically around him that much; they usually dealt 
with Sorkin and his Saugus office and secretary via beepers and cellular phones. 367 

And while they did collect debts for Sorkin, including bad debts (especially Gately), it's 
not like Gately went around breaking debtors' kneecaps. Even the threat of coercive 
violence was pretty rare. Partly, Gately and Fackelmann's sheer size was enough to keep 
delinquencies from getting out of hand. And partly it was that everybody involved 
usually knew each other — Sorkin, his bettors and debtors, Gately and Fackelmann, 
other drug addicts (who sometimes bet, or more often dealt with Gately and Fack¬ 
elmann for guys that did), even the North Shore Finest's Vice guys, many of whom also 
sometimes bet with Sorkin because he gave the Finest special civil-servant reductions on 
vigorish. It was all like this community. Usually Gately's job on bad debts or delinquent 
vig was to go around to the debtor at whatever bar the guy watched satellite sports at 
and just inform him that the debt was threatening to get out of hand — making the debt 
itself seem like the delinquent party — and that Whitey was concerned about it, and 
work out some arrangement or payment-plan with the guy. Then the young Gately'd go 
into the bar's head and cellphone Sorkin and get his OK on whatever arrangement 
they'd worked out. Gately was laid-back and affable and never had a hard word for 
anybody, hardly. Nor did Whitey Sorkin: a lot of his bettors were old and steady 
customers, and lines of credit went with the territory. Most of the rare debt-trouble that 
called for size and coercion involved guys with a gambling problem, kind of pathetic 
furtive guys addicted to the rush of the bet, who got themselves in a hole and then tried 



suicidally to bet their way out of the hole, and who'd bet with several bookies at once, 
and who'd lie and agree to payment-arrangements they had no intention of sticking to, 
suicidally betting they could keep all their debts in the air until they could square 
themselves with the major long-shot score they were always sure was around the 
corner. These types were painful, because usually Gately knew the debtors and they'd 
exploit his knowing them and beg and weep and tug at both Gately's and Whitey 
Sorkin's heartstrings with tales of loved ones and wasting illnesses. They'd sit there and 
look into Gately's eyes and lie and believe their own lies, and Gately would have to call 
in the debtors' lies and sob-stories and get Sorkin's explicit decision on if to believe them 
and what to do. These types were Gately's first exposure to the concept of real 
addiction and what it can turn someone into; he hadn't yet connected the concept to 
drugs really, except coke-heads and hardcore needle-jockeys, who at that point all 
seemed to him just as furtive and pathetic as the gambling-addicts, in their own way. 
These sob-story-, one-more-chance-types were also the types that put Whitey Sorkin 
through hell in terms of emotionally, causing Whitey cluster headaches and terrible 
cranio-facial neuralgia, and at a certain point Sorkin used to start adding (to the 
delinquent skeet, the vig, and the interest) extra charges for his own required intake of 
Cafergot 368 spansules and UV light and visits to Enfield MA's National Cranio-Facial Pain 
Foundation. The use of Gately and Fackelmann's rump-roast-sized fists in actual hands- 
on coercion got called for only when a compulsive debtor's lies and hole got serious 
enough that Sorkin became willing to forgo the guy's patronage in the future. At this 
sort of point, Whitey Sorkin's business-objective became to somehow induce the 
addicted debtor to cover his debts to Sorkin before the debtor covered his debts to any 
of the other books he was into, which meant for Sorkin that he had to vividly 
demonstrate to the debtor that Sorkin's was the least pleasant hole to be in and the 
most important one to get out of. Enter the Twin Towers. The violence was to be tightly 
controlled and gradually progressive in like stages. The first round of incentivizing hose- 
work — a light beating, maybe a broken digit or two — usually fell to Gene Fackelmann, 
not only because he was the naturally crueler of the Twin Towers and rather liked 
putting a digit in a car door, but also because he had a controlled restraint Gately 
lacked: Sorkin found that once Gately got started in physically on somebody it was like 
something ferocious and uncontrolled on a slope inside the big kid got dislodged and 
started to roll on its own, and sometimes Gately wouldn't be able to stop himself before 
the debtor was reduced to a condition where he wasn't even going to be able to raise 
his head, much less funds, at which point not only did Sorkin have to write off the debt 
but the big kid Donny'd get so guilty and remorseful he'd triple his drug-intake and be 
no use to fucking nobody for a week. Sorkin learned how to use his Towers to maximize 
their strengths. Fackelmann got the first-round light work for coercive collections, but 
Gately was better than Fax at negotiating arrangements with guys so it never had to 
come to violence. And there were certain harder cases, cases that laid Sorkin out in bed 
with cranio-facial stress for days at a time because they were hard-case addicts that 
were either so far gone or so deep in so many holes that Fackelmann's light cruelty 
didn't resolve the situation. At an extreme point with some of these cases Sorkin got to 
a point where he was willing to forgo not only the debtor's future patronage but also 



the remittance due; at a certain point the goal was to minimize future other hard cases 
by making it clear that W. Sorkin was one book you couldn't just flagrantly stay in the 
hole with and lie to for month after month without having your map seriously fucking 
reconfigured. Here again, in this-type case Gately's internal out-of-control slope of 
ferocity was superior to Fackelmann's easy but ultimately shallow sadism. 369 

W. Sorkin, like most psychosomatic-level neurotics, was spiteful to his enemies and 
overgenerous to his friends. Gately and Fackelmann each received 5% vig on the 10% 
vigorish Sorkin took on every bet, and Sorkin made over $200,000 worth of book all over 
the North Shore on a week's pro ball alone, which for most diplomaless young 
Americans 1,000+ per pre-millennial week would have been a very handsome living, but 
for the Twin Towers' rigid physical scheduling of narcotics needs was not even 60% 
enough, weekly. Gately and Fackelmann moonlighted, and for a while separately — 
Fackelmann's sideline with I.D.s and creative personal checking, Gately working 
freelance Security for large card games and small drug-deliveries — but even before 
they were a real crew they copped as a unit, as in together, plus once in a moon with 
poor old V. Nucci, for whom Gately also occasionally held the rope on late-night Osco- 
and-Rite-Aid-skylight missions, his entree to formal burglary proper. The fact that Gately 
was devoted to Percocets and Bam-Bams and Fackelmann to Dilaudid allowed them a 
high level of trust with each other's stashes. Gately would do Blues, which had to be 
injected, only when no oral narcs were to be got and he was face to face with early 
Withdrawal. Gately feared and despised needles and was terrified of the Virus, which in 
those days was laying out needle-jockeys left and right. Fackelmann would cook up for 
Gately and tie him off and let Gately watch closely as he took the plastic wrap off a 
mint-new syringe and needle-cartridge Fackelmann could get with a fake Medicaid 
lletin 370 I.D. for diabetes mellitus. The worst thing about Dilaudid for Gately was that the 
hydromorphone's transit across the blood-brain barrier created a terrible five-second 
mnemonic hallucination where he was a gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib 
in a sandy field under a storm-cloudy sky that bulged and receded like a big gray lung. 
Fackelmann would loosen the belt and stand back and watch Gately's eyes roll up as he 
broke a malarial sweat and stared up at the delusion's respiritic sky while his huge hands 
throttled the air in front him just like a toddler shakes at the bars of his crib. Then after 
five or so seconds the Dilaudid would cross over and kick, and the sky stopped breathing 
and turned blue. A Dilaudid nod made Gately mute and sodden for three hours. 

Besides the maddening itch behind the eyes, Fackelmann didn't like oral narcotics 
because he said they gave him terrible sugar-cravings that his huge soft slumped weight 
wouldn't tolerate indulging. Not exactly the swiftest ship in Her Majesty's fleet in terms 
of like upstairs, Fackelmann was resistant to Gately's pointing out that Dilaudid also 
gave the Faxman terrible sugar-cravings, as did actually just about everything. The plain 
truth was that Fackelmann just really liked Dilaudid. 

Then good old Trent Kite got the administrative Shoe from Salem State, who informed 
him he'd never study in the industry again, and Gately brought Kite into the crew, and 
Kite threw together some old-time Quo-Vadis for a small crew-warming party, and 
Fackelmann introduced Kite to pharmaceutical-grade Dilaudid, and Kite found a new 
friend for life, he said; and Kite and Fackelmann swiftly fell into the I.D.-, credit-history- 



and-furnished-luxury-apartment-scam, in which by this time Gately involved himself 
pretty much only as a hobby, preferring bold nighttime merchandise-promotion to 
fraud, which fraud tended to involve meeting the people you stole from, which Gately 
found slimy and kind of awkward. 

Gately lay in the Trauma Ward in terrific infected pain, trying to Abide between 
cravings for relief by remembering a blinding white afternoon just after Xmas, when 
Fackelmann and Kite were off disposing of some of a furnished apartment's furnishings 
and Gately was killing time in the apartment laminating some false MA drivers licenses 
rush-ordered by rich Philips Andover Academy 371 kids for what turned out to be the last 
New Year's Eve of Unsubsidized Time. He'd been standing at an ironing board in the by 
now pretty much unfurnished apartment, ironing laminates onto the fake licenses, 
watching good old Boston U. play Clemson in the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper- 
Insurance Forsythia Bowl on a cumbersome first-generation InterLace HDV hanging on 
the bare wall, the high-def viewer always now the last luxury furnishing to be fenced. 
The winter daylight through the penthouse windows was dazzling and fell across the 
viewer's big flat screen and made the players look bleached and ghostly. Through the 
windows off in the distance was the Atlantic 0., gray and dull with salt. The B.U. punter 
was a hometown Boston kid the announcers kept inserting was a walk-on and an 
inspirational story that had never played a major sport until college and now was 
already one of the finest punt-specialists in N.C.A.A. history, and had the potential to be 
a lock for a pretty much limitless pro ball career if he bore down and kept his eye on the 
carrot. The B.U. punter was two years younger than Don Gately. Gately's big digits could 
barely fit around the iron's EZ-grip handle, and stooping over the ironing board made 
the small of his back ache, and he hadn't eaten anything except deep-fried stuff out of 
shiny plastic packaging for like a week, and the stink of the plastic laminates under the 
iron stunk wicked bad, and his big square face sagged lower and lower as he stared at 
the punter's ghostly digital image until he found himself starting to cry like a babe. It 
came out of emotional nowheres all of a sudden, and he found himself blubbering at the 
loss of organized ball, his one gift and other love, his own stupidity and lack of discipline, 
that blasted cocksucking Ethan From, his Mom's Sir Osis and vegetabilization and his 
failure after four years ever yet to visit, feeling suddenly lower than bottom-feeder-shit, 
standing over hot laminates and Polaroid squares and little stick-on D.M.V. letters for 
rich blond male boys, in the blazing winter light, blubbering amid fraudulent stink and 
tear-steam. It was two days later he got pinched for assaulting one bouncer with the 
unconscious body of another bouncer, in Danvers MA, and three months after that that 
he went to Billerica Minimum. 


Entrepot-bound, twitchy-eyed and checking both sides behind him as he comes, 
rounding the curve of Subdormitory B's hall with his stick and little solid frustum-shaped 
stool, Michael Pemulis sees at least eight panels of the drop-ceiling have somehow 
fallen out of their aluminum struts and are on the floor — some broken in that 
incomplete, hingey way stuff with fabric-content gets broken — including the relevant 
panel. No old sneaker is in evidence on the floor as he clears the panels to plant the 



stool, his incredibly potent Bentley-Phelps penlight in his teeth, looking up into the 
darkness of the struts' lattice. 


Given the Faxter's historical proclavity for fraudulent scams, it was amazing to Gately 
that he didn't ever know how Fackelmann had been fraudulently getting over on Whitey 
Sorkin in all kinds of little ways almost from the start, and didn't even find it out until the 
not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob, which took place during the three 
months Gately was out on bail Sorkin had generously put up. By this time Gately had 
fallen in with two lesbian pharmaceutical-cocaine addicts he'd met at the gym doing 
upside-down sit-ups from the chin-up bar (the lesbians, not Gately, who was strictly 
from bench, curl, and squat). These vigorous girls ran a rather intriguing house-cleaning- 
and-key-copying-and-burglary operation in Peabody and Wakefield, and Gately had 
begun working heavy-merchandise-lifting and 4x4-vehicle-promotion for them, serious 
full-time burglary, as his taste for even the threat of violence diminished on account of 
remorse at the bouncer-damage he'd inflicted in that Danvers bar after just seven 
Flefenreffers and an innocent comment about the B.-S.H.S.'s Minutemen's inferiority to 
the Danvers H.S. Roughriders; and Gately left more and more of Sorkin's transfer-and- 
collection work to Fackelmann, who by this time had gotten back into oral narcotics out 
of Virus-fears and stopped resisting the sugar-cravings he associated with oral narcs and 
gotten so fat and soft his shirtfront looked like an accordion when he sat down to eat 
Peanut M&M's and nod, and now also to a bad-news new guy Sorkin had lately 
befriended and put to work, a fuchsia-haired Flarvard Square punk-type kid with a build 
like a stump and round black unblinking eyes, an old-fashioned street-junk needle- 
jockey that went by the moniker Bobby C or just 'C,' and liked to hurt people, the only 
I.V.-heroin addict Gately'd come across that actually preferred violence, with no lips at 
all and purple hair in three great towering spikes and little bare patches in the hair on 
his forearms — from constantly testing the edge on his boot-knife — and a leather 
jacket with way more zippers than anybody could ever need, and a pre-electric earring 
that hung way down and was a roaring skull in gold-plate flames. 

Gene Fackelmann had, it turns out, for years been getting fraudulently over on Whitey 
Sorkin's bookmaking operation in all sorts of little ways that Gately and Kite (according 
to Kite) hadn't known about. Usually it was something like Fax taking long-shot action 
from marginal bettors not well known to Sorkin and not phoning the action in to 
Sorkin's secretary, and then, when the long-shot lost, collecting the skeet plus vig 372 
from the bettor and rat-holing it all for himself. It had seemed to Gately after he found 
out about it a suicidal-type risk, since if any of these long-shots ever actually won Fack¬ 
elmann would be responsible for giving the bettor his winnings from 'Whitey' — 
meaning it would be Sorkin that would hear the complaint if Fackelmann didn't come up 
with the $ on his own and get it to the bettor — and the whole crew's pharmacological 
expenses meant they always existed on the absolutest margins of liquidity, at least 
that's what Gately and Kite (according to Kite) had always thought. It wasn't until 
Fackelmann's map had been presumably eliminated for keeps and Kite had returned 
from his long highatus and Gately and Kite were getting the late Fackelmann's stuff 



together to divvy up valuables and dump the rest and Gately found, taped to the 
underside of Fackelmann's porn-cartridge storage case, over $22,000 in mint-crisp 
O.N.A.N. currency, not until then that Gately realized that Fackelmann had through iron 
will kept unspent an emergency reserve skeet-payment stake for just such a worst-case 
possibility. Gately split this found Fackelmann-$ with Trent Kite, then but went and 
turned his half of it in to Sorkin, claiming it was all they'd found. It wasn't that he forked 
his half over to Sorkin out of any kind of fear — Sorkin would have regretfully had the C 
kid and his Nuck/fag crew demap him, Gately, too, along with Fackelmann, if he'd 
thought Gately had been part of Fax's scam — but out of guilt over having been clueless 
about his own fellow Twin Tower screwing Sorkin after Sorkin had been so 
neurasthenically overgenerous to them both, and because Fackelmann's betrayal had 
ended up so hurting Sorkin and causing him so much psychosomatic grief that he'd 
spent a whole week in bed in Saugus in the dark with Lone Ranger-type sleep shades on, 
drinking VO and Cafergot and clutching his traumatized cranium and face, feeling 
betrayed and abandoned, he'd said, his whole faith in the human creature shaken, he'd 
wept to Gately over the cellular phone, after it all came out. Ultimately, Gately gave 
Sorkin his half of Fackelmann's secret $ mostly to try and cheer Sorkin up. Let him know 
somebody cared. He also did it for Fackelmann's memory, which he was mourning Fax's 
gruesome death even at the same time he cursed him for a liar and rat-punk. It was a 
time of moral confusion for Don G., and his half of the postmortem $ seemed like the 
best he could do in terms of like a gesture. He didn't rat out that Kite had a whole other 
half, which Kite spent his half of the $ on Grateful Dead bootlegs and a portable 
semiconductor-refrigeration unit for his D.E.C. 2100's motherboard that upped his 
processing capacity to 32 mb 2 of RAM, roughly the same as an InterLace Disseminator- 
substation or an NNE Bell cellular SWITCHnet; though it wasn't two months before he'd 
pawned the D.E.C. and put it in his arm, and had become such a steeply-downhill-type 
Dilaudid-addict that when he signed on as Gately's new trusted associate for B&Es after 
Gately got out of Billerica the once-mighty Kite wasn't even able to dicky an alarm or 
shunt a meter, and Gately found himself the brains of the team, which it was a mark of 
his own high-angle decline that this fact didn't make him more nervous. 

The R.N. that'd flushed his colon while Gately wept with shame is now back in the 
room with an M.D. Gately hasn't seen before. He lies there pinwheel-eyed from pain 
and efforts to Abide via memory. One eye has some sort of blurry sleep-goop film in it 
that won't blink or rub away. The room is filled with mournful gunmetal winter-P.M. 
light. The M.D. and gorgeous R.N. are doing something to the room's other bed, 
attaching something metally complex from out of a big case not unlike a good-table- 
silverware case, with molded purple velvet insides for metal rods and two half-circles of 
steel. The intercom dings. The M.D.'s got a beeper at his belt, an object with still more 
unhealthy associations. Gately hasn't exactly been asleep. The heat of his post-op fever 
makes his face feel tight, like standing too close to a fire. His right side's settled down to 
a sick ache like a kicked groin. Fackelmann's favorite phrase had been 'That's a 
goddamned lie!' He'd used it in response to just about everything. His mustache always 
looked like it was getting ready to crawl off his lip. Gately's always despised facial hair. 
The former naval M.P. had had a great big yellow-gray mustache he waxed into two 



sharp protruding steer-horns. The M.P. was vain about his mustache and spent giant 
amounts of time clipping and grooming and waxing it. When the M.P. passed out, Gately 
used to come quietly up and gently push the stiff waxed sides of the mustache into 
crazy canted angles. Sorkin's new third field-operative C'd claimed to collect ears and to 
have a collection of ears. Bobby C with his lightless eyes and flat lipless head, like a 
reptile. The M.D. was one of those apprentice Residential M.D.s that looked about 
twelve, scrubbed and groomed to a dull pink shine. He radiated the bustling cheer they 
teach M.D.s how to radiate at you. He had a child's haircut, complete with spit-curl, and 
his thin neck swam in the collar of his white M.D.-coat, and his coat's pens' pocket- 
protector and the owlish glasses he kept pushing up, together with the little neck, gave 
Gately the sudden insight that most M.D.s and A.D.A.s and P.D./P.O.s and shrinks, the 
fearsomest authority figures in a drug addict's life, that these guys came from the 
pencil-necked ranks of the same weak-chinned wienie kids that drug addicts used to 
despise and revile and bully, as kids. The R.N. was so attractive in the gray light and 
goop-blur it was almost grotesque. Her tits were such that she had a little cleft of 
cleavage showing even over her R.N.'s uniform, which was not like a low-neckline thing. 
The milky cleavage that suggests tits like two smooth scoops of vanilla ice cream that 
your healthy-type girls all have probably got. Gately's forced to confront the fact that 
he's never once been with a really healthy girl, and not with even so much as a girl of 
any kind in sobriety. And then when she reaches way up to unscrew a bolt in some kind 
of steelish plate on the wall over the empty bed the like hemline of her uniform retreats 
up north so that the white stockings' rich violinish curves at the top of the insides of her 
legs in the white LISLE are visible in backlit silhouette, and an EMBRASURE of sad 
windowlight shines through her legs. The raw healthy sexuality of the whole thing just 
about makes Gately sick with longing and self-pity, and he wants to avert his head. The 
young M.D. is also staring at the lissome stretch and retreating hem, not even 
pretending to help with the bolt, missing as he goes to push up the glasses so that he 
stabs himself in the forehead. The M.D. and R.N. exchange several pieces of real 
technical medical language. The M.D. drops his clipboard twice. The R.N. either doesn't 
notice any of the sexual tension in the room because she's spent her whole life as the 
eye of a storm of sexual tension, or else she just pretends not to notice. Gately's almost 
positive the M.D.'s jacked off before to the thought of this R.N., and he feels sick that he 
totally empathizes with the M.D. It'd be CIRCUMAMBIENT sexual tension, would be the 
ghostword. Gately'd never even let an unhealthy strung-out-type female go into the 
head for at least an hour after he'd taken a dump in there, out of embarrassment, and 
now this sickening circumambient creature had with her own Fleet syringe and soft 
hands summoned a loose pathetic dump from the anus of Bimmy Gately, which anus 
she had thus seen close up, producing a dump. 

It doesn't even register on Gately that it's spitting a little goopy sleet outside until he's 
made himself avert his head from the window and R.N. The ceiling's throbbing a little, 
like a dog when it's hot. The R.N. had told him, from behind, her name was Cathy or 
Kathy, but Gately wants to think of her as just the R.N. He can smell himself, a smell like 
sandwich-meat left in the sun, and feel greasy sweat purling all over his scalp, and his 
unshaved chin against his throat, and the tube taped into his mouth is tacky with the 



scum of sleep. The thin pillow is hot and he has no way to flip it over to the cool side of 
the pillow. It's like his shoulder's grown its own testicles and every time his heart beats 
some very small guy kicked him in them, the testicles. The M.D. sees Gately's open eyes 
and tells the nurse the gunshot patient is semiconscious again and is he Q'd for any kind 
of P.M. med. The sleetfall is slight; it sounds like somebody's throwing little fistfuls of 
sand at the window from real far away. The deadly R.N., helping the M.D. clamp some 
kind of weird steel back-braceish thing with what looks like a metal halo they'd put 
together from parts out of the big case, clamping the thing to the head of the bed and 
to little steel plates under the bed's heart monitor — it looks sort of like the upper part 
of an electric chair, he thinks — the R.N. looks down in mid-stretch and says Hi Mr. 
Gately and says Mr. Gately is allergic and doesn't get any meds except antipyretics and 
Toradol in a drip Dr. Pressburger do you Mr. Gately you poor brave allergic thing. Her 
voice is like you can just imagine what she'd sound like getting X'd and really liking it. 
Gately's repelled at himself for having taken a dump in front of this kind of R.N. The 
M.D.'s name had sounded just like 'Pressburger' or 'Priss-burger,' and Gately's now sure 
the poor yutz'd taken daily ass-kickings from sinister future drug addicts, as a kid. The 
M.D.'s perspiring in the ambient sexuality of the R.N. He says (the M.D. does) So what's 
he intubated for if he's conscious and self-ventilating and on a drip. This is while the 
M.D.'s trying to screw the metal halo itself to the top of the back-braceish thing with 
bolt-head screws, one knee up on the bed and stretching so part of the red soft upper 
part of his ass is showing over his belt, not being able to get the thing screwed on, 
shaking the metal halo like it's its stubborn fault, and even lying there Gately can tell the 
guy's turning the bolt-head screws the wrong way. The R.N. comes over and puts a cool 
soft hand on Gately's forehead in a way that makes the forehead want to die with 
shame. What Gately can get from what she says to Dr. Pressburger is that there'd been 
concern that Gately might have got a fragment of whatever projectile he got invaded 
with in, through, or near his lower-something Trachea, since there'd been trauma to his 
Something-with-six-syllables-that-started-with-Sterno, she said the radiology results 
were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called Pendleton had wanted a 16 mm. 
siphuncular nebulizer dispensing 4 ml. of 20% Mucomyst 373 q. 2 h. on the off-chance of 
hemorrhage or mucoidal flux, like just in case. The parts of this Gately can follow he 
doesn't care for one bit. He doesn't want to know his body even fucking has something 
with six syllables in it. The horrifying R.N. wipes Gately's face off as best she can with her 
hand and says she'll try to fit him in for a sponge bath before she goes off-shift at 
1600h., at which Gately goes rigid with dread. The R.N.'s hand smells of Kiss My Face- 
brand Organic Hand and Body Lotion, which Pat Montesian also uses. She tells the poor 
M.D. to let her have a try at the cranial brace, those things are always a bear to screw in. 
Her shoes are those subaudible nurses' shoes that make no sound, so it seems like she 
glides away from Gately's bed instead of walks away. Her legs aren't visible until she 
gets a certain ways away. The M.D.'s own shoes have a wet squeak to the left one. The 
M.D. looks like he hasn't slept well in about a year. There's a faint vibe of prescription 
'drines about the guy, on Gately's view. He paces squeakily at the foot of the bed 
watching the R.N. turn the screws the right way and pushes his owlish glasses up and 
says that Clifford Pendleton, scratch golfer or no, is a post-traumatic maroon, that 



nebulized Mucomyst is for (and here his voice makes it clear he's reciting from memory, 
like to show off) abnormal, viscid, or inspissated post-traumatic mucus, not potential 
hemorrhaging or edema, and that 16 mm. siphuncular intubation itself had been 
specifically discreditated as an intratracheal-edema prophylaxis in the second-to-latest 
issue of Morbid Trauma Quarterly as so diametrically invasive that it was more apt to 
exacerbate than to alleviate hemoptysis, according to somebody he calls 'Laird' or 
'Layered.' Gately's listening in with the uncomprehending close attention of like a child 
whose parents are discussing something adultly complex about child-care in its 
presence. The condescension with which Prissburger inserts that hemoptysis means 
something called 'pertussive hemorrhage,' like Kathy the R.N. wasn't enough of a pro 
not to have to insert little technical explanations for, makes Gately sad for the guy — it's 
obvious the guy pathetically thinks this kind of limp condescending shit will impress her. 
Gately's got to admit he would have tried to impress her, too, though, if she hadn't met 
him by holding a kidney-shaped pan under his working anus. The R.N.'s finishing packing 
up the parts of the brace thing the M.D. couldn't seem to attach, meanwhile. She was 
saying the M.D. seemed awful well-up on methodology for something called a 2R, as 
they left, and Gately could tell the M.D. couldn't tell she was being a little sarcastic. The 
M.D. was struggling to try to carry the thing's case, which Gately judges weighs at most 
30 kg. It occurs to him head-on for the first time that the real reason Stavros L. hired 
shelter-cleaning guys out of halfway houses was that he could get away with paying 
them like bupkis, and that he (Don G.) must surely on some level have known this all 
along but been in some kind of Denial about confronting it head-on that he was getting 
fucked over by Stavros the shoe-freak, and that the word embrasure had been surely 
another invasive-wraith ghostword, and then now also that nobody seems to exactly be 
falling all over themself to bring the paper and pen it had sure seemed like Joelle van D. 
had understood Gately's mimed request for, and that thus maybe Joelle's visit and 
show-and-tell with the snapshots had been just as much a febrile hallucination as the 
figuranted wraith, and that it has stopped spitting sleet but the clouds out there still 
look like they mean serious business out there over Brighton-Allston, and that if Joelle 
v.D.'s intimate visit with the photo album was a hallucination that at least meant it was 
also a hallucination she was wearing fucking college-kid Ken Erdedy's sweatpants, and 
that the low-angled sadness of the cloudy P.M. light meant it had to be pretty near 
1600h. EST so that maybe There By The Grace he could avoid maybe getting an 
uncontrolled woodie getting sponged naked by the horrifyingly attractive K/Cathy and 
but still could get sponged by her linebacker of a replacement, because the sour meaty 
smell of himself was grim, only maybe miss the woodie-hazard and get sponged by the 
big hairy-moled 1600-2400h. nurse in support-hose to who Gately's anus was a stranger. 
Plus that 1600h. EST was Spontaneous-Dissemination time for Mr. Bouncety-Bounce, 
the mentally ill kiddy-show host Gately's always loved and used to try his best with Kite 
and poor old Fackelmann to be home and largely alert for, and that nobody's once 
offered to click on the HD viewer that hangs next to a myopic fake-Turner fog-and-boat 
print on the wall opposite Gately's and the former kid's beds, and that he had no remote 
with which to either activate the TP at 1600 or ask somebody else to activate it. That 
without some kind of notebook and pencil he couldn't communicate even the basicest 



question or like concept to anybody — it was like he was a vegetated hemorrhagic- 
stroke-victim. Without a pencil and notebook he couldn't even seem to get across a 
request for a notebook and pencil; it was like he was trapped inside his huge chattering 
head. Unless, his head then points out, Joelle van Dyne's visit had been real and her 
understanding of the pen-and-notebook gesture had been real, and but somebody out 
there in the hallway with a hat or at the Hospital President's office or at the nurses' 
station with his innerdicted M.-Hanley-brownies had also innerdicted the request for 
writing supplies, at the Finest's request, so he couldn't get his story straight with 
anybody before they came for him, that it was like a pre-interrogation softening-up 
thing, they were leaving him trapped in himself, a figurant, mute and unmoving and 
blank like the House's catatonic lady slumped moist and pale in her chair or the 
Advanced Basics Group's adopted girl's vegetable-kingdom sister, or the whole catatonic 
gang over at E.M.P.H.H.'s #5 Shed, silent and dead-faced even when touching a tree or 
propped up amid exploding front-lawn firecrackers. Or the wraith's nonexistent kid. It's 
got to be past 1600h., light-wise, unless it's the lowering clouds. There's roughly 0% or 
less visibility now outside the sleet-crusted window. The room's windowlight is 
darkening to that Kaopectate shade that has always marked the just-pre-sunset time of 
day that Gately (like most drug addicts) has always most dreaded, and had always either 
lowered his helmet and charged extra-murderous at somebody to block it out (the late- 
day dread) or else dropped QuoVadis or oral narcotics or turned on Mr. Bouncety- 
Bounce extra loud or busied himself in his silly chef's hat in the Ennet House kitchen or 
made sure he was at a Meeting sitting way up close in nose-pore range, to block it out 
(the late-day dread), the gray-light late-afternoon dread, always worse in winter, the 
dread, in winter's watered-down light — just like the secret dread he's always felt 
whenever everybody happened to ever leave the room and left him alone in a room, a 
terrible stomach-sinking dread that probably dates all the way back to being alone in his 
XXL Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed. 

It occurs to Gately that right now's just like when he was a toddler and his Mom and 
her companion were both passed out or worse: no matter how frightened or scared he 
might become he now again cannot get anybody to come or to hear or even know about 
it; the discredited tube to prevent vicious or inspired bleeding in his suspicious Trachea 
has left him completely Alone, worse off than a toddler that could at least bellow and 
yowl, rattling the bars of its playpen in terror that nobody tall was in any shape to hear 
him. Plus this dreadful time of weak gray late-day light is the time, was the time when 
the sad and nerdily dressed wraith appeared yesterday. Assuming that was yesterday. 
Assuming it was a real wraith. But the wraith, with its chinky Coke and theories of post¬ 
mortem speed, had been able to interface with Gately without aid of speech or gesture 
or Bic, was why even out of his mind Gately had had to admit to himself it must have 
been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he'd kind of liked it. The dialogue. 
The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him. The way he said 
Gately's best thoughts were really communiques from the patient and Abiding dead. 
Gately wonders if his organic father the ironworker is not now maybe dead and 
dropping in and standing very still from time to time for a communique. He felt slightly 
better. The room's ceiling was not breathing. It lay flat as a stucco sheet, rippling only 



slightly with the petroleum-fumes of fever and Gately's own smell. Then bubbling up out 
of nowhere again he suddenly confronts deep-focus memories of Gene Fackelmann's 
final demise and Gately and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's involvement in Fackelmann's 
demise. 

Gately, for several months before he did his State assault-bit, was disastrously 
involved with one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, his first girl ever with a hyphen, a sort of 
upscale but directionless and not very healthy and pale and incredibly passive Danvers 
girl that worked in Purchasing for a hospital-supply co. in Swampscott and was pretty 
definitely an alcoholic and drank bright drinks with umbrellas in Rte. 1 clubs in the late 
P.M. until she swooned and passed out with a loud clunk. That's what she called it — 
'swooned .'The swooning and passing out with a loud clunk as her head hit the table was 
more or less a nightly thing, and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep fell automatically in love with 
any man she termed 'chivalrous' 374 enough to carry her out to the parking lot and drive 
her home without raping her, which rape of an unconscious head-lolling girl she termed 
'Taking Advantage. ' Gately got introduced to her by Fackelmann, who one time as he 
came up through a sports bar called the Pourhouse's parking lot to dialogue with a 
Sorkin-debtor Gately saw Fackelmann staggering along carrying this unconscious girl to 
his ride, one big hand quite a bit farther up her prom-looking taffeta gown than it really 
needed to be to carry her, and Fackelmann told Gately if Don'd give this gash a ride 
home he'd stay and do the collection, which Gately's heart wasn't in collections 
anymore and he jumped at the trade, as long as Fackelmann could promise him she 
could hold her various fluids in the 4x4 he was driving. So it was Fackelmann who told 
him, as he put the tiny and limp but still continent body in his arms in the parking lot of 
the Pourhouse, to watch his personal six, Gately, and be sure and violate her a little, 
because this gash here was like one of those South Sea-culture gashes in that if Gately 
took her home and she woke up nonviolated she'd be Gately's for life. But Gately 
obviously had no intention of raping an unconscious person, much less even putting his 
hand up the gown of a girl that might lose her fluids any second, and this locked him 
into the involvement. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep called Gately her 'Night-Errand' and fell 
passively in love with his refusal to Take Advantage. Gene Fackelmann, she confided, 
was not the gentleman Gately was. 

What helped make the involvement disastrous was that Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was 
always either so leglessly drunk or so passively hungover all the time that any sort of sex 
any time at all with her would have classified as Taking Advantage. 

This girl was the single passivest person Gately ever met. He never once saw P.H.-J. 
actually get from one spot to another under her own power. She needed somebody 
chivalrous to pick her up and carry her and lay her back down 24/7/365, it seemed like. 
She was a sort of sexual papoose. She spent most of her life passed out and sleeping. 
She was a beautiful sleeper, kittenish and serene, never drooling. She made passivity 
and unconsciousness look kind of beautiful. Fackelmann called her Death's Poster-Child. 
Even at work, at the hospital supply co., Gately imagined her horizontal, curled fetal on 
something soft, with all the hot slack facial intensity of a sleeping baby. He imagined her 
bosses and coworkers all tiptoeing around Purchasing whispering to each other to not 
wake her up. She never once rode in the actual front seat of any vehicle he drove her 



home in. But she also never threw up or pissed herself or even complained, just smiled 
and yawned an infant's little milky yawn and snuggled deeper into whatever Gately had 
swaddled her in. Gately started doing that thing about yelling they'd been robbed when 
he carried her into whatever stripped luxury apt. they were crewing in. P.H.-J. wasn't 
what you'd call great-looking, but she was incredibly sexy, Gately felt, because she 
always managed to look like you'd just X'd her into a state of total unmuscled swoon, 
lying there unconscious. Trent Kite told Fackelmann he thought Gately was out of his 
fucking mind. Fax observed that Kite himself was not exactly a W. T. Sherman with the 
ladies, even with coke-whores and strung-out nursing students and dipsoid lounge-hags 
whose painted faces swung loose from their heads. Fackelmann claimed to have started 
a Log just to keep track of Kite's attempted pickup lines — surefire lines like e.g. 'You're 
the second most beautiful woman I've ever seen, the first most beautiful woman I've 
ever seen being former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,' and 'If you came 
home with me I'm unusually confident that I could achieve an erection,' and said that if 
Kite wasn't still cherry at twenty-three and a half it was proof of some kind of divine- 
type grace. 

Sometimes Gately would come out of a Demerol-nod and look at pale passive Pamela 
lying there sleeping beautifully and undergo a time-lapse clairvoyant thing where he 
could almost visibly watch her losing her looks through her twenties and her face 
starting to slide over off her skull onto the pillow she held like a stuffed toy, becoming a 
lounge-hag right before his eyes. The vision aroused more compassion than horror, 
which Gately never even considered might qualify him as a decent person. 

Gately's two favorite things about Pamela Hoffman-Jeep were: the way she would 
come out of her stupor and hold her cheek and laugh hysterically each time Gately 
carried her across the threshold of some stripped apartment and bellow that they'd 
been ripped off; and the way she always wore the long white linen gloves and bare- 
shoulder taffeta that made her seem like some upscale North Shore debutante who's 
had like one too many dippers of country-club punch and is just begging to be Taken 
Advantage of by some low-rent guy with a tattoo — she'd make a sort of languid very- 
slow-motion bullwhip-gesture with her hand in the long white glove as she lay wherever 
Gately had deposited her and simper out with an upscale inflection 'Don Honey, bring 
Mommy a highball' (she called a drink a highball), which it turned out was a deadly 
impression of her own Mom, who it turned out this lady made Gately's own Mom look 
like Carry Nation by comparison, lush-wise: the only four times Gately ever met Mrs. H.- 
J. were all at E.R.s and sanitaria. 

Gately lies there pop-eyed with guilt and anxiety in the hiss and click of resumed sleet, 
in the twilit St. E.'s room, next to the glittering back-brace-and-skull-halo thing clamped 
exoskeletally to the empty next bed and gleaming dully at selected welds, Gately trying 
to Abide, remembering. It had been Pamela Hoffman-Jeep that finally clued Gately in on 
the little ways Gene Fackelmann had been historically getting over on Whitey Sorkin, 
and alerted him to the suicidal creek Fackelmann had got himself into with a certain 
mistaken-bet scam that had blown up right in his map. Even Gately had been able to tell 
something was the matter: for the last two weeks Fackelmann had been squatting 
sweatily in a corner of the stripped living room, right outside the little luxury bedroom 



Gately and Pamela were lying in, out there squatting over his Sterno cooker and 
incredible twin hills of sky-blue Dilaudid and many-hued M&M's, not much speaking or 
responding or moving or even seeming to cop a nod, just sitting there hunched and 
plump and glistening like some sort of cornered toad, his mustache flailing around on 
his lip. Things would have had to be bad indeed for Gately ever to try to get coherent 
data out of P.H.-J. Apparently the deal was that one of the bettors that bet with Sorkin 
through Fackelmann was a guy Gately and Fackelmann know only as Eighties Bill, an 
impeccably groomed guy that wore red suspenders under snazzy Zegna-brand 
menswear and tortoiseshell specs and Docksiders, an old-fashioned corporate take- 
overer and asset-plunderer, maybe fifty, with an Exchange Place office and a souvenir 
FREE MILKEN bumper sticker on his Beamer — it was a night of many highballs and 
much papoosing, and Gately had to keep flicking the top of P.H.-J.'s skull to keep her 
conscious long enough to free-associate her way through the details — who was on his 
fourth marriage to his third aerobics instructor, and who liked to bet only on Ivy League 
college hoops, but who when he did so — bet — bet amounts so huge that Fackelmann 
always had to get Sorkin's pre-approval on the bet and then call Eighties Bill back, and so 
on. 

But so — according to Pamela Hoffman-Jeep — this Eighties Bill, who's a Yale alum 
and usually unabashedly sentimental about what Pamela H.-J. laughingly says 
Fackelmann called his 'almometer' — well, on this particular time it seems like a little 
impeccably groomed birdie has whispered in Eighties Bill's hairy ear, because this one 
time Eighties Bill wants to put $125K down on Brown U. against Yale U., i.e. betting 
against his almometer, only he wants (-2) points instead of the even spread Sorkin and 
the rest of the Boston books are taking off the Atlantic City line for a spread. And 
Fackelmann has to cell-phone down to Saugus to bounce this off Sorkin, except Sorkin's 
down in the city in Enfield at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation office getting 
his weekly UV-bombardment and Cafergot refill from Dr. Robert ('Sixties Bob') Monroe 
— the septuagenarian pink-sunglasses-and-Nehru-jacket-wearing N.C.-F.P.F. ergotic- 
vascular-headache-treatment specialized, a guy who in yore-days interned at Sandoz 
and was one of T. Leary's original circle of mayonnaise-jar acid-droppers at T. Leary's 
now-legendary house in West Newton MA, and is now (60s B.) an intimate acquaintance 
of Kite, because Sixties Bob is an even bigger Grateful Dead fanatic maybe even than 
Kite, and sometimes got together with Kite and several other Dead devotees (most of 
who now had canes and 0 2 tanks) and traded historical-souvenir-type tiger's eyes and 
paisley doublets and tie-dyes and lava lamps and bandannas and plasma spheres and 
variegated black-light posters of involuted geometric designs, and argued about which 
Dead shows and bootlegs of Dead shows were the greatest of all time in different 
regards, and just basically had a hell of a time. 60s B., an inveterate collector and 
haggling trader of shit, sometimes took Kite along on little expeditions of eclectic and 
seedy shops for Dead-related paraphernalia, sometimes even informally fencing stuff 
for Kite (and so indirectly Gately), covering Kite with $ when Kite's rigid need-schedule 
didn't permit a more formal and time-consuming fence. Sixties Bob then trading the 
merchandise around various seedy locales for 60s-related shit nobody else'd even 
usually want. A couple times Gately had to actually finger an ice cube out of a highball 



and slip it under the shoulderless neckline of P.H.-J.'s prom gown to try and keep her on 
some kind of track. Like most incredibly passive people, the girl had a terrible time ever 
separating details from what was really important to a story, is why she rarely ever got 
asked anything. But so the point is that the person that took Fackelmann's call about 
Eighties Bill's mammoth Yale-Brown bet wasn't in fact Sorkin but rather Sorkin's 
secretary, one Gwendine O'Shay, the howitzer-breasted old Green-Cardless former 
I.R.A.-moll who'd gotten hit on the head with a truncheon by a godless Belfast Bobbie 
once too often back on the Old Sod, and whose skull now was (in Fackelmann's own 
terminology) soft as puppy-shit in the rain, but who had just the seedy sort of 
distracted-grandmotherly air that makes her perfect for clapping her red-knuckled old 
hands to her cheeks and squealing as she claimed Mass Lottery lottery winnings 
whenever Whitey Sorkin and his MA-Statehouse bagmen-cronies arrange to have a 
Sorkinite buy a mysteriously winning Mass Lottery ticket from one of the countless 
convenience stores Sorkin <£ cronies own through dummy corporations all up and down 
the North Shore, and who, because she could not only give what Sorkin claimed was the 
only adequate cervical massage west of the Berne Hot Alp Springs Center but also could 
both word-process a shocking 110 wpm and wield a shillelagh like nobody's business — 
plus had been W. Sorkin's dear late I.R.A.-moll Mum's Scrabble-pal back in Belfast, on 
the Old Sod — served as Whitey's chief administrative aide, manning the cellular phones 
when Sorkin was out or indisposed. 

And so but P.H.-J.'s point, which Gately has to just about crack her scalp open flicking 
out of her: Gwendine O'Shay, familiar with Eighties Bill and his Y.U. Bulldog 
sentimentality, plus cranially soft as a fucking grape, O'Shay took Fackelmann's call 
wrong, thought Fackelmann said Eighties Bill wanted 125K with (-2) points on Yale 
instead of (-2) on Brown, put Fackelmann on Hold and made him listen to Irish Muzak 
while she put in a call to a Yale Athletic Dept, mole out of Sorkin's Read-Protected 
database's MOLE file and learned that the Yale U. Bulldogs' star power forward had 
been diagnosed with an extremely rare neurologic disorder called Post-Coital 
Vestibulitis 375 in which for several hours after intercourse the power forward tended to 
suffer such a terrible vertiginous loss of proprioception that he literally couldn't tell his 
ass from his elbow, much less make an authoritative move to the bucket. Plus then 
O'Shay's second call, to Sorkin's Brown U. athletic mole (a locker-room attendant 
everybody thinks is deaf), reveals that several of Brown U.'s most sirenish and school- 
spirited hetero coeds had been recruited, auditioned, briefed, rehearsed (i.e. 
'debriefed,' giggles Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, whose giggles involve the sort of ticklish 
shoulder-writhing undulations of a much younger girl getting tickled by an authority 
figure and pretending not to like it), and stationed at strategic points —1-95 rest-stops, 
in the spare-tire compartment at the rear of the Bulldogs' chartered bus, in the 
evergreen shrubbery outside the teams' special entrance to the Pizzitola Athl. Center in 
Providence, in concave recesses along the Pizzitola tunnels between special entrance 
and Visitors' locker room, even in a specially enlarged and sensually-appointed locker 
next to the power forward's locker in the VLR, all prepared — like the Brown 
cheerleaders and Pep Squad, who've been induced to do the game pantyless, 
electrolysized and splits-prone to help lend a pyrotechnic glandular atmosphere to the 



power forward's whole playing-environment — prepared to make the penultimate 
sacrifice for squad, school, and influential members of the Brown Alumni Bruins 
Boosters Assoc. So that Gwendine O'Shay then switches back to Fackelmann and OKs 
the mammoth bet and point-spread, as like who wouldn't, with that kind of mole- 
reported fix in the works. Except of course she's taken the wager backwards, i.e. O'Shay 
thinks Eighties Bill's now got 125K on Yale coming within two points, while Eighties Bill 

— who it turns out's cast himself as White Knight in bidding for majority control of 
Providence's Federated Funnel and Cone Corp., O.N.A.N.'s leading manufacturer of 
conoid receptacles, with F.F.&C. CEO'd by a prominent Brown alumnus so rabid a Bruins- 
booster he actually wears a snarling hollow bear-head to conference games, whose ass 
Eighties Bill is going about kissing like nobody's beeswax, P.FI.-J. inserts, hinting it was 
Eighties Bill who'd tipped the Bruins staff off about the power forward's Achilles' vas 
deferens — E.B. quite reasonably believes he's now got Brown within a deuce for 125 el 
grande's. 

The wrench in the ointment that nobody in Providence has counted on is the picket- 
and-knuckleduster-wielding appearance of Brown University's entire Dworkinite Female 
Objectification Prevention And Protest Phalanx outside the Pizzitola Athl. Center's main 
gates right at game-time, two FOPPPs per motorcycle, who blow through the filigreed 
gates like they were so much wet Kleenex and storm the arena, plus a division of 
Brown's pluckier undergraduate N.O.W.s who execute a pincer-movement down from 
the cheap seats up top during the first time-out, at the precise moment the Brown 
cheerleaders' first pyramid-maneuver ends in a mid-air split that causes the Pizzitola's 
Scoreboard's scorekeeper to reel backward against his controls and blow out both 
FIOME's and VISITORS' zeroes, on the board, just as the FOPPPs' unmuffled Flawgs come 
blatting malevolently down through the ground-level tunnels and out onto the playing 
floor; and in the ensuing melee not only are cheerleaders. Pep Squad, and comely 
Brown U. sirens all either laid out with picket-signs wielded like shillelaghs or thrown 
kicking and shrieking over the burly shoulders of militant FOPPPs and carried off on 
roaring Flawgs, leaving the Yale power forward's delicate nervous system intact if 
overheated; but two Brown U. Bruin starters, a center and a shooting guard — both too 
wrung-out and dazed by a grueling week of comely-siren-auditioning and -rehearsing to 
have sense enough to run like hell once the melee spills out onto the Pizzitola hardwood 

— are felled, by a FOPPP knuckleduster and a disoriented referee with a martial-arts 
background, respectively; and so when the floor is finally cleared and stretchers borne 
off and the game resumes, Yale U. cleans Brown U.'s clock by upwards of 20. 

Then so Fackelmann calls up Eighties Bill and arranges to pick up the skeet, which is 
$137,500 with the vig, which E.B. gives him in large-denomination pre-O.N.A.N. scrip in 
a GO BROWN BRUINS gym-bag he'd brought to the game to sit next to the ursine¬ 
headed CEO with and now has less than no use for, but so Fackelmann receives the 
skeet downtown and blasts up cheesy Route 1 to Saugus to deliver the skeet and pick up 
his vig on the vig ($625 U.S.) right away, needing to cop Blues in what's starting to be 
the worst way, etc. Plus Fackelmann's figuring on maybe a small bonus or at least some 
emotional validation from Sorkin for bringing in such a mammoth and promptly- 
remitted wager. But, when he gets to the Rte. 1 titty bar at the rear of which Sorkin has 



his administrative offices behind an unmarked fire door and all wallpapered in stuff that 
looks like ersatz wood panelling, Gwendine O'Shay wordlessly points behind her station 
at Sorkin's personal office door with a terse gesture Fackelmann doesn't think fits with 
the up-beatness of the occasion at all. The door's got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, 
from before the assassination. Sorkin's in there working spreadsheets with his special 
monitor-screen-light-filtering goggles on. The goggles' lenses on their long protruding 
barrels look like lobsters' eyes on stalks. Gately and Fackelmann and Bobby C never 
spoke to Sorkin until spoken to, not out of henchmanish obsequity but because they 
could never tell what Sorkin's cranio-facial vascular condition was or if he could tolerate 
sound until they verifiably heard him tolerating his own. (Sound.) So G. Fackelmann 
waits wordlessly to hand over Eighties Bill's skeet, standing there tall and soft and palely 
sweating, the overall shape and color of a peeled boiled egg. When Sorkin hikes an 
eyebrow at the GO BRUINS bag and says the knee-slapping hilarity of the joke escapes 
him, Fackelmann's mustache positively takes off all over his upper lip, and he prepares 
to say what he always says when he's flummoxed, that whatever's being said is with all 
due respect a goddamn lie. Sorkin saves his data and pushes his desk chair back so he 
can reach all the way down to the fireproof drawer. The goggles are often used in data- 
processing sweatshops and list for a deuce. Sorkin grunts as he hauls out a huge old 
Mass Lottery box for Quik-Pick cards and heaves it onto the desk, where it bulges 
obscenely, filled with 112.5K U.S. — there's 112.5 fucking K in there, all in ones, 125K 
minus vig, what Sorkin via O'Shay believes to be Eighties Bill's winnings, all in small bills, 
because Sorkin's pissed off and can't resist making a little like gesture. Fackelmann 
doesn't say anything. His mustache goes limp as his mental machinery starts revving. 
Sorkin, massaging his temples, staring up at Fackelmann with his goggles like a crab in a 
tank, says he supposes he can't blame Fax or O'Shay, that he'd have OK'd the bet 
himself, what with the neurologic tip on the Yale forward they had. Who could have 
foreseen thuggish Feminazis screwing up the ointment. He utters a bit of Gaelic that 
Fackelmann doesn't know but assumes to be fata Iistica I. He peels six C-notes and an 
O.N.A.N.ite 25-spot off a wad the size of an artillery shell and pushes them across the 
metal desk at Fackelmann, his vig on the vig. He says What the fuck (Sorkin does), this 
Eighties Bill kid's irrational sentimentalism for Yale will sooner or later catch up with 
him. Veteran books tend to be statistically philosophical and patient. Fackelmann 
doesn't even bother to wonder why Sorkin refers to Eighties Bill as 'kid' when they're 
both about the same age. But a high-watt bulb is slowly beginning to incandesce over 
Fackelmann's moist head. As in the Faxter starts to conceptualize the overall concept of 
what must of happened. He still hasn't said anything, Pamela Hoffman-Jeep emphasizes. 
Sorkin looks Fackelmann over and asks if he's gained some asymmetrical-type weight, 
there. Fackelmann's left tit does look noticeably bigger than his right, under his sport¬ 
coat, because of the legal envelope with 137 1000s and one 500 in it, the skeet from an 
Eighties Bill who thought he'd lost. Just like Sorkin thought E.B.'d won. The slight high 
whine in the room that Sorkin thinks is his infernatron disk-drive is really the whine of 
Fackelmann's high-speed mentation. His mustache roils like a cracked whip as he works 
his own internal mental spreadsheet. 250K in one lumpy sum represented like 375 sky- 
blue grams of hydromorphone hydrochloride 376 or like 37,500 10-mg. soluble tablets of 



the shit, available from a certain rapacious but discreet Chinatown opiate-dealer who'd 
only deal synthetic narcs in 100-gram weights — which all translated, assuming Kite 
could be persuaded to pack up his D.E.C. 2100 and move far far away with Fackelmann 
to help him set up a street-distribution matrix in some urban market far far away, into 
close to like let's see carry the one like 1.9 million in street-value, which sum meant that 
Fackelmann and to a lesser jr.-partner extent Kite could have their chins on their chests 
for the rest of their days without ever having to strip another apt., forge another 
passport, break another thumb. All if Fackelmann just kept his map shut about O'Shay's 
confabulation of Yale/ Brown//Brown/Yale, mumbled something about an I.V.- 
adulterant causing a sudden and temporary gigantism in one tit, and blasted out of 
there straight down Rte. 1 to this one Dr. Wo and Associates, Flung Toy's Cold Tea 
Emporium, Chinatown. 

By this time Pamela Floffman-Jeep had succumbed to the highballs and her own 
swaddled warmth and was irreversibly swooned, ice or fillip or no, twitching synaptically 
and murmuring to somebody named Monty that he was certainly no kind of gentleman 
in her book. But Gately could chart the rest of Fackelmann's shit-creek's course for 
himself. When approached by Fackelmann with a GO BROWN gym-bag of Dr. Wo's 
finest wholesale Dilaudid and invited to decamp with him and set up a distrib-matrix for 
their own drug-empire far far away. Kite would have staggered back in horror at 
Fackelmann's obviously not knowing that the bettor Eighties Bill was in fact none other 
than the son of Sixties Bob, viz. Whitey Sorkin's personal migrainologist, who Sorkin 
trusted and confided in as only a massive I.V.-dose of Cafergot can make you trust and 
confide, and whom Sorkin would undoubtedly tell all about the guy's own son's huge 
win on Yale, and who wasn't like Ward-and-Wally close with his son. Sixties Bob wasn't, 
but naturally kept distant paternal tabs on him, and would certainly have known that 
E.B.'d in fact bet Brown in an attempt to cozy up to the conic CEO, and so would know 
that there'd been some kind of mix-up; and also that (Kite'd still be staggering back in 
horror as all this added up) plus, even if Sorkin somehow didn't get told of Eighties Bill's 
loss and Fackelmann's scam from Sixties Bill, the fact was that Sorkin's newest savagest 
U.S. muscle, Bobby ('C') C, old-fashioned smack-addict, copped regular old organic 
Burmese heroin from this Dr. Wo on a regular basis, and was sure to hear about 300+ 
grams of wholesale Dilaudid bought by a Fackelmann known to be C's co-employee off 
Sorkin... and thus that Fackelmann, who when he came to Kite with the proposition was 
already in possession of a Brown-Booster bag full of 37,500 10-mg. Dilaudids and minus 
Sorkin's 250K — plus with as Gately later knew only 22K in suicidal-scam-backfire- 
insurance capital — was already dead: Fackelmann was a Dead Man, Kite would have 
said, staggering back with horror at Fax's idiocy; Kite'd have said he could smell 
Fackelmann already biodegrading from here. Dead as a fucking post, he'd have told 
Fackelmann, already worrying about being seen sitting there with him in whatever titty 
bar they were in when Fax hit Kite with the proposal. And Gately, watching P.FI.-J. sleep, 
could not only imagine but Identify fully with how Fackelmann, on hearing Kite say he 
could smell him dead and why, with how Fackelmann, instead of taking his bagful of 
Blues and gluing on a goatee and immediately fleeing to climes that'd never even 
fucking heard of metro Boston's North Shore — that the Faxter'd done what any drug 



addict in possession of his Substance would do when faced with fatal news and 
attendant terror: Facklemann'd made a fucking beeline for their luxury-stripped home 
and familiar safe-feeling hearth and had plopped down and immediately fired up the 
Sterno cooker and cooked up and tied off and shot up and nailed his chin to his chest 
and kept it there with staggering quantities of Dilaudid, trying to mentally blot out the 
reality of the fact that he was going to get demapped if he didn't take some kind of 
decisive remedial action at once. Because, Gately realized even then, this was your drug 
addict's basic way of dealing with problems, was using the good old Substance to blot 
out the problem. Also probably medicating his terror by stuffing himself with Peanut 
M&M's, which would explain all the wrappers littering the floor of the corner he hadn't 
moved from. That thus this is why Fackelmann has been squatting moist and silent in a 
corner of the living room right outside this very bedroom here for days; this was why 
the apparent contradiction of the staggering amount of Substance Fackelmann had in 
the gym-bag next to him together with the cornered-toad look of a man in the great fear 
one associates with Withdrawal. Charting and thinking, drumming his fingers absently 
on P.FI.-J.'s unconscious skull, Gately realized he could more than empathize with 
Fackelmann's flight into Dilaudid and M&M's, but he now realizes that that was the first 
time it really ever dawned on him in force that a drug addict was at root a craven and 
pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides. 

The most sexual thing Gately ever did with Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was he liked to 
unwrap her cocoon of blankets and climb in with her and spoon in real tight, fitting his 
bulk up close against all her soft concave places, and then go to sleep with his face in 
her nape. It bothered Gately that he could empathize with Fackelmann's desire to hide 
and blot out, but in the retrospect of memory now it bothers him more that he didn't lie 
there up next to the comatose girl being bothered for more than a few minutes before 
he felt the familiar desire that blots out all bother, and that that night he had un¬ 
wrapped the cocoon of bedding and arisen so automatically in service of this desire. And 
feels the worst of all that he'd lumbered out of the bedroom in just jeans and belt out to 
the gloaming living room where Fackelmann was hunched moist and smeary-mouthed 
in the corner next to a mountain of 10 mg. Dilaudids and his mixing bowl of distilled 
water and works-kit and Sterno unit, that Gately had lumbered so automatically out to 
Fackelmann under the pretense — to himself, too, the pretense, was the worst thing — 
the pretense that he was just going to check on poor old Fackelmann, to maybe try and 
convince him to take some kind of action, go penitent to Sorkin or flee the clime instead 
of just hiding there in the corner with his mind in neutral and his chin on his chest and a 
stalactite of chocolated drool from his lower lip lengthening. Because he knew that the 
first thing Fackelmann would do when Gately left P.H.-J. and lumbered out to the 
defurnished living room would be to fumble in his GoreTex works-kit for a new factory- 
wrapped syringe and invite Gately to hunker on down and get right with the planet. I.e. 
ingest some of this mountain of Dilaudid, to keep Fackelmann company. Which to 
Gately's shame he did, had done, and no part of the reality of Fackelmann's creek and 
the need for action had even been brought up, so intent were they on the Blues' 
somnolent hum, blotting everything out, while Pamela Hoffman-Jeep lay wrapped tight 
in the other room dreaming of damsels and towers — Gately did, he remembers vividly. 



he let Fackelmann fix them both up but good, and told himself he was doing it to keep 
Fackelmann company, like sitting up with a sick friend, and (maybe worst) believed it 
was true. 

Little entr'actes of feverish dreams punctuate memories and being conscious, like. He 
dreams he's riding due north on a bus the same color as its own exhaust, passing again 
and again the same gutted cottages and expanse of heaving sea, weeping. The dream 
goes on and on, without any kind of resolution or arrival, and he weeps and sweats as 
he lies there, stuck in it. Gately comes sharply around when he feels the little rough 
tongue on his forehead — not unlike Nimitz the M.P.'s little pet kitten's hesitant tongue, 
when the M.P. had still had the kitten, before the mysterious period when the kitten 
disappeared and the garbage disposal wouldn't run right for days and the M.P. sat 
hungover with his notebook at the kitchen table with his blond head in his hands, just 
sat there for several days, and Gately's Mom went around pale as hell and wouldn't go 
near the kitchen sink for days, and rushed to the bathroom when Gately finally asked 
what was the deal with the garbage disposal and where was Nimitz. When Gately gets 
his eyelids unstuck, though, the tongue is not even close to being Nimitz's. The wraith is 
back, right by the bed, dressed like before and blurred at the edges in the hat-shadowed 
spill of hallway-light, and except now with him is another, younger, way more physically 
fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top who's leaning way over 
Gately's railing and ... fucking licking Gately's forehead with a rough little tongue, and as 
Gately reflexively strikes out at the guy's map — no man put his tongue on D. W. Gately 
and lived — he has just enough time to realize the wraith's breath has no warmth to it, 
or smell, before both wraiths vanish and a blue forked bolt of pain from his sudden 
striking-out sends him back against his hot pillow with an arched spine and a tube- 
impeded scream, his eyes rolling back into the dove-colored light of whatever isn't quite 
sleep. 

His fever is way worse, and his little snatches of dreams have a dismantled cubist 
aspect he associates in memory with childhood flu. He dreams he looks in a mirror and 
sees nothing and keeps trying to clean the mirror with his sleeve. One dream consists 
only of the color blue, too vivid, like the blue of a pool. An unpleasant smell keeps 
coming up his throat. He's both in a bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out, but 
never Ferocious Francis or Joelle van D. He dreams there's people in his room but he's 
not one of them. He dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging 
some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency 
important, and Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, 
and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so 
he can't really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at 
Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the 
Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid 
moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no 
underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts 
talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he's got no 
idea who they're talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair 
and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late. 



She'd come out of the St. E.'s doors and turned right for the quick walk back up to 
Ennet and a grotesquely huge woman whose hose bulged with stubble and whose face 
and head were four times larger than the largest woman Joelle had ever seen had 
grabbed her arm at the elbow and said she was sorry to be the one to tell her but that 
unbeknownst to her she was in almost mind-boggling danger. 

It took rather a while for Joelle to look her up and down. 'This is supposed to be 
news?' 


So and but that night's next A.M.'d found Gately and Fackelmann still there in 
Fackelmann's little corner, belts around their arms, arms and noses red from scratching, 
still at it, the ingestion, on a hell of a tear, cooking up and getting off and eating M&M's 
when they could find their mouths with their hands, moving like men deep under water, 
heads wobbling on strengthless necks, the empty room's ceiling sky-blue and bulging 
and under it hanging on the wall overhead to their right the apartment's upscale TP's 
viewer on a recursive slo-mo loop of some creepy thing Fackelmann liked that was just 
serial shots of flames from brass lighters, kitchen-matches, pilot lights, birthday candles, 
votive candles, pillar candles, birch shavings, Bunsen burners, etc., that Fackelmann had 
got from Kite, who just before dawn had come out dressed and declined to get high 
with them and coughed nervously and announced he had to leave for a few days or 
more for a 'totally key' and unmissable software trade-show in a different area code, 
not knowing Gately now knew he knew Fackelmann already to be dead, w/ Kite then 
trying to leave discreetly with every piece of hardware he owned in his arms, including 
the nonportable D.E.C., trailing cables. Then a bit later, as the A.M. light intensified 
yellowly and made both Gately and Fackelmann curse the fact that the curtains had 
been stripped and pawned, as they continued to hunch and cook and shoot, at maybe 
0830h. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was up and vomiting briskly and applying mousse against 
the workaday day, calling Gately Honey and her Night Errand and asking if she'd done 
anything last night she'd have to explain to anybody today — kind of an A.M. routine in 
their relationship — applying blush and drinking her standard anti-hangover breakfast 377 
and watching Gately and Fackelmann's chins fall and rise at slightly different underwater 
rates. The smell of her perfume and high-retsin mints hung in the bare room long after 
she'd bid them both Ciao Bello. As the A.M. sun got higher and intolerable, instead of 
taking action and nailing a blanket or something over the window they opted instead to 
obliterate the reality of the eye-scalding light and began truly bingeing on Blues, flirting 
with an 0. D. They scaled Fackelmann's Mt. Dilaudid at a terrible clip. Fackelmann was 
by nature a binger. Gately was typically more like a maintenance user. He rarely went on 
a classic-type binge, which meant plunking down in one place with an enormous stash 
and getting loaded over and over again for long periods without moving. But when he 
did start a binge he might as well have been strapped to the snout of a missile for all the 
control he had over length or momentum. Fackelmann was having at the mountain of 
10-mg. Blues like there was no tomorrow. Every time Gately even started to bring up 



the issue of how Faxter had come by such a huge blue haul of the Substance — trying 
maybe to invite Fackelmann to confront the reality of his trouble by describing it, like — 
Fackelmann would cut him off with a soft 'That's a goddamn lie.' This was pretty much 
all Fackelmann would ever say, when loaded, even in response to things like questions. 
You have to picture all the binge's verbal exchanges as occurring like very slowly, oddly 
distended, as if the time were honey: 

'Serious fucking stash you managed to come by somehow right here. Fa—' 

'That's a goddamn lie.' 

'Man. Man. I just hope Gwendine or C's got the phone today out there, man. Instead 
of Whitey. No business getting done out of here today I don't thi—' 

"s a goddamn he.' 

'That's for sure. Fax.' 

"s a goddamn lie.' 

'Fax. The Faxter. Count Faxula.' 

'Goddamn lie.' 

After a while in all the distension it got to be like a joke. Gately would haul his big head 
upright and try to allege the roundness of the planet, the three-dimensionality of the 
phenomenal world, the blackness of all black dogs — 

"s a goddamn lie.' 

They found it increasingly funny. After every exchange like this they laughed and 
laughed. Each exhalation of laughter seemed to take several minutes. The ceiling and 
the window's light receded. Fackelmann wet his pants; this was even funnier. They 
watched the pool of urine spread out against the hardwood floor, changing shape, 
growing curved arms, exploring the fine oak floor. The rises and valleys and little seams. 
It might of gotten later and then early A.M. again. The entertainment cartridge's myriad 
small flames were reflected in the spreading puddle, so that soon Gately could watch 
without taking his chin off his chest. 

When the phone rang it was just a fact. The ringing was like an environment, not a 
signal. The fact of its ringing got more and more abstract. Whatever a ringing phone 
might signify was like totally overwhelmed by the overwhelming fact of its ringing. 
Gately pointed this out to Fackelmann. Fackelmann vehemently denied it. 

At some point Gately tried to stand and was rudely assaulted by the floor, and wet his 
own pants. 

The phone rang and rang. 

At another point they got interested in rolling different colors of Peanut M&M's into 
the puddles of urine and watching the colored dye corrode and leave a vampire-white 
football of M&M in a nimbus of bright dye. 

The intercom's buzzer to the luxury apartment complex's glass doors downstairs 
sounded, overwhelming both of them with the fact of its sound. It buzzed and buzzed. 
They discussed wishing it would stop the way you discuss wishing it would stop raining. 

It became the ICBM of binges. The Substance seemed inexhaustible; Mt. Dilaudid 
changed shapes but never really much shrank that they could see. It was the first and 
only time ever that Gately I.V.'d narcotics so many times in one arm that he ran out of 
arm-vein and had to switch to the other arm. Fackelmann was no longer coordinated 



enough to help him tie off and boot. Fackelmann kept making a string of chocolaty drool 
appear and distend almost down to the floor. The acidity of their urine was corroding 
the apt.'s hardwood floor's finish in an observable way. The puddle had grown many 
arms like a Hindu god. Gately couldn't quite tell if the urine had explored its way almost 
back to their feet or if they were already sitting in urine. Fackelmann would see how 
close to the surface of the pond of their mixed piss he could get the tip of the string of 
spit before he sucked it back up and in. The little game had an intoxicating aura of 
danger to it. The insight that most people like play-danger but don't like real-life danger 
hit Gately like an epiphany. It took him gallons of viscous time to try and articulate the 
insight to Fackelmann so that Fackelmann could give it the imprimatur of a denial. 

Eventually the buzzer stopped. 

The phrase 'More tattoos than teeth' also kept going through Gately's head as it 
bobbed (the head), even though he had no idea where the phrase came from or who it 
was supposed to refer to. He hadn't been to Billerica Minimum yet; he was on bail that 
Whitey Sorkin had bonded. 

The taste of the M&M's couldn't cut the weirdly sweet medical taste of 
hydromorphone in Gately's mouth. He watched an old stovetop-burner's crown of blue 
flame shimmer in the shine of the urine. 

During a ruddled sunset-light period Fackelmann had had a small convulsion and a 
bowel movement in his pants and Gately hadn't had the coordination to go to 
Fackelmann's side during the seizure, to help and just be there. He had the nightmarish 
feeling that there was something crucial he had to do but had forgot what it was. 10-mg. 
injections of the Blue Bayou kept the feeling at bay for shorter and shorter periods. He'd 
never heard of somebody having a convulsion from an O.D., and Fackelmann had indeed 
seemed to bounce to his version of back. 

The sun outside the big windows seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo. 

They ran out of the distilled water Fackelmann had in the mixing bowl, and 
Fackelmann took a cotton and sopped up candy-dyed urine off the floor and cooked up 
with urine. Gately appeared to himself to be repulsed by this. But there was no question 
of trying to get to the stripped kitchen for the distilled-water bottle. Gately was tying off 
his right arm with his teeth, now, his left was so useless. 

Fackelmann smelled very bad. 

Gately nodded out into a dream where he was on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides 
said PARAGON BUS LINES: THE GRAY LINE. In his stuporous recall over four years later in 
St. E.'s he realizes that this bus is the bus from the dream that wouldn't end and 
wouldn't go anywhere, but has the sickening realization that the connection between 
the two buses is itself a dream, or is in a dream, and it's now that his fever returns to 
new heights and his line on the heart monitor gets a funny little hitch like a serration at 
the 1st and 3rd nodes, which makes an amber light flash at the nurse's station down the 
hall. 

When the buzzer sounded again they were watching the flames-film late at night. Now 
poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's voice came to them through the intercom. The 
intercom and apt.-complex-front-doors-unlocker button were all the way across the 
living room by the apartment door. The ceiling bulged and receded. Fackelmann had 



made his hand into the shape of a claw and was studying the claw in the light of the TP's 
flames. Mt. Dilaudid was badly caved in on one side; a disastrous avalanche into Lake 
Urine was a possibility. P.H.-J. sounded drunk as a Nuck. She said to let her in. She said 
she knew they were in there. She used party as a verb several times. Fackelmann was 
whispering that it was a lie. Gately remembers he actually had to prod himself in the 
bladder to feel if he had to go to the bathroom. His Unit felt small and icy cold against 
his leg in the wet jeans. The ammoniac smell of urine and the breathing ceiling and 
drunk distant female voice ... Gately reached in the dark for the bars of his playpen, 
grasped them with pudgy fists, hauled himself to his feet. His rising was more like the 
floor lowering. He wobbled like a toddler. The apt. floor below him feinted right, left, 
circling for an opening to attack. The luxury windows hung with starlight. Fackelmann 
had made his claw come alive into a spider and was letting the spider climb slowly down 
his chest-area. The starlight was smeary; there were no distinct stars. Everything out of 
the line of fire of the cartridge-viewer was dark as a pocket. The buzzer sounded angry 
and the voice pathetic. Gately put his foot out in the direction of the buzzer. He heard 
Fackelmann telling his hand's claw's spider it was witnessing the birth of an empire. 
Then when Gately put his foot down there was nothing there. The floor dodged his foot 
and rushed up at him. He caught a glimpse of bulged ceiling and then the floor caught 
him in the temple. His ears belled. The impact of the floor against him shook the whole 
room. A box of laminates teetered and fell and fanned clear laminates all over the wet 
floor. The viewer fell off the wall and cast ruddled flames on the ceiling. The floor 
jammed itself against Gately, pressing in tight, and he grayed out with his scrunched 
face toward Fackelmann and the windows beyond, with Fackelmann holding the spider 
out in mid-air at him for his inspection. 


'Oh for Christ's sake then. 

'I was in two scenes. What else is in there I do not know. In the first scene I'm going 
through a revolving door. You know, around in this glass revolving door, and going 
around out as I go in is somebody I know but apparently haven't seen for a long time, 
because the recognition calls for a shocked look, and the person sees me and gives an 
equally shocked look — we're supposedly formerly very close and now haven't seen 
each other in the longest time, and the meeting is random chance. And instead of going 
in I keep going around in the door to follow the person out, which person is also still 
revolving in the door to follow me in, and we whirl in the door like that for several 
whirls.' 

'Q.' 

'The actor was male. He wasn't one of Jim's regulars. But the character I recognize in 
the door is epicene.' 

'Q.' 

'Hermaphroditic. Androgynous. It wasn't obvious that the character was supposed to 
be a male character. I assume you can Identify. 

'The other had the camera bolted down inside a stroller or bassinet. I wore an 
incredible white floor-length gown of some sort of flowing material and leaned in over 



the camera in the crib and simply apologized.' 

U' 

'Apologized. As in my lines were various apologies. "I'm so sorry. I'm so terribly sorry. I 
am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am." For a real long time. I 
doubt he used it all, I strongly doubt he used it all, but there were at least twenty 
minutes of permutations of "I'm sorry." 

U' 

'Not exactly. Not exactly veiled.' 

'Q.' 

'The point of view was from the crib, yes. A crib's-eye view. But that's not what I mean 
by driving the scene. The camera was fitted with a lens with something Jim called I think 
an auto-wobble. Ocular wobble, something like that. A ball-and-socket joint behind the 
mount that made the lens wobble a little bit. It made a weird little tiny whirring noise, I 
recollect.' 

'Q.' 

'The mount's the barrel. The mount's what the elements of the lens are arranged in. 
This crib-lens's mount projected out way farther than a conventional lens, but it wasn't 
near as big around as a catadioptric lens. It looked more like an eye-stalk or a night- 
vision scope than a lens. Long and skinny and projecting, with this slight wobble. I don't 
know much about lenses beyond basic concepts like length and speed. Lenses were 
Jim's forte. This can't be much of a surprise. He always had a whole case full. He paid 
more attention to the lenses and lights than to the camera. His other son carried them 
in a special case. Leith was cameras, the son was lenses. Lenses Jim said were what he 
had to bring to the whole enterprise. Of filmmaking. Of himself. He made all his own.' 

U' 

'Well I've never been around them. But I know there's something wobbled and weird 
about their vision, supposedly. I think the newer-born they are, the more the wobble. 
Plus I think a milky blur. Neonatal nystagmus. I don't know where I heard that term. I 
don't remember. It could have been Jim. It could have been the son. What I know about 
infants personally you couJd — it may have been an astigmatic lens. I don't think there's 
much doubt the lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field. That's what 
you could feel was driving the scene. My face wasn't important. You never got the sense 
it was meant to be captured realistically by this lens.' 

U' 

'I never saw it. I've got no idea.' 

'Q-' 

'They were buried with him. The Masters of everything unreleased. At least that was 
in his will.' 

'Q.' 

'It had nothing to do with killing himself. Less than nothing to do with it.' 

U' 

'No I never saw his fucking will. He told me. He told me things. 

'He'd stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn't take it but he'd 
made a promise.' 



U' 

'I don't know that he ever even got a finished Master. That's your story. There wasn't 
anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes. Nothing like these actual- 
perfection rumors. These are academic rumors. He talked about making something 
quote too perfect. But as a joke. He had a thing about entertainment, being criticized 
about entertainment v. nonentertainment and stasis. He used to refer to the Work itself 
as "entertainments." He always meant it ironically. Even in jokes he never talked about 
an anti-version or antidote for God's sake. He'd never carry it that far. A joke.' 

i i 

'When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally 
compelling — it was always ironic — he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go 
around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful 
for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the 
Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the 
deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release — 
it'd paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.' 

U' 

'Jim's humor was a dry humor.' 

'Q.' 

'If it got made and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried. That's 
just a guess. But I bet you.' 

l l 

'Call it an educated bet.' 'Q.' 

l l 

'Q, Q, Q.' 

'That's the part of the joke he didn't know. Where he's buried is itself buried, now. It's 
in your annulation-zone. It's not even your territory. And now if you want the thing — 
he'd enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh shit yes very much.' 


By a rather creepy coincidence, it turned out that, up in our room, Kyle Dempsy Coyle 
and Mario were also watching one of Himself's old efforts. Mario had gotten his pants 
on and was using his special tool to zip and button. Coyle looked oddly traumatized. He 
was sitting on the edge of my bed, his eyes wide and his whole body with the slight 
tremble of something hanging from the tip of a pipette. Mario greeted me by name. 
Snow continued to whirl and eddy outside the window. The position of the sun was 
impossible to gauge. The net-posts were now buried almost up to their scorecard 
attachments. The wind was piling snow up in drifts against all Academy right angles and 
then pummelling the drifts into unusual shapes. The window's whole view had the gray 
grainy quality of a poor photo. The sky looked diseased. Mario worked his tool with 
great patience. It often took him several tries to catch and engage the tool's jaws on the 
tongue of his zipper. Coyle, still wearing his apnea-mouthguard, stared at our room's 
little viewer. The cartridge was Himself's Accomplice!, a short melodrama with Cosgrove 
Watt and a boy no one had ever seen before or since. 



'You woke up early,' Mario said, smiling up from his fly. His bed was made up drum- 
tight. 

I smiled. 'Turns out I wasn't the only one.' 

'You look sad.' 

I raised my hand with the NASA glass at Coyle. 'An unexpected pleasure, K.D.C.' 

'Thtithe fickn meth,' Coyle said. 

I put the glass and toothbrush on my dresser and straightened its doily. I picked some 
clothing up and began separating it by smell into wearable and unwearable. 

'Kyle says Jim Troeltsch tore some of Ortho's face off trying to pull him off a window 
his face got glued to,' Mario said. 'And then Jim Troeltsch and Mr. Kenkle tried to put 
toilet tissue on the ripped parts, the way Tall Paul sometimes puts little bits of Kleenex 
on a shaving cut, but Ortho's face was a lot worse than a shaving cut, and they used a 
whole roll, and now Ortho's face is covered with toilet tissue, and the tissue's stuck now, 
and Ortho can't get it off, and at breakfast Mr. deLint was yelling at Ortho for letting 
them put toilet tissue on it, and Ortho ran to his and Kyle's room and locked the door, 
and Kyle doesn't have his key since the accident with the whirlpool.' 

I helped Mario on with his police lock's vest and affixed the Velcro nice and tight. 
Mario's chest is so fragile-feeling that I could feel his heartbeat's tremble through the 
vest and sweatshirt. 

Coyle removed the apnea-guard. Strings of white nighttime oral material appeared 
between his mouth and the guard as he extracted it. He looked to Mario. 'Tell him the 
worst part.' 

I was watching Coyle very closely to see what he planned to do with the sickening 
mouthpiece he held. 

'Hey Hal, your phone has messages, and Mike Pemulis came by and asked if you were 
up and about.' 

'You haven't told him the worst part of it,' Coyle said. 

'Don't even think about putting that thing down anywhere my bed, Kyle, please.' 

'I'm holding it away from everything, don't worry.' 

Mario used his tool to zip up the long curved zipper of his backpack. 'Kyle said there 
was a problem with a discharge again —' 

'So I heard,' I said. 

'— and Kyle says he woke up and Ortho was missing, and Ortho's bed was missing as 
well, so he turned on the light —' 

Coyle gestured with the appliance: 'And lo and fucking-capital-B behold.' 

'—yes and lo, 1 Mario said, 'Ortho's bed is up near the ceiling of their room. The frame 
has some way got lifted up and bolted to the ceiling sometime during the night without 
Kyle hearing it or waking up.' 

'Until the discharge, that is,' I said. 

This is it,' said Coyle. The tin cans and accusations I'm moving his stuff around are one 
thing. I'm going to Lateral Alice for a switch like Troeltsch did. This is the straw.' 

Mario said 'And his bed's up on the ceiling now, still, and if it falls it's going to go right 
through the floor and fall in Graham and Petropolis's room.' 

'He's in there right now all mummified in toilet paper, sulking, with his bed hanging 



overhead, with the door locked, so I can't even get my apnea-guard-cleaning supplies,' 
Coyle said. 

I'd heard nothing about Troeltsch apparently switching room-assignments with Trevor 
Axford. A gigantic wedge of snow slid down a steep part of the roof over our window 
and fell past the window and hit the ground below with a huge whump. For some 
reason the fact that something as major as a midterm room-switch could have taken 
place without my knowing anything about it filled me with dread. There were a few 
glitters of a possible incipient panic-attack again. 

Mario's bedside table had a tube of salve for his pelvis's burn, unevenly squeezed. 
Mario was looking at my face. 'Is it you're sad about not getting to play if the Quebec 
players are canceled?' 

'And then to crown off the whole night he ends up with his face glued to a window,' 
Coyle said disgustedly. 

'Frozen,' I corrected him. 

'Except but now listen to Stice's explanation.' 

'Let me guess,' I said. 

'For the bed hovering.' 

Mario looked at Coyle. 'You said bolted.' 

'I said presumably bolted is what I said. I said the only rationale that's possible is bolts.' 

'Let me guess,' I said. 

'Let him guess,' Mario told Coyle. 

'The Darkness thinks ghosts.' Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not 
set quite level in his face. 'Slice's explanation that he swore me to discretion but that 
was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he's been somehow selected or chosen 
to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides 
in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how 
to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to 
help his game.' One eye was subtly lower than the other, and set at a different angle. 

'Or hurt somebody else's,' I said. 

'Stice is mentally buckling,' Coyle said, still moving in. I was careful to stay just out of 
morning-breath range. 'He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to 
exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at 
the same time, and then he wouldn't let me cancel the bet when I got embarrassed for 
him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.' 

I was also keeping a careful eye on the oral appliance. 'Did you guys hear sausage- 
analog and fresh-squeezed for breakfast?' 

Mario asked again if I were sad. 

Coyle said 'I was down there. Stice's map was taking the edge off appetites all over the 
room. Then deLint started in yelling at him.' He was looking at me oddly. 'I don't see 
what's so funny about it, man.' 

Mario fell backward onto his bed and wriggled into his backpack's straps with 
practiced ease. 

Coyle said 'I don't know if I should go to Schtitt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice. 
What if they haul him off somewhere, and it's my fault?' 



'There's no denying The Dark's raised his game this fall though.' 

'There are machine messages on the machine, Hal, too,' Mario said as I held his hands 
carefully and pulled him upright. 

'What if it's the mental buckling that's raised his game?' Coyle said. 'Does it still count 
as buckling?' 

Cosgrove Watt had been one of the very few professional actors Himself ever used. 
Himself often liked to use rank amateurs; he wanted them simply to read their lines 
with an amateur's wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would 
hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. Up until 
the last phase of his career. Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality 
of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind 
the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. 
Like the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired. Himself had no interest in suckering the 
audience with illusory realism, he said. The apparent irony of the fact that it required 
nonactors to achieve this stilted artificial I'm-only-acting-here quality was one of very 
few things about Himself's early projects that truly interested academic critics. But the 
real truth was that the early Himself hadn't wanted skilled or believable acting to get in 
the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges, and this had 
always seemed to me more like Brecht than like Bresson. Conceptual and technical 
ingenuity didn't much interest entertainment-film audiences, though, and one way of 
looking at Himself's abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his last several 
projects he'd been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might 
find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting 378 that he had had 
professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place. Getting emotion out 
of either actors or audiences had never struck me as one of Himself's strengths, though I 
could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn't see a lot of what 
was right there. 

Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but he wasn't very good, and before Himself discovered 
him. Watt's career consisted mostly of regional-market commercials on broadcast 
television. His widest commercial exposure was as the Dancing Gland in a series of spots 
for a chain of East Coast endocrinology clinics. He'd worn a bulbous white costume, 
white toupee, and either a ball-and-chain or white tap-shoes, depending on whether he 
was portraying the Before-Gland or the After-Gland. Himself during one of these 
commercials had shouted Eureka at our HD Sony and travelled personally all the way to 
Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, where Watt lived with his mother and her cats, to recruit 
him. He used Cosgrove Watt in almost every project for eighteen months. Watt for a 
time was to Himself as DeNiro was to Scorsese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen. And 
up until Watt's temporal-lobe problem made his social presence unbearable. Himself 
had actually put Watt, mother, and cats up in a contiguous suite of what later became 
prorectors' rooms off the main E.T.A. tunnel, the Moms acquiescing in this but 
instructing Orin, Mario, and me never ever to remain in a room alone with Watt. 

Accomplice! was one of Watt's later roles. It is a sad and simple cartridge, and so short 
that the TP retracked to the film's beginning in almost no time. Himself's film opens as a 



beautifully sad young bus-station male prostitute, fragile and epicene and so blond even 
his eyebrows and lashes are blond, is approached in the Greyhound coffee shop by a 
flabby, dissipated-looking old specimen with gray teeth and circumflex eyebrows and 
obvious temporal-lobe difficulties. Cosgrove Watt plays the depraved older man, who 
takes the boy home to his lush but somehow scuzzy co-op apartment, in fact the place 
Himself had rented for 0. and the P.G.O.A.T. and had decorated in various gradations of 
scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects. 

The sad and beautiful Aryan-looking boy agrees to seduction by the dissipated old 
specimen, but only on the condition that the man wear protection. The boy, who is 
inarticulate, nevertheless makes this stipulation extremely clear. Safe Sex or No Sex, he 
stipulates, holding up a familiar foil packet. The hideous old specimen — now in a 
smoking jacket and ascot of apricot-colored silk, and smoking through a long white FDR- 
style filter — is offended, thinks the young male prostitute has sized him up as such a 
depraved and dissipated old specimen that he might well have It, the Human Immuno 
Virus, he thinks. His thoughts are rendered via animated thought-bubbles, which 
Himself at that late-middle stage hoped the audience would find at once self¬ 
consciously nonillusory and wildly entertaining. Watt's old specimen is grinning grayly in 
what he thinks is a pleasant way as he obligingly takes the foil packet and removes his 
ascot with what he believes to be a sensual flourish ... but inside his thought-bubble he's 
having temporal-lobe spasms of sadistic rage at the sad blond boy for appearing to size 
him up as a health risk. The obvious health risk here is referred to, both orally and in the 
thought-bubble, merely as It. For example: 'Little bastard thinks I'm so dissipated- 
looking that I've been at this sort of thing so long that I'm likely to have It, does he,' the 
old specimen thinks, his thought-bubble going all jagged with rage. 

So the flabby old specimen's now, at only six minutes into the cartridge. Track 510, 
he's now taking the sad beautiful boy, in the standard (extravagantly hunched) 
homosexual way, on the canopied bed of his tacky boudoir: the young male prostitute's 
dutifully assumed the hunched, homo-submissive position because the old ponce has 
showed him he's wearing the condom. The young prostitute, who's shown (hunched) 
only from the left side during the act itself, seems beautiful in a fragile, skinny-flanked, 
visible-ribs way, while the old specimen has the slack ass and pointy little breasts of a 
man made grotesque by years of dissipation. The intercourse scene is done under bright 
lamps, without any sort of soft focus or light-jazz background score to lighten the 
atmosphere of clinical detachment. 

What the sad blond submissive boy doesn't know is that the dissipated old specimen 
had secretly palmed an old-fashioned one-sharp-sided razor blade when he'd gone into 
his burgundy-tiled bathroom to gargle with cinnamon mouthwash and dab Calvin Klein- 
brand Pheromonic Musk on his flabby pulse-points, and as he hunches animalistically 
over the boy, he's holding the business end of the blade right up next to the sad boy's 
anus as he takes his pleasure, so that the blade's sharp side slices into both condom and 
erect phallus on each outthrust, the hideous old specimen unmindful of the blood and 
whatever pain's involved in the phallic slicing as, still hunched and thrusting, he peels 
the slit condom off like the skin of a sausage. The young male prostitute, hunched 
submissively, feels the condom-peel and then the blood and starts struggling like a 



condemned man, trying to get the condomless bleeding flabby old specimen out and off 
of him. But the boy's thin and delicate, and the old man has no trouble holding him 
down with his soft slack flabby weight until he's grimaced and grunted and taken his 
pleasure to its end. It's apparently an explicit-homosexual-sex-scene convention that 
whoever takes the submissive hunched position keeps his face turned away from the 
camera while the dominant partner's phallus is inside him, and Himself honors this 
convention, though a self-conscious footnote subtitled along the bottom of the screen 
rather irritatingly points out that the scene is honoring a convention. The prostitute 
turns his agonized face around to the camera only after the depraved older homosexual 
has removed his bloody and deflating post-pleasure phallus, brings his blond-browed 
face around to his left to face the audience in a mute howl as he collapses onto his 
delicate chest with his arms out on the satin sheets and his violated bum hiked high in 
the air, revealing now at the crease of his bum and upper hamstring a vivid purple 
splotch, more vivid than any bruise and with eight spidery tentacles radiating from it 
that are, the older man's horrified thought-bubble reveals, the unmistakable eight¬ 
legged-vivid-contusion-blotch sign of Kaposi's Sarcoma, that most universal symptom of 
It, and the boy is sobbing that the depraved old homosexual has made him — the 
prostitute — a murderer, the boy's racking sobs making the hiked bum waggle in front 
of the old specimen's horrified face as the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks 
'Murderer! Murderer! 1 over and over, so that almost a third of Accomplicel's total length 
is devoted to the racked repetition of this word — way, way longer than is needed for 
the audience to absorb the twist and all its possible implications and meanings. This was 
just the sort of issue Mario and I argued about. As I see it, even though the cartridge's 
end has both characters emoting out of every pore, Accomplice!'s essential project 
remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the 
characters but about the cartridge itself. By the time the final repetitive image darkens 
to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man's face stops spasming in 
horror and the boy shuts up, the cartridge's real tension becomes the question: Did 
Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry 'Murderer!' for some reason, i.e. 
is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and 
then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film 
aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty 
editor of his own stuff? 

It was only after Himself's death that critics and theorists started to treat this question 
as potentially important. A woman at U. Cal-lrvine had earned tenure with an essay 
arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in 
Himself's work illuminated the central conundra of millennial apres-garde film, most of 
which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so 
much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive 
commercial entertainment was so much fun. The essay was turgid to the point of being 
unreadable, besides using reference as a verb and pluralizing conundrum as conundra. 379 

From my horizontal position on the bedroom floor I could use the TP's remote to do 
everything but actually remove and insert cartridges into the drive's dock. The room's 
window was now a translucent clot of snow and steam. InterLace's Spontaneous 



Disseminations for New New England were all about weather. With our subscription 
system, E.T.A. got numerous large-market Spontaneous tracks. Each track took a slightly 
different angle on the weather. Each track had a slightly different focus. Remote reports 
from Boston's North and South shores. Providence, New Haven, and Hartford- 
Springfield served to establish a consensus that a terrific amount of snow had fallen and 
was continuing to fall and blow around and pile up. Cars were shown abandoned at 
hasty angles, and we got to see the universal white VW-Bug-shape of snow-buried cars. 
Black-helmeted gangs of adolescents on snowmobiles were shown prowling New 
Haven's streets, clearly up to no good. Pedestrians were shown bent over and 
floundering; remote-report journalists were shown trying to flounder over to them to 
get their thoughts and reflections. One floundering reporter in Quincy on the South 
Shore abruptly disappeared from view except for a hand with a microphone protruding 
bravely from some sort of sinkhole of snow; the bent backs of technicians were then 
shown floundering away from the remote camera to his aid. People with snow blowers 
stood in their own little blizzards. A pedestrian was filmed doing a spectacular pratfall. 
Cars at all angles in streets were shown with their tires spinning, shuddering in stasis. 
One track kept cutting back to a man endlessly trying to brush off a windshield that 
immediately whitened again behind each brushstroke. A bus sat with its snout in a 
monster-sized drift. ATHSCME fans atop the wall north of Ticonderoga NNY were shown 
making horizontal cyclones of snow in the air. Rouged somber women in InterLace 
studios concurred that this was the worst blizzard to hit the region since B.S. 1998 and 
the second-worst since B.S. 1993. A man in a wheelchair was shown staring stonily at a 
two-meter drift across the ramp outside the State House. Satellite maps of east-central 
O.N.A.N. showed a white formation that was spiralled and shaggy and seemed to have 
what looked like claws. It was not a Nor'easter. A hot moist ridge from the Gulf of 
Mexico and an Arctic cold front had collided over the Concavity. The storm's satellite 
photo was superimposed on schemata of the '98 ass-kicker and shown to be just about 
identical. An unwelcome old acquaintance was back, a striking woman with black bangs 
and vivid lipstick said, smiling somberly. Another track iterated: this was not a 
Nor'easter. It might have been better to say 'smiling mirthlessly.' The flat glazed eyes of 
the man brushing impotently at his windshield seemed to represent an important visual 
image; different tracks kept returning to his face. He refused to acknowledge journalists 
or requests for thoughts. His was the creepy businesslike face of someone carefully 
picking up glass in the road after an accident in which his decapitated wife's been 
impaled on the steering wheel. Another track's anchor was a beautiful black woman 
with purple lipstick and what looked like a very tall crew cut. Reports of snow came in 
from all directions. After a while I stopped keeping track of the number of times the 
word snow was repeated. All synonyms for snowstorm were rapidly exhausted. 
Helmetless thrill-seekers on snowmobiles were doing doughnuts in Copley Square 
downtown. Homeless men hunched nearly drift-covered in doorways, readying snorkels 
of rolled-up newspaper. Jim Troeltsch, now apparently a resident of B-204, had liked to 
do a pretty funny impression of an InterLace anchorwoman having an orgasm. One of 
the thrill-seekers' snowmobiles spun out of control and plunged into a drift, and the 
remote camera stayed on the drift for several moments, but nothing emerged. 



Connecticut's National Guard Reserve had been ordered to assemble but had not 
assembled because travel in Connecticut was impossible. Three men in uniforms and 
gray helmets chased two men in white helmets, all on snowmobiles, for reasons an on¬ 
site journalist described as not yet emergent. Remote-site journalists used such words 
as emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, and developing. But all this impersonal diction 
was preceded by the anchorperson's first name, as if the report were part of an intimate 
conversation. An InterLace delivery-boy was shown delivering recorded cartridges on a 
snowmobile and was described as plucky. Otis P. Lord had undergone a procedure for 
the removal of the Hitachi monitor on Thursday, LaMont Chu had said. I had never once 
ridden a snowmobile, skied, or skated: E.T.A. discouraged them. DeLint described winter 
sports as practically getting down on one knee and begging for an injury. The 
snowmobiles on the viewer all made sounds like little chain-saws that were extra 
pugnacious to compensate for being so little. There was a poignant shot of a stuck plow 
in Northampton. 'Individuals who are not with emergency reasons to travel' (sic) were 
being officially discouraged from travelling by a state trooper in a hat with a chinstrap. A 
Brockton man in a Lands' End parka took a fall too burlesque to have been unstaged. 

I could barely recall the '98 blizzard. The Academy had been open for only a few 
months. I remember the edges of the shaved hilltop were still square and steep and 
striped in sedimentary layers, final construction delayed by some nasty piece of 
litigation from the VA hospital below. The storm came barrelling in southeast from 
Canada in March. Dwight Flechette and Orin and the other players had had to be led to 
the Lung roped together, single file, Schtitt in the lead carrying a highway flare. A couple 
photos hung in C.T.'s waiting room. The last boy along the rope disappeared into a 
forlorn gray whirl. The Lung's new bubble had had to be taken down and fixed when 
snow-weight stove it in on one side. The T stopped running. I remember some of the 
younger players had cried and sworn up and down that the blizzard wasn't their fault. 
For days snow churned steadily out of a graphite sky. Himself had sat in a spindle- 
backed chair, at the same living-room window C.T. now uses for advanced worry, and 
aimed a series of nondigital cameras at the mounting snow. After years in which his 
consuming obsession was the establishment of E.T.A., Orin said. Himself had started in 
with the film-obsession almost immediately after the Academy was up and running. Orin 
has said the Moms had assumed the film thing was a passing obsession. Himself had 
seemed interested mostly in the lenses and rasters 380 at first, and in the consequences 
of their modification. He sat in that chair throughout the whole storm, sipping brandy 
from a one-handed snifter, his long legs not quite covered by a plaid blanket. His legs 
had seemed to me almost endlessly long back then. He always seemed to be right on 
the edge of coming down with something. His record up until then indicated that he 
remained obsessed with something until he became successful at it, then transferred his 
obsession to something else. From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial 
optics to tennis-pedagogy to film. In the chair during the blizzard he'd had beside him 
several different types of camera and a large leather case. The inside of the case was 
striated with lenses down both sides. He used to let Mario and me put different lenses 
in our eyes and squint to hold them, imitating Schtitt. 

One way of looking at the film-obsession's endurance is that Himself was never really 



successful or accomplished at filmmaking. This was something else on which Mario and I 
had agreed to disagree. 

It took almost a year to complete the move from Weston to E.T.A. The Moms had 
attachments in Weston and she drew things out. I was pretty small. I lay flat on my back 
on our room's carpet and tried to recall details of our home in Weston, twidgeling the 
TP's remote with my thumb. I do not have Mario's head for remembered detail. One 
dissemination-track simply panned the metro-Boston sky and horizons from atop the 
Hancock tower. On the FM band, WYYY was apparently doing its weather-report via 
mimesis, broadcasting raw static while the student staff doubtless did bongs in 
celebration of the storm and then went up sliding around the Union's cerebral rooftop. 
The Hancock camera's pan included the sinciput of the M.l.T. Union, its roof's 
convolutions filling with snow ahead of the rest of it, creepy filigrees of white against 
the roof's deep gray. 

Our subdorm room's only carpet was an oversized corruption of the carpet page from 
the Lindisfarne Gospels in which you had to look very closely to make out the tiny 
pornographic scenes in the Byzantine weave surrounding the cross. I'd acquired the 
carpet years ago during a period of intense interest in Byzantine pornography inspired 
by what I'd seen as a titillating reference in the O.E.D. I too had moved serially between 
obsessions, as a child. I adjusted my angle on the carpet. I was trying to align myself 
along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped. 
Meaning the grain, not the world. I realized I could not distinguish my own visual 
memories of the Weston house from my memories of hearing Mario's detailed reports 
of his memories. I remember a late-Victorian three-level on a low quiet street of elms, 
hyperfertilized lawns, tall homes with oval windows and screen porches. One of the 
street's homes had a pineapple finial. Only the street itself was low; the lots were 
humped up high and the houses so tall the broad street seemed nevertheless 
constricted, a sort of affluence-flanked defile. It seemed always to be summer or spring. 
I could remember the Moms's voice high overhead at a screen-porch door, calling us in 
as dusk drifted down and leaded fanlights began to light up at homes' doors in some 
sort of linear sync. Either our driveway or another driveway flanked with whitewashed 
stones the shapes of beads or drops. The Moms's intricate garden in a backyard 
enclosed by a fencework of trees. Himself on the screen porch, stirring a gin and tonic 
with his finger. The Moms's dog S. Johnson, not yet neutered, confined by psychosis in a 
sort of large fenced pen abutting the garage, running around and around the pen when 
thunder sounded. The smell of Noxzema: Himself behind Orin in the upstairs bathroom, 
towering over and down, teaching Orin to shave against the grain, upward. I remember 
S. Johnson leaping up on his hind legs and sort of playing the fence with his paws as 
Mario approached the pen: the rattling chain-link's pitch. The circle of earth worn bare 
by S.J.'s orbit in the pen when thunder sounded or planes crossed overhead. Himself sat 
low in chairs and could cross his legs and still have both feet flat on the floor. He'd hold 
his chin in his hand while he looked at you. My memories of Weston seemed like 
tableaux. They seemed more like snapshots than films. A weird isolated memory of 
summertime gnats knitting the air above the shaggy animal-head of a neighbor's topiary 
hedge. Our own round shrubs trimmed flat as tabletops by the Moms. More horizontals. 



The chatter of hedge-clippers, their power-cords bright orange. I had to swallow spit 
with almost every breath. I remembered climbing with a dawdler's heavy tread the 
cement steps up from the street to a gambrel-roofed late-Victorian whose narrow 
height from the steps gave it the distended look of thick liquid hanging: gingerbread 
eaves, undulate shingles of weathered red, zinc gutters the Moms's graduate students 
came and kept clean. A blue star in the front window and the words BLOCK MOTHER, 
which had always suggested either a rectangular woman or some type of football-crowd 
cheer. The inside cool and dim and a smell of Lemon Pledge. I had no visual memories of 
my mother without white hair; all that varied was the length. A touch-tone phone, with 
a cord running into the wall, on a horizontal surface in a recessed alcove near the front 
door. Cork floors and pre-mounted shelving of woody-smelling wood. The chilling 
framed print of Lang directing Metropolis in 1924. 381 A hulking black chest with strap- 
hinges of brass. A few of Himself's old heavy tennis trophies as bookends on the 
mounted shelving. An etagere filled with old-fashioned magnetic videos in bright 
adverting boxes, a cluster of blue-and-white delfts on the etagere's top shelf that had 
dwindled as one figurine after another got knocked off by Mario, stumbling or shoved. 
The blue-white chairs with the protective plastic that made your legs sweat. A divan 
done in some sort of burlapesque Iranian wool dyed to the color of sand mixed with ash 
— this may have been a neighbor's divan. Some cigarette burns in the fabric of the 
divan's arms. Books, videotapes, kitchen's cans — all alphabetized. Everything painfully 
clean. Several spindle-backed captain's chairs in contrasting fruit-woods. A surreal 
memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane. A massive 
stereo television console of whose gray-green eye I was afraid when the television was 
off. Some of the memories have to be confabulated or dreamed — the Moms would 
never have had a divan with burns in it. 

A picture window east, the direction of Boston, with claret-colored figures and a blue 
sun all suspended in a web of lead. The candy-colored summer sunrise through that 
window as I watched television in the A.M. 

The tall thin quiet man. Himself, with his razor-burn and bent glasses and chinos too 
short, whose neck was slender and shoulders sloped, who slumped in candied east- 
window sunlight with his tailbone supported by windowsills, meekly stirring a glass of 
something with his finger while the Moms stood there telling him she'd long-since 
abandoned any reasonable hope that he could hear what she was telling him — this 
silent figure, of whom I still remember mostly endless legs and the smell of Noxzema 
shave-cream, seems, still, impossible to reconcile with the sensibility of something like 
Accomplice! It was impossible to imagine Himself conceiving of sodomy and razors, no 
matter how theoretically. I lay there and could almost remember Orin telling me 
something almost moving that Himself had once told him. Something to do with 
Accomplice! The memory hung somewhere just out of conscious reach, and its tip-of- 
the-tongue inaccessibility felt too much like the preface to another attack. I accepted it: 

I could not remember. 

Off down the Weston street a church with an announcement-board in the grass out 
front — white plastic letters on a slotted black surface — and at least once Mario and I 
stood watching a goatish man change the letters and thus the announcement. One of 



the first occasions where I remember reading something involved the announcement- 
board announcing: 

LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN 

with the letters all spaced far out like that. A big fresh-cement-colored church, liberal 
with glass, denomination not recalled, but built in what was, in the B.S. 80's probably, 
modern — a parabolic poured-concrete shape billowed and peaked like a cresting wave. 
A suggestion in it of some paranormal wind somewhere that could make concrete billow 
and pop like a tucking sail. 

Our own subdorm room now has three of those old Weston captain's chairs whose 
backs dent your spine if you don't fit it carefully between two spindles. We have an 
unused wicker basket for laundry on which are stacked some corduroy spectation- 
pillows. Floor plans for Hagia Sophia and S. Simeon at Qal'at Si'man on the wall over my 
bed, the really prurient part of Consummation of the Levirates over the chairs, also from 
the old interest in Byzantinalia. Something about the stiff and dismantled quality of 
maniera greca porn: people broken into pieces and trying to join, etc. At the foot of 
Mario's bed a surplus-store trunk for his own film equipment and a canvas director's 
chair where he's always laid out his police lock, lead weights, and vest for the night. A 
fiberboard stand for the compact TP and viewer, and a stenographer's chair for using 
the TP to type. Five total chairs in a room where no one ever sits in a chair. As in all the 
subdorm rooms and hallways, a guilloche ran around our walls half a meter from the 
ceiling. New E.T.A.s always drove themselves bats counting their room's guilloche's 
interwoven circles. Our room had 811 and truncated bits of -12 and -13, two left halves 
stuck like open parentheses up in the southwest corner. Between the ages of eleven and 
thirteen I'd had a plaster knock-off of a lewd Constantine frieze, the emperor with a 
hyperemic organ and an impure expression, hung by two hooks from the guilloche's 
lower border. Now I couldn't for the life of me recall what I'd done with the frieze, or 
which Byzantine seraglio the original had decorated. There had been a time when data 
like these were instantly available. 

The Weston living room had had an early version of Himself's full-spectrum cove 
lighting and at one end an elevated fieldstone fireplace with a big copper hood that 
made a wonderful ear-splitting drum-head for wooden spoons, with memories of some 
foreign adult I didn't recognize grinding at her temples and pleading Do Stop. The 
Moms's jungle of Green Babies had spread out into the room from another corner, the 
plants' pots on stands of various heights, hanging in nests of twine suspended from 
clamps, arrayed at eye-height from projecting trellises of white-painted iron, all in the 
otherworldly glow of a white-hooded tube of ultraviolet light hung with thin chains from 
the ceiling. Mario can recall violet-lit laces of ferns and the wet meaty gloss of rubber- 
tree leaves. 

And a coffee table of green-shot black marble, too heavy to move, on whose corner 
Mario knocked out a tooth after what Orin swore up and down was an accidental shove. 

Mrs. Clarke's varicotic calves at the stove. The way her mouth overhead would 
disappear when the Moms reorganized something in the kitchen. My eating mold and 
the Moms's being very upset that I'd eaten it — this memory was of Orin's telling the 
story; I had no childhood memory of eating fungus. 



My trusty NASA glass still rested on my chest, rising when my rib cage rose. When I 
looked down my own length, the glass's round mouth was a narrow slot. This was 
because of my optical perspective. There was a concise term for optical perspective that 
I again could not quite make resolve. 

What made it hard really to recall our old house's living room was that so many of its 
appointments were now in the living room of the Headmaster's House, the same and 
yet altered, and by more than rearrangement. The onyx coffee table Mario had fallen 
against (specular is what refers to optical perspective; it came to me after I stopped 
trying to recall it) now supported compact disks and tennis magazines and a cello¬ 
shaped vase of dried eucalyptus, and the red-steel stand for the family Xmas tree, when 
in season. The table had been a wedding gift from Himself's mother, who died of 
emphysema shortly before Mario's surprise birth. Orin reports she'd looked like an 
embalmed poodle, all neck-tendons and tight white curls and eyes that were all pupil. 
The Moms's birth-mother had died in Quebec of an infarction when she — the Moms — 
was eight, her father during her sophomore year at McGill under circumstances none of 
us knew. The hydrant-sized Mrs. Tavis was still alive and somewhere in Alberta, the 
original L'Islet potato farm now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost. 

Orin and Bain et al. at Family Trivia during that terrible first year's blizzard, Orin 
imitating the Moms's high breathy 'My son ate this! God, please!,' never tiring of it. 

Orin had liked also to recreate for us the spooky kyphotic hunch of Himself's mother, 
in her wheelchair, beckoning him closer with a claw, the way she seemed always caved 
in over and around her chest as if she'd been speared there. An air of deep dehydration 
had hung about her, he said, as if she osmosized moisture from whoever came near. She 
spent her last few years living in the Marlboro St. brownstone they'd had before Mario 
and I were born, tended by a gerontologic nurse Orin said always wore the expression of 
every post-office mug shot you've ever seen. When the nurse was off, a small silver bell 
was apparently hung from an arm of the old lady's wheelchair, to be rung when she 
could not breathe. A cheery silver tinkle announcing asphyxiation upstairs. Mrs. Clarke 
would still pale whenever Mario asked about her. 

It's become easier to see the climacteric changes in the Moms's own body since she 
began confining herself more and more to the Headmaster's House. This occurred after 
Himself's funeral, but in stages — the gradual withdrawal and reluctance to leave the 
grounds, and the signs of aging. It is hard to notice what you see every day. None of the 
physical changes has been dramatic — her nerved-up dancer's legs becoming hard, 
stringy, a shrinking of the hips and a girdly thickening at the waist. Her face settles a 
little lower on her skull than it did four years ago, with a slight bunching under the chin 
and an emerging potential for something pruny happening around her mouth, in time, I 
thought I could see. 

The word that best connoted why the glass's mouth looked slotty was probably 
foreshortened. 

The Q.R.S. Infantilist would no doubt join the old grief-therapist in asking how 
watching one's Moms begin to age makes you feel inside. Questions like these become 
almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All, since this appears as a 
textbook lie under the therapeutic model. The brutal questions are the ones that force 



you to lie. 

Either our old kitchen or a neighbor's kitchen panelled with walnut and hung with 
copper pate-molds and herbal sprigs. An unidentified woman — not Avril or Mrs. Clarke 
— standing in that kitchen in snug cherry slacks, loafers over bare feet, waggling a 
mixing spoon, laughing at something, a long-tailed comet of flour on her cheek. 

It occurred to me then with some force that I didn't want to play this afternoon, even 
if some sort of indoor exhibition-meet came off. Not even neutral, I realized. I would on 
the whole have preferred not to play. What Schtitt might have to say to that, v. what 
Lyle would say. I was unable to stay with the thought long enough to imagine Himself's 
response to my refusal to play, if any. 

But this was the man who made Accomplice!, whose sensibility informed the hetero¬ 
hardcore Mobius Strips and the sado-periodontal Fun with Teeth and several other 
projects that were just thoroughgoingly nasty and sick. 

Then it occurred to me that I could walk outside and contrive to take a spill, or 
squeeze out the window on the rear staircase of HmH and fall several meters to the 
steep embankment below, being sure to land on the bad ankle and hurt it, so I'd not 
have to play. That I could carefully plan out a fall from the courts' observation transom 
or the spectators' gallery of whatever club C.T. and the Moms sent us to to help raise 
funds, and fall so carefully badly I'd take out all the ankle's ligaments and never play 
again. Never have to, never get to. I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and 
be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant. Becoming the object of 
compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. 

I couldn't stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose 
disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid (or forgo). 

And then out of nowhere it returned to me, the moving thing Himself had said to Orin. 
This was concerning 'adult' films, which from what I've seen are too downright sad to be 
truly nasty, or even really entertainment, though the adjective adult is kind of a 
misnomer. 

Orin had told me that once he and Smothergill, Flechette, and I think Penn's older 
brother had gotten hold of a magnetic video of some old hardcore X-film — The Green 
Door or Deep Throat, one of those old chestnuts of cellulite and jism. There were 
excited plans to convene in V.R.3 and watch the thing in secret after Lights Out. The 
Viewing Rooms at that point had broadcast televisions and magnetic VCR-devices, 
instructional mag-vids from Galloway and Braden, etc. Orin and co. were all around 
fifteen at the time, bombed by their own glands — they were pop-eyed at the prospect 
of genuine porn. There were rules about videos' suitability for viewing in the Honor 
Code, but Himself was not noted for his discipline, and Schtitt didn't yet have deLint — 
the first generation of E.T.A.s did pretty much as they pleased off-court, as long as they 
were discreet. 

Nevertheless, word about this 'adult' film got around, and somebody — probably 
Mary Esther Thode's sister Ruth, then a senior and insufferable — ratted the boys' 
viewing-plans out to Schtitt, who took the matter to Himself. Orin said he was the only 
one Himself called into the Headmaster's office, which in that era had only one door, 
which Himself asked Orin to close. Orin recalled seeing none of the unease that always 



accompanied Himself's attempts at stern discipline. Instead Himself invited Orin to sit 
and gave him a lemon soda and stood facing him, leaning back slightly so that the front 
edge of his desk supported him at the tailbone. Himself took his glasses off and 
massaged his closed eyes delicately — almost treasuringly, his old eyeballs — in the way 
Orin knew signified that Himself was ruminative and sad. One or two soft interrogatives 
brought the whole affair out in the open. You could never lie to Himself; somehow you 
just never had the heart. Whereas Orin made almost an Olympic sport of lying to the 
Moms. Anyway, Orin quickly confessed to everything. 

What Himself said then moved him, Orin told me. Himself told Orin he wasn't going to 
forbid them to watch the thing if they really wanted to. But just please to keep it 
discreet, just Bain and Smothergill and Orin's immediate circle, nobody younger, and 
nobody whose parents might hear about it, and for God's sake don't let your mother get 
wind. But that Orin was old enough to make his own entertainment-decisions, and if he 
decided he wanted to watch the thing... And so on. 

But Himself said that if Orin wanted his personal, fatherly as opposed to headmasterly, 
take on it, then he, Orin's father — though he wouldn't forbid it — would rather Orin 
didn't watch a hard-porn film yet. He said this with such reticent earnestness there was 
no way Orin couldn't ask him how come. Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up 
several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving 
Orin the wrong idea about having sex. He said he'd personally prefer that Orin wait until 
he'd found someone he loved enough to want to have sex with and had had sex with 
this person, that he'd wait until he'd experienced for himself what a profound and really 
quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was presented as 
nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. 
He said he supposed he was afraid that something like The Green Door would give Orin 
an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality. 

What poor old 0. claimed to have found so moving was Himself's assumption that 0. 
was still cherry. What moved me to feel sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious 
that that had nothing to do with what Himself was trying to talk about. It was the most 
open I'd ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, 
somehow, that he'd wasted it on Orin. I'd never once had a conversation nearly that 
open or intimate with Himself. My most intimate memory of Himself was the 
scratchiness of his jaw and the smell of his neck when I fell asleep at supper and he 
carried me upstairs to bed. His neck was thin but had a good meaty warm smell; I now 
for some reason associate it with the odor of Coach Schtitt's pipe. 

I tried briefly to picture Ortho Stice hoisting his bunk up and bolting it to the ceiling 
without waking Coyle. Our room's door remained ajar from Mario's exit with Coyle to 
find someone with a master key. Yardguard and Wagenknecht's heads popped in briefly 
and urged me to come have a look at The Darkness's ruined map and withdrew when 
they got no response. The second floor was pretty quiet; most of them were still 
dawdling at breakfast, awaiting some announcement on the weather and Quebecois 
squads. Snow hit the windows with a gritty sound. The angle of the wind had made a 
kind of whistle out of one corner of the subdorm building, and the whistling came and 
went. 



Then I heard John Wayne's stride in the hall outside, light and even and easy on floors, 
the stride of a guy with stellar calf-development. I heard his low sigh. Then, though the 
door was too far behind me to see, for a moment or two I could somehow tell for sure 
that John Wayne's head was inside the open door. I could feel it clearly, almost 
painfully. He was looking down at me lying there on the Lindisfarne carpet. There was 
none of the gathering tension of a person deciding whether or not to speak. I could feel 
my throat's equipment move when I swallowed. John Wayne and I never had much to 
say to one another. There wasn't even hostility between us. He ate dinner with us at 
HmH every so often because he and the Moms were tight. The Moms made little 
attempt to disguise her attachment to Wayne. Now his breathing behind me was light 
and very even. No waste, complete utilization of each breath. 382 

Of us three, it was Mario who had spent the most time with Himself, sometimes 
travelling with him for location-work. I had no idea what they spoke about together, or 
how openly. None of us had ever pressed Mario to say much about it. It occurred to me 
to wonder why this was so. 

I decided to get up but then did not in fact get up. Orin was convinced that Himself 
was a virgin when he met the Moms in his late thirties. I find this pretty hard to believe. 
Orin will also grant that there's no doubt Himself was faithful to the Moms right up to 
the end, that his attachment to Orin's fiancee was not sexual. I had a sudden and lucid 
vision of the Moms and John Wayne locked in a sexual embrace of some kind. John 
Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after 
his arrival. They were both expatriates. I hadn't yet been able to identify a strong feeling 
one way or the other about the liaison, nor about Wayne himself, except for admiring 
his talent and total focus. I did not know whether Mario knew of the liaison, to say 
nothing of poor C.T. 

It was impossible for me to imagine Himself and the Moms being explicitly sexual 
together. I bet most children have this difficulty where their parents are concerned. Sex 
between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of 
doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it. I imagined the Moms's eyes open and staring 
blankly at the ceiling the whole time. I imagined C.T. never once shutting up, talking 
around and around whatever was taking place between them. My coccyx had gone 
numb from the pressure of the floor through the thin carpet. Bain, graduate students, 
grammatical colleagues, Japanese fight-choreographers, the hairy-shouldered Ken N. 
Johnson, the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing — these encounters 
were imaginable but somehow generic, mostly a matter of athleticism and flexibility, 
different configurations of limbs, the mood one more of cooperation than complicity or 
passion. I tended to imagine the Moms staring expressionlessly at ceilings throughout. 
The complicit passion would have come after, probably, with her need to be sure the 
encounter was hidden. Peterson-allusions notwithstanding, I wondered about some 
hazy connection between this passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself had 
made so many films titled Cage , and that the amateur player he became so attached to 
was the veiled girl, Orin's love. I wondered whether it was possible to lie supine and 
throw up without aspirating vomit or choking. The plumed spout of a whale. The 
tableau of John Wayne and my mother in my imagination was not very erotic. The 



image was complete and sharply focused but seemed stilted, as if composed. She 
reclines against four pillows, at an angle between seated and supine, staring upward, 
motionless and pale. Wayne, slim and brown-limbed, smoothly muscled, also 
completely motionless, lies over her, his untanned bottom in the air, his blank narrow 
face between her breasts, his eyes unblinking and his thin tongue outthrust like a 
stunned lizard's. They stay just like that. 


She wasn't dumb — she figured it was likely that they'd let her loose just to see where 
she'd go. 

She went home. She went to the House. She got one of the last trains before they 
closed the T, probably. It took forever to get from Comm. Ave. down to Enfield Marine 
in her clogs and skirt in the snow, and melt soaked the veil and made it adhere to the 
features below. She'd been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside- 
linebacker of a federal lady anyway. She looked now just like a linen-pale version of 
what she really looked like. But there was no one about in the snow. She figured if she 
could speak with Pat M. Pat M. might be prevailed upon to put her in quarantine with 
Clenette and Yolanda, not let in no law. She could tell Pat about the wheelchairs, try to 
convince her to dismantle the ramp. The visibility was so bad she didn't see it til she 
cleared the Shed, the Middlesex County Sheriff's car, fiercely snow-tired, lights going 
bluely, parked idling in the roadlet outside the ramp, wipers on Occasional, a uniform at 
the wheel absently feeling his face. 


He says 'I'm Mikey, alcoholic and addict and a sick fuck, you know what I'm saying?' 

And they laugh and shout out 'You definitely are' as he stands there rocking the 
podium slightly, blurred a bit through the linen, smearing one side of his face with a 
laborer's hand as he tries to think what to say. It's another of these round-robin-speaker 
deals, each speaker picking the next from the smoky lunchtime crowd, jogging up to the 
fiberboard podium trying to think what to say, and how, for the five minutes each is 
allotted. The chairperson at the table up by the podium has a clock and a novelty-shop 
gong. 

'Well,' he says, "well so I seen some of the old Mikey come back out yesterday, you 
know what I'm saying? Fucking scared me to see it. What it was, I was going to take my 
kid down to the lanes and bowl a couple. With my kid. Who he just got the cast off. So 
I'm all happy and whatnot, got the day off, see the kid. Quality sober time with the kid. 
So on and so forth. So I'm all on the happy wagon and like that, about seeing the kid, 
you know what I'm saying? So, what, so I call up my cunt of a sister. He's living back with 
them, with Ma and my sister, so I'm calling up my sister to see can I come get the kid at 
such-and-such time and whatnot. Because you know how the judge said I got to get one 
of them's fucking consent to even see my kid. You know what I'm saying? Because of the 
restraining order on the old Mikey, from before. I got to get their permission. And I, 
what, accept that, I say OK, so I'm calling up all accepting and on the happy wagon for 
my sister to consent, and she out of the goodness of her heart she makes me wait while 



she says she's got to check it with Ma. And they consent, finally. And I, what, accept 
that, you know what I'm saying? And I say I was going to be there at such-and-such time 
and whatnot, and my sister says ain't I even going to say thank you? Like with the 
attitude, you know what I'm saying? And I say't the fuck, what, you want a fucking 
medal for letting me see my own kid? And the cunt hangs up on me. Oh. Fucking oh. 
Ever since the judge with the order, it's with the attitude over there, the cunt and Ma 
both. So after she just hangs up on me a little of the old Mikey I think starts to come out 
and I go over there and yes all right I got to be honest I do I park on the grass of their 
fucking lawn, and I go up and go up and I see her and I'm like Fuck you you cunt, and 
Ma's in the hall behind her in the door, I go Fucking hang up on me why don't you, you 
should go for some fucking counselling you know what I'm saying? And they don't 
neither one of them like that verbal comment too much, right? The cunt almost starts 
laughing and goes, like, I'm telling her to go for counseling?' 

Crowd-laughter. 

'I mean I ain't exactly coming over there with long-term sobriety, right? And I accept 
that. But the cunt's got the hook on the door and she's going Who the fuck are you to be 
telling me to go for fucking counselling after the sick fucking little like stunt you and that 
bimbo pulled on that kid who only just now even got the cast off? Oh, and no sign of the 
fucking kid anywhere. Just her and Ma through the screen door, all over the place with 
the attitude. And now they tell me to get the fuck off their porch. No they tell me, as in 
like Permission Denied, consent to see my own kid fucking refused. And the cunt still in 
her fucking bathrobe after noon, and Ma behind her half in the bag already and hanging 
on to the fucking wall. You know what I'm saying? My serenity's like: See yaa! And I say 
up boat- ayouse's asses. I'm here for my goddamn kid. And now my sister says she's 
going for the phone, and Ma's saying The fuck, get the fuck out, Mikey. And plus did I 
mention no sign of the kid, and I ain't to even like touch the screen door, not without 
consent. And I'm wanting to fucking kill somebody here, you know what I'm saying? And 
my sister's getting the antenna out on the phone, and so I go OK I'm fucking leaving, but 
I like grab my balls at the both of them and go Eat me the boatayouse, you know what 
I'm saying? Cause now it's the old Mikey back, and now / got with the attitude now, 
also. I'm wanting to light my cunt of a sister up so bad I can't hardly see to get the truck 
off the lawn and leave. But and so and but so I'm driving back home, and I'm so mad I all 
of a sudden try and pray. And I try and pray, driving along and whatnot, and it comes to 
me I see irregarding of their fucked-up attitude I still need to go back and apologize 
irregardless, for grabbing my balls at them, cause that's old fucking behavior. I see for 
my own sobriety's sake I need to go back and try and say I'm sorry. The thought of it just 
about makes me puke, you know what I'm — but I go back and pull the truck up out 
front on the street and pray and go back up on the porch, and I fucking apologize, and I 
go to my sister Please can I at least see the kid to see the cast off, and the cunt goes 
Fuck you, get the fuck out, we don't accept your fucking apology. And no sign of Ma, and 
the fucking kid there's no sign of him, so I got to accept her word and don't even know 
for sure if the cast is even off. But why I needed to share I think is it scared me. / scared 
me, you know what I'm saying? I was at the counsellor's after and I told him I go I got to 
get some kind of hold on this fucking temper or I'm going to end up right back in front of 



the fucking judge for lighting somebody up again, you know what I'm saying? And God 
fucking forbid it should be somebody that's in my family, because I been that route once 
too many times already. And I go like Am I nuts. Dr., or what? Do I got a like death-wish 
or what? You know what I'm saying? The cast just only now finally comes off and I'm 
wanting to light up the fucking cunt that's got to consent I should get closer than a 
hundred m.'s to the kid? Is it like I'm trying to set myself up for a drink or what exactly is 
it with this spring-loaded temper, if I'm sober? The temper and judge is why I fucking got 
sober in the first place. So what the fuck is this? Well fuck me. I'm just grateful I got 
some of that out. It's been up in my head, renting space, you know what I'm saying? I 
see Vinnie's getting ready to fucking gong me. I want to hear from Tommy E. back there 
against the wall. Yo Tommy! What are you, spanking the hog back there or what? But 
I'm just glad to be here. I just wanted to get some of that shit out.' 


The man's pants' crease was gone at the knee and his Cardin topcoat looked slept in. 

'It was good of you to grant me an easement.' 

Pat M. tried to recross her legs and shrugged. 'You said you weren't here 
professionally. 1 

'Good of you to believe me.' The Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County's 4th 
Circuit up on the near North Shore's hat was a good dress Stetson with a feather in the 
band. He held it up in his lap by the brim and slowly rotated it by moving his fingers 
along the brim. He'd re-crossed his legs twice. 'We met you and Mars at the Marblehead 
Regatta for the McDonald's House thing for children, not this summer but either the 
sum—' 

'I know who you are.' Pat's husband wasn't a celebrity but knew a lot of local 
celebrities, from the mint-reconditioned-sports-car upscale network around Boston. 

'Well it's good of you. I'm here about one of your residents.' 

'But not professionally,' Pat said. It wasn't a question or verification. She was cool steel 
when it came to protecting the residents and House. Then back home in her own home 
she was a shattered husk of a wreck. 

'Frankly I'm not sure why I am here. You're just down the hill from the hospital. I've 
been up at Saint Elizabeth's off and on for three days. Perhaps 1 need to simply air this. 
The 5th District boys — the P.D.s — speak well of the place. Your House here. Perhaps I 
need simply to share this, to work up the nerve. My sponsor's no help. He's simply said 
do it if you want to have any hope of things getting better.' 

Anything less than a combination thoroughgoing professional and AA-longtimer would 
have at least hiked an eyebrow at one of the most powerful and remorseless constables 
in three counties saying sponsor. 

'It's Phob-Comp-Anon,' the A.D.A. said. 'I went through Choices 383 last winter and have 
been working a program of recovery in Phob-Comp-Anon a day at a time to the best of 
my ability ever since then.' 

'I see.' 

'It's Tooty,' the A.D.A. said. He did a pause with his eyes closed and then smiled, still 
with his eyes closed. 'It is, rather, me, and my enmeshment-issues with Tooty's... 



condition. 1 

Phob-Comp-Anon was a decade-old 12-Step splinter from Al-Anon, for codependency- 
issues surrounding loved ones who were cripplingly phobic or compulsive, or both. 

'It's a long story and not a particularly interesting one. I'm sure,' the A.D.A. said. 
'Suffice to say that Tooty's been in torment over some oral-dental-hygienic-violation 
issues that have their roots we're discovering in some issues from a childhood whose 
dysfunctionality we — well, which she'd been in denial about for quite some time. It 
doesn't matter what. My program's my own. The hiding the car keys, the cutting off her 
credit with different dentists, the checking the wastebaskets for new brush-wrappers 
five times an hour — my unmanageability's my own, and I'm doing what I can, day by 
day, to let go and detach with love.' 

'I think I understand.' 

'I'm working Nine, now.' 

Pat said 'The Ninth Step.' 

The A.D.A. reversed the hat's rotation by moving his fingers in the opposite direction 
along the brim. 

'I'm trying to make direct amends to whosoever my Fourth- and Eighth-Step work's 
revealed I've harmed, except in cases where to do so would injure them or others.' 

A tiny spiritual slip from Pat in the form of a patronizing smile. 'I have a nodding 
acquaintance with Nine myself.' 

The A.D.A. was barely there, his eyes fixed and dilated. The remorselessly ingathered 
eyebrow-angle Pat had always seen in his photos was completely reversed. The brows 
now formed a little peaked roof of pathos. 

'One of your residents,' he said. 'A Mr. Gately, Court-Remanded out of the 5th Circuit, 
Peabody I believe. Or Staff counselor, alumni, some status.' 

Pat made a kind of exaggerated innocent trying-to-place-the-name-type face. 

The A.D.A. said 'It doesn't matter. I'm aware of your constraints. I want nothing from 
you on him. It's him I've been up at Saint Elizabeth's to see.' 

Pat allowed herself one slightly flared nostril at this news. 

The A.D.A. leaned forward, hat rotating between his calves, elbows on knees in the 
odd defecatory posture men used to try to communicate earnestness in their sharing. 
'I'm told — I owe the — Mr. Gately — an amend. I need to make an amend to Mr. 
Gately.' He looked up. 'You too — this remains within these walls, as if it were my 
anonymity. All right?' 

'Yes.' 

'It doesn't matter what for. I blamed the — I've harbored a resentment, against this 
Gately, concerning an incident I'd considered responsible for making Tooty's phobia 
reflare. It doesn't matter. The specifics, or his culpability or exposure to prosecution in 
the incident — I've come to believe these don't matter. I've harbored this resentment. 
The kid's picture's been up on my Priority-board with the pictures of far more 
objectively important threats to the public weal. I've been biding my time, waiting to get 
him. This latest incident — no, don't say it, you needn't say a thing — seemed like just 
the opening. My last chance went federal and then//zz/ed.' 

Pat allowed herself a very slightly puzzled forehead. 



The man waved the hat. 'It doesn't matter. I've hated, hated this man. You know that 
Enfield's Suffolk County. This incident with the Canadian assault, the alleged firearm, the 
witnesses who can't depose because of their own exposure... My sponsor, my entire 
Group — they say if I act on the resentment I'm doomed. I'll get no relief. It won't help 
Tooty. Tooty's lips will still be white pulp from the peroxide, her enamel in tatters from 
the constant irrational brushing and brushing and brushing and —' he clamped his fine 
clean hand over his mouth and produced a high-pitched noise that frankly gave Pat the 
howlers, his right eyelid twitching. 

He took several breaths. 'I need to let it go. I've come to believe that. Not just the 
prosecution — that's the easy part. I've already tossed the file, though whatever civil 
liability the — Mr. Gately might face is another matter, not my concern. It's so damnably 
ironic. The man's going to two-step out of at the very least a probation-violation and 
prosecution on all his old highly convictable charges because I have to pitch the case, for 
the sake of my own recovery, I, who wanted nothing so much as to see this man locked 
down in a cell with some psychopathic cellmate for the rest of his natural life, who 
shook my fist at the ceiling and vowed —' and again the noise, this time muffled by the 
fine hat and so less well-muffled, his shoes pounding a little on the carpet in rage so that 
Pat's dogs raised their heads and looked quizzically at him, and the epileptic one had a 
very small loud-noise seizure. 

'I hear you saying this is very hard but you've decided what you need to do.' 

'Worse,' the A.D.A. said, blotting his brow with an unfolded handkerchief. 'I have to 
make an amend, my sponsor's said. If I want the growth that promises real relief. I have 
to make direct amends, put out my hand and say that I'm sorry and ask the man's 
forgiveness for my own failure to forgive. This is the only way I'll be able to forgive him. 
And I can't detach with love from Tooty's phobic compulsion until I've forgiven the b — 
the man I've blamed in my heart.' 

Pat looked him in the eye. 

'Of course I can't say I've tossed the Canadian case's file, I needn't go that far they say. 
That would expose me to conflict of interest — the irony — and could hurt Tooty, if my 
position's threatened. I've been told I can simply let him simmer on that until time 
passes and nothing moves forward.' He raised his own eyes. 'Which means you cannot 
tell anyone either. Declining to prosecute for personal spiritual reasons — the office — 
it would be hard for others to understand. This is why I've come to you in explicit 
confidence.' 

'I hear your request and I'll honor it.' 

'But listen. I can't do it. Cannot. I've sat outside that hospital room saying the Serenity 
Prayer over and over and praying for willingness and thinking of my own spiritual 
interests and believing this amend is my Higher Power's will for my own growth and I 
haven't been able to go in. I go and sit paralyzed outside the room for several hours and 
drive home and pry Tooty away from the sink. It can't go on. I have to look that rotten 
— no, evil. I'm convinced in my heart, that son of a bitch is evil and deserves to be 
removed from the community. I have to walk in there and extend my hand and tell him 
I've wished him ill and blamed him and ask for forgiveness — him — if you knew what 
sick, twisted, sadistically evil and sick thing he did to us, to her — and ask him for 



forgiveness. Whether he forgives or not is not the issue. It's my own side of the street I 
need to clean.' 

'It sounds very, very hard,' Pat said. 

The fine hat was almost spinning between the man's calves, the pantcuffs of which 
had been pulled up in the defecatory forward lean to reveal socks that weren't, it 
seemed, both quite the same texture of wool. The mismatched socks spoke to Pat's 
heart more than anything else. 

'I don't even know why I came here,' he said. 'I couldn't simply leave again and drive 
home. Yesterday she'd been at her tongue with one of those old NoCoat LinguaScraper 
appliances until it bled. I can't go home and look on that again without having cleaned 
house.' 

'I hear you.' 

'And you were just down the hill.' 

'I understand.' 

'I don't expect help or counsel. I already believe I have to do it. I've accepted the 
injunction to do it. I believe I have no choice. But I can't do it. I haven't been able to do 
it.' 

'Willing, maybe.' 

'Haven't yet been willing. Yet. I wish to emphasize yet.' 


20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT 
UNDERGARMENT 


IMMEDIATELY PRE-FUNDRAISER-EXHIBITION-FETE 
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR 

Usually, part of the experience of having the place you live in throw a gala is watching 
different people arrive for the festivities — the Warshavers, the Cartons and Peltasons 
and Prines, the Chins, the Middlebrooks and Gelbs, an incidental Lowell, the Buckmans 
in their claret-colored Volvo driven by their silent grown son who you never see except 
when he's driving Kirk and Binnie Buckman someplace. Dr. Hickle and his creepy niece. 
The Chawafs and Heavens. The Reehagens. The palsied and mega wealthy Mrs. 
Warshaver with her pair of designer canes. The Donagan brothers from Svelte Nail. But 
usually we never get to see them arriving, the friends and patrons of E.T.A., for the 
Fundraising exhibition and gala. Usually while they're arriving and getting greeted by 
Tavis we're all down in the lockers, dressing and stretching, getting ready to exhibit. 



Getting shaved and taped by Loach, etc. 

It must usually be an unusual occasion for the guests, too, because for the first few 
hours they're there to watch us play — they're all audience — then at some point with 
the last couple matches winding down the guys in white jackets with trays start 
appearing in Comm.-Ad., and the gala starts, and then it's the guests who become the 
participants and performers. 

Dressing and stretching, wrapping grips with Gauze-Tex or filling a pouch with fuller's 
earth (Coyle, Freer, Slice, Traub) or sawdust (Wagenknecht, Chu), getting taped, those in 
puberty getting shaved and taped. A ritual. Even the conversation, usually, such as it is, 
has a timeless ceremonial aspect. John Wayne hunched as always on the bench before 
his locker with his towel like a hood over his head, running a coin back and forth over 
the backs of his fingers. Shaw pinching the flesh between his thumb and first finger, 
acupressure for a headache. Everyone had gone into their like autopilot ritual. 
Possalthwaite's sneakers were pigeon-toed under a stall door. Kahn was trying to spin a 
tennis ball on his finger like a basketball. At the sink, Eliot Kornspan was blowing out his 
sinuses with hot water; no one else was anywhere near the sink. A certain number of 
hysterical pre-competition rumors about the Quebec Jr. Team and the severity of the 
weather circulated and were refuted and shifted antigens and returned. You could hear 
the high-register end of the wind even down here. The Csikszentmihalyi kid was doing a 
kind of piaffer in place, his knees hitting his chest, stretching his hip-flexors out. 
Troeltsch sat up against his locker near Wayne, wearing a disconnected headset and 
broadcasting his own match in advance. There were fart-accusations and -denials. Rader 
snapped a towel at Wagenknecht, who liked to stand for long periods of time bent at 
the waist with his head against his knees. Arslanian sat very still in a corner, blindfolded 
in what was either an ascot or a very fey necktie, his head cocked in the attitude of the 
blind. It was unclear whether B squads would even get to play; no one was sure how 
many courts the M.l.T. Union had inside. Rumors flew this way and that. Michael 
Pemulis was nowhere to be seen since early this A.M., at which time Anton Doucette 
said he'd seen Pemulis quote 'lurking' out by the West House dumpsters looking quote 
'anxiously depressed.' 

Then a small but univocal cheer went up from some of the players when Otis P. Lord 
appeared at the door, his cadaverous dad escorting him, O.P.L. out of post-op and pale 
but looking his old self, with just a thin little choker-width bandage of gauze around his 
neck from the monitor's removal and an odd ellipse of dry red skin around his mouth 
and nostrils. He came in and shook a few hands and used the stall next to Postal Weight 
and left; he wasn't playing today. 

J. L. Struck was applying an astringent to areas of his jaw. 

An hysterical rumor that the Quebec players had been spotted coming down a ramp 
out of a charter-bus in the main lot and were by all appearances not the Quebec J.D.C. 
and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Quebec adult wheelchair-tennis 
contingent — this rumor flew wildly around the locker room and then died out when a 
couple of the sub-14's who burned nervous energy by scampering around checking 
rumors scampered out and up the stairs to check the rumor and failed to return. 

Across the wall on the Female side we could easily hear Thode and Donni Stott 



invoking Camilla, goddess of speed and light step. Thode had had an hysterical tantrum 
after breakfast because Poutrincourt hadn't showed for the Females' pre-match Staff 
thing and looked to be AWOL. Loach et al. had outfitted Ted Schacht with a complex 
knee-brace with jointed aluminum struts down both sides and a coin-sized hole in the 
elastic over the kneecap for dermal ventilation, and Schacht was lumbering around 
between the stalls and the locker with his arms straight out and his weight on his heels 
pretending to walk like Frankenstein. Several people talked to themselves at their 
lockers. Barry Loach was down on one knee shaving Hal's left ankle for tape. A couple of 
us remarked how Hal wasn't eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal. Hal 
had his hands on Loach's shoulders as the tape went on. A match-wrap is two horizontal 
layers just above the malleolus knob-thing, then straight down and four times around 
the tarsus just in front of the joint, so there's a big gap for flexion of the joint, but a 
compacting and supportive wrap. Then Loach puts a liner-sock and a wick-sock over the 
tape, then slides on the little inflatable AirCast deal and pumps it to the right pressure, 
checking with a little gauge, and Velcros it just tight enough for support plus max- 
flexion. Hal was on the bench with his hands on Loach's shoulders through the whole 
little routine. Everybody's had his hands on Loach's shoulders at one time or another. 
Hal's shave and wrap take four minutes. Schacht's knee and Fran Unwin's hamstring 
thing each take over ten. Wayne's quarter looked like it was dancing on his knuckles. 
Because of the towel over his head all you could see was a very thin oval section of his 
face, like an almond on its end. Wayne got to have a small disk-player in his locker, and 
Joni Mitchell was playing, which nobody ever minded because he kept it very low. Stice 
was blowing a purple bubble. Freer was trying to touch his toes. Traub and Whale, also 
on the wrap-bench, later said Hal was being weird. Like they said asking Loach if the pre¬ 
match locker room ever gave him a weird feeling, occluded, electric, as if all this had 
been done and said so many times before it made you feel it was recorded, they all in 
here existed basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines, locked down 
and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast at specified times. What Traub heard as 
Fourier Transforms Whale heard as Furrier Transforms. But also, as a consequence, 
erasable, Hal had said. By whom? Hal before a match usually had a wide-eyed ingenuish 
anxiety of someone who'd never been in a situation even remotely like this before. His 
face today had assumed various expressions ranging from distended hilarity to 
scrunched grimace, expressions that seemed unconnected to anything that was going 
on. The word was that Tavis and Schtitt had chartered three buses to take the squads to 
an indoor venue Mrs. Inc had had alumnus Corbett Th-Thorp call in mammoth favors to 
arrange — several mostly unused courts somewhere in the deep-brain tissue of the 
M.l.T. Student Union — and that the whole gala would be moved over to the Student 
Union, and that the Quebec team and most of the guests were being contacted by 
cellular about the cancellation of the previous cancellation and the change in venue, and 
that those guests who didn't hear about the change would ride in the buses with the 
players and staff, some of them in formal- and evening-wear, probably, the guests. 
Traub also says he also heard Hal use the word moribund, but Whale couldn't confirm. 
Schacht entered a stall and drove the latch home with a certain purposeful sound that 
produced that momentary gunslinger-enters-saloon-type hush throughout the locker 



room. Nobody in the vicinity could say they heard Barry Loach respond one way or 
another to any of the strange moody things Hal was saying as Loach locked down the 
ankle for high-level play. Wagenknecht apparently really did fart. 

The consensus among E.T.A.s is that Head Trainer Barry Loach resembles a wingless 
fly—blunt and scuttly, etc. One E.T.A. tradition consists of Big Buddies recounting to 
new or very young Little Buddies the saga of Loach and how he ended up as an elite 
Head Trainer even though he doesn't have an official degree in Training or whatever 
from Boston College, which is where he'd gone to school. In outline form, the saga goes 
that Loach grew up as the youngest child of an enormous Catholic family, the parents of 
which were staunch Catholics of the old school of extremely staunch Catholicism, and 
that Mrs. Loach (as in the mom)'s life's most fervent wish was that one of her countless 
children would enter the R.C. clergy, but that the eldest Loach boy had done a two-year 
U.S.N. bit and had gotten de-mapped early on in the Brazilian O.N.A.N./U.N. joint action 
of Y.T.M.P.; and that within weeks of the wake the next oldest Loach boy had died of 
ciquatoxic food-poisoning eating tainted blackfin grouper; and the next oldest Loach, 
Therese, through a series of adolescent misadventures had ended up in Atlantic City NJ 
as one of the women in sequined leotards and high heels who carries a large 
posterboard card with the Round # on it around the ring between rounds of 
professional fights, so that hopes for Therese becoming a Carmelite dimmed 
considerably; and on down the line, one Loach falling helplessly in love and marrying 
right out of high school, another burning only to play the cymbals with a first-rate 
philharmonic (now crashing away with the Houston P.O.). And so on, until there was just 
one other Loach child and then Barry Loach, who was the youngest and also totally 
under Mrs. L.'s thumb, emotionally; and that young Barry had breathed a huge sigh of 
relief when his older brother — always a pious and contemplative and big-hearted kid, 
brimming over with abstract love and an innate faith in the indwelling goodness of all 
men's souls — began to show evidence of a true spiritual calling to a life of service in the 
R.C. clergy, and ultimately entered Jesuit seminary, removing an enormous weight from 
his younger brother's psyche because young Barry — ever since he first slapped a Band- 
Aid on an X-Men figure — felt his true calling was not to the priesthood but to the 
liniment-and-adhesive ministry of professional athletic training. Who, finally, can say the 
whys and whences of each man's true vocation? And then so Barry was a Training major 
or whatever at B.C., and by all accounts proceeding satisfactorily toward a degree, when 
his older brother, quite far along toward getting ordained or frocked or whatever as a 
licensed Jesuit, suffered at age twenty-five a sudden and dire spiritual decline in which 
his basic faith in the innate indwelling goodness of men like spontaneously combusted 
and disappeared — and for no apparent or dramatic reason; it just seemed as if the 
brother had suddenly contracted a black misanthropic spiritual outlook the way some 
twenty-five-year-old men contract Sanger-Brown's ataxia or M.S., a kind of degenerative 
Lou Gehrig's Disease of the spirit — and his interest in serving man and God-in-man and 
nurturing the indwelling Christ in people through Jesuitical pursuits underwent an 
understandable nosedive, and he began to do nothing but sit in his dormitory room at 
St. John's Seminary — right near Enfield Tennis Academy, coincidentally, on Foster 
Street in Brighton off Comm. Ave., right by the Archdiocese H.Q. or whatever — sitting 



there trying to pitch playing-cards into a wastebasket in the middle of the floor, not 
going to classes or vespers or reading his Hours, and talking frankly about giving up the 
vocation altogether, which all had Mrs. Loach just about prostrate with disappointment, 
and had young Barry suddenly re-weighted with dread and anxiety, because if his 
brother bailed out of the clergy it would be nearly irresistibly incumbent on Barry, the 
very last Loach, to give up his true vocation of splints and flexion and enter seminary 
himself, to keep his staunch and beloved Mom from dying of disappointment. And so a 
series of personal interviews with the spiritually necrotic brother took place, Barry 
having to station himself on the other side of the playing-cards' wastebasket so as even 
to get the older brother's attention, trying to talk the brother down from the 
misanthropic spiritual ledge he was on. The spiritually ill brother was fairly cynical about 
Barry Loach's reasons for trying to talk him down, seeing as how both men knew that 
Barry's own career-dreams were on the line here as well; though the brother smiled 
sardonically and said he'd come to expect little better than self-interested #l-looking- 
out from human beings anyway, since his practicum work out among the human flocks 
in some of Boston's nastier downtown venues — the impossibility of conditions- 
changing, the ingratitude of the low-life homeless addicted and mentally ill flocks he 
served, and the utter lack of compassion and basic help from the citizenry at large in all 
Jesuitical endeavors — had killed whatever spark of inspired faith he'd had in the higher 
possibilities and perfectibility of man; so he opined what should he expect but that his 
own little brother, no less than the coldest commuter passing the outstretched hands of 
the homeless and needy at Park Street Station, should be all-too-humanly concerned 
with nothing but the care and feeding of Numero Uno. Since a basic absence of empathy 
and compassion and taking-the-risk-to-reach-out seemed to him now an ineluctable 
part of the human character. Barry Loach was understandably way out his depth on the 
theological turf of like Apologia and the redeemability of man — though he was able to 
relieve a slight hitch in the brother's toss that was stressing his card-throwing arm's 
flexor carpi ulnaris muscle and so to up the brother's card-in-wastebasket percentage 
significantly — but he was not only desperate to preserve his mother's dream and his 
own indirectly athletic ambitions at the same time, he was actually rather a spiritually 
upbeat guy who just didn't buy the brother's sudden despair at the apparent absence of 
compassion and warmth in God's supposed self-mimetic and divine creation, and he 
managed to engage the brother in some rather heated and high-level debates on 
spirituality and the soul's potential, not that much unlike Alyosha and Ivan's 
conversations in the good old Brothers K., though probably not nearly as erudite and 
literary, and nothing from the older brother even approaching the carcinogenic acerbity 
of Ivan's Grand Inquisitor scenario. 

In outline, it eventually boiled down to this: a desperate Barry Loach — with Mrs. L. 
now on 25 mg. of daily Ativan 384 and just about camped out in front of the candle¬ 
lighting apse of the Loach's parish church — Loach challenges his brother to let him 
prove somehow — risking his own time, Barry's, and maybe safety somehow — that the 
basic human character wasn't as unempathetic and necrotic as the brother's present 
depressed condition was leading him to think. After a few suggestions and rejections of 
bets too way-out even for Barry Loach's desperation, the brothers finally settle on a. 



like, experimental challenge. The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges 
Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself look 
homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity, 
and to stand out in front of the Park Street T-station on the edge of the Boston 
Common, right alongside the rest of the downtown community's lumpen dregs, who all 
usually stood there outside the T-station stemming change, and for Barry Loach to hold 
out his unclean hand and instead of stemming change simply ask passersby to touch 
him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact. And this 
Barry does. And does. Days go by. His own spiritually upbeat constitution starts taking 
blows to the solar plexus. It's not clear whether the verminousness of his appearance 
had that much to do with it; it just turned out that standing there outside the station 
doors and holding out his hand and asking people to touch him ensured that just about 
the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to do was touch him. It's possi¬ 
ble that the respectable citizenry with their bookbags and cellulars and dogs with little 
red sweater-vests thought that sticking one's hand way out and crying 'Touch me, just 
touch me, please’ was some kind of new stem-type argot for 'Lay some change on me,' 
because Barry Loach found himself hauling in a rather impressive daily total of $ — 
significantly more than he was earning at his work-study job wrapping ankles and 
sterilizing dental prostheses for Boston College lacrosse players. Citizens found his pitch 
apparently just touching enough to give him $; but B. Loach's brother — who often 
stood there in collar less mufti up against the plastic jamb of the T-station's exit, 
slouched and smirking and idly shuffling a deck of cards in his hands — was always quick 
to point out the spastic delicacy with which the patrons dropped change or $ into Barry 
Loach's hand, these kind of bullwhip-motions or jagged in-and-outs like they were trying 
to get something hot off a burner, never touching him, and they rarely broke stride or 
even made eye-contact as they tossed alms B.L.'s way, much less ever getting their hand 
anywhere close to contact with B.L.'s disreputable hand. The brother not unreasonably 
nixed the accidental contact of one commuter who'd stumbled as he tried to toss a 
quarter and then let Barry break his fall, not to mention the bipolarly ill bag-lady who 
got Barry Loach in a headlock and tried to bite his ear off near the end of the third week 
of the Challenge. Barry L. refused to concede defeat and misanthropy, and the 
Challenge dragged on week after week, and the older brother got bored eventually and 
stopped coming and went back to his room and waited for the St. John's Seminary 
administration to give him his walking papers, and Barry Loach had to take Incompletes 
in the semester's Training courses, and got canned from his work-study job for not 
showing up, and he went through weeks and then months of personal spiritual crisis as 
passerby after passerby interpreted his appeal for contact as a request for cash and 
substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact; and some of the T- 
station's other disreputable stem-artists became intrigued by Barry's pitch — to say 
nothing of his net receipts — and started themselves to take up the cry of 'Touch me, 
please, please, someone!,' which of course further compromised Barry Loach's chances 
of getting some citizen to interpret his request literally and lay hands on him in a 
compassionate and human way; and Loach's own soul began to sprout little fungal 
patches of necrotic rot, and his upbeat view of the so-called normal and respectable 



human race began to undergo dark revision; and when the other scuzzy and shunned 
stem-artists of the downtown district treated him as a compadre and spoke to him in a 
collegial way and offered him warming drinks from brown-bagged bottles he felt too 
disillusioned and coldly alone to be able to refuse, and thus started to fall in with the 
absolute silt at the very bottom of the metro Boston socio-economic duck-pond. And 
then what happened with the spiritually infirm older brother and whither he fared and 
what happened with his vocation never gets resolved in the E.T.A. Loach-story, because 
now the focus becomes all Loach and how he was close to forgetting — after all these 
months of revulsion from citizens and his getting any kind of nurturing or empathic 
treatment only from homeless and addicted stem-artists — what a shower or washing 
machine or a ligamental manipulation even were, much less career-ambitions or a 
basically upbeat view of indwelling human goodness, and in fact Barry Loach was 
dangerously close to disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston 
street life and spending his whole adult life homeless and louse-ridden and stemming in 
the Boston Common and drinking out of brown paper bags, when along toward the end 
of the ninth month of the Challenge, his appeal — and actually also the appeals of the 
other dozen or so cynical stem-artists right alongside Loach, all begging for one touch of 
a human hand and holding their hands out — when all these appeals were taken literally 
and responded to with a warm handshake — which only the more severely intoxicated 
stemmers didn't recoil from the profferer of, plus Loach — by E.T.A.'s own Mario 
Incandenza, who'd been sent dashing out from the Back Bay co-op where his father was 
filming something that involved actors dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker 
with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, using subway tokens as the ante, and 
Mario'd been sent dashing out to get another roll of tokens from the nearest station, 
which because of a dumpster-fire near the entrance to the Arlington St. station turned 
out to be Park Street, and Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless 
about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had no one worldly or adult 
along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands 
for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn't automatically be honored and granted, 
and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach's own 
fuliginous hand, which led through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith- 
reaffirming series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an 
Asst. Trainer's job at E.T.A., a job he was promoted from just months later when the 
then-Head Trainer suffered the terrible accident that resulted in all locks being taken off 
E.T.A. saunas' doors and the saunas' maximum temperature being hard-wired down to 
no more than 50°C. 


The inverted glass was the size of a cage or small jail cell, but it was still recognizably a 
bathroom-type tumbler, as if for gargling or post-brushing swishing, only huge and 
upside-down, on the floor, with him inside. The tumbler was like a prop or display; it 
was the sort of thing that would have to be made special. Its glass was green and its 
bottom over his head was pebbled and the light inside was the watery dancing green of 
extreme ocean depths. 



There was a kind of louvered screen or vent high on one side of the glass, but no air 
was coming out. In. The air inside the huge glass was pretty clearly limited, as well, 
because there was already C0 2 steam on the sides. The glass was too thick to break or 
to kick his way out, and it felt like he might have possibly broken the leg's foot already 
trying. 

There were some green and distorted faces through the glass's side's steam. The face 
at eye-level belonged to the latest Subject, the dexterous and adoring Swiss hand- 
model. She stood looking at him, her arms crossed, smoking, exhaling greenly through 
her nose, then looked down to confer with another face, seeming to float at about 
waist-level, that belonged to the shy and handicapped fan who O.'d realized had shared 
the Subject's Swiss accent. 

The Subject behind the glass would meet Orin's eye steadily but did not acknowledge 
him or anything he shouted. When Orin had tried to kick his way out was when he'd 
recognized that the Subject was looking at his eyes rather than into them as previously. 
There were now smeared footprints on the glass. 

Every few seconds Orin wiped the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to see 
what the faces were doing. 

His foot really was hurt, and the remains of whatever had made him fall asleep so hard 
really were making him sick to his stomach, and in sum this experience was pretty 
clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Orin, #71, was in deep denial about its not being a 
dream. It was like the minute he'd come to and found himself inside a huge inverted 
tumbler he'd opted to figure: dream. The stilted amplified voice that came periodically 
through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The Master 
Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make him grateful: it 
was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement 
demand that often gets made in really bad dreams. Plus the bizarre anxiety of not being 
able to get the adoring Subject to acknowledge anything he said through the glass. 
When the speaker's screen slid back, Orin looked away from the glass's faces and up, 
figuring that they were going to do something even more surreal and vehement that 
would really nail down the undeniable dream-status of the whole experience. 

Mile. Luria P— , who disdained the subtler aspects of technical interviews and had 
lobbied simply to be given a pair of rubber gloves and two or three minutes alone with 
the Subject's testicles (and who was not really Swiss), had predicted accurately what the 
Subject's response would be when the speaker's screen was withdrawn and the sewer 
roaches began pouring blackly and shinily through, and as the Subject splayed itself 
against the tumbler's glass and pressed its face so flat against the absurd glass's side 
that the face changed from green to stark white, and, much muffled, shrieked at them 
'Do it to her! Do it to her!,' Luria P— inclined her head and rolled her eyes at the A.F.R. 
leader, whom she had long regarded as something of a ham. 


Human beings came and went. An R.N. felt his forehead and yanked her hand back 
with a yelp. Somebody down the hall was jabbering and weeping. At one point Chandler 
F., the recently graduated nonstick-cookware salesman, seemed to be there in the 



classic resident-confiteor position, his chin on his hands on the bedside crib-railing. The 
room's light was a glowing gray. The Ennet House House Manager was there, fingering 
the place her missing eyebrow'd been, trying to explain something about how Pat M. 
hadn't come because she and Mr. M.'d had to kick Pat's little girl out of the house for 
using something synthetic again, and was in a too shaky place spiritually to even leave 
home. Gately felt physically hotter than he'd ever felt. It felt like a sun in his head. The 
crib-type railings got tapered on top and writhed a little, like flames. He imagined 
himself on the House's aluminum platter with an apple in his mouth, his skin glazed and 
crispy. The M.D. that looked age twelve appeared with others wreathed in mist and said 
Up it to 30 q 2 and Let's Try Doris, 385 that the poor son of a bitch was burning down. He 
wasn't talking to Gately. The M.D. was not addressing Don Gately. Gately's only 
conscious concern was Asking For Help to refuse Demerol. He kept trying to say addict. 
He remembered being young on the playground and telling Maura Duffy to look down 
her shirt and spell attic. Somebody else said Ice Bath. Gately felt something rough and 
cool on his face. A voice that sounded like his own brain-voice with an echo said to 
never try and pull a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn't calm 
and peaceful like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you. He 
heard the late Gene Fackelmann saying to get a load of this. He was the object of much 
bedside industry. A brisk clink of I.V. bottles overhead. Slosh of bags. None of the 
overhead voices talking to him. His input unrequired. Part of him hoped they were 
putting Demerol in his I.V without him knowing. He gurgled and mooed, saying addict. 
Which was the truth, that he was, he knew. The Crocodile that liked to wear Hanes, 
Lenny, that at the podium liked to say 'The truth will you set you free, but not until it's 
done with you.' The voice down the hall was weeping like its heart would break. He 
imagined the A.D.A. with his hat off earnestly praying Gately would live so he could send 
him to M.D.C.-Walpole. The harsh sound he heard up close was the tape around his 
unshaved mouth getting ripped off him so quick he hardly felt it. He tried to avoid 
projecting how his shoulder would feel if they started pounding on his chest like they 
pound on dying people's chests. The intercom calmly dinged. He heard conversing 
people in the hall passing the open door and stopping for a second to look in, but still 
conversing. It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and 
eat and X their wife and go to sleep. A conversing voice at the door laughed and told 
somebody else it was getting harder these days to tell the homosexuals from the people 
who beat up homosexuals. It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it. He 
remembered two of his Beverly High teammates beating up a so-called homosexual kid 
while Gately walked away, wanting no part of either side. Disgusted by both sides of the 
conflict. He imagined having to become a homosexual in Walpole. He imagined going to 
one meeting a week and having a shepherd's crook and parrot and playing cribbage for 
a cigarette a point and lying on his side in his bunk in his cell facing the wall, jacking off 
to the memory of tits. He saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and his hat against his 
chest. 

Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody 
commented on the size of Gately's head and gripped Gately's head, and then he felt an 
upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up. Only one 



of his eyes would open because the floor's impact had shut the other one up plump and 
tight as a sausage. His whole front side of him was cold from lying on the wet floor. 
Fackelmann around somewhere behind him was mumbling something that consisted 
totally of g's. 

His open eye could see the luxury apt. window. It was dawn outside, a glowing gray, 
and birds had plenty to say out in the bare trees; and at the big window was a face and a 
windmill of arms. Gately tried to adjust the vertical hold on his vision. Pamela Hoffman- 
Jeep was at the window. Their apt. was on the second floor of the luxury complex. She 
was up in a tree right outside the window, standing on a branch, looking in, either 
gesturing wildly or trying to keep her balance. Gately felt a rush of concern about her 
falling out of the tree and was preparing to ask the floor to maybe please relax its hold a 
second and let him go when P.H.-J.'s face suddenly fell and exited the bottom of the 
window and was replaced by the face of Bobby ('C') C. Bobby C raised a slow two-finger 
salute to his temple in an impassively mocking Hello as he scanned the evidence of 
serious bingeing in the room, through the window. Eyeballing Mt. Dilaudid with special 
attention, nodding down to somebody down under the tree. He edged forward on the 
branch until he was right up flush with the window and pushed up on its frame with one 
hand, trying to open the locked window. The rising sun behind him cast a shadow of his 
head against the wet floor. Gately called out to Fackelmann and tried to roll and sit up. 
His bones felt full of busted glass. Bobby C held up a six-pack of Hefenreffer and waggled 
it suggestively, like wanting in. Gately had just managed to sit partly up when C's fist in 
its fingerless glove came through the window, spraying double-pane glass. The fallen TP 
screen continued to show shots of small flames, Gately could see. C's arm came through 
and groped for the latch and raised the window. Fackelmann was bleating like a sheep 
but not moving; a syringe he hadn't bothered with removing hung from the inside of his 
elbow. Gately saw Bobby C had glass in his purple hair and a vintage Taurus-PT 9 mm. 
jammed into his spike-studded belt. Gately sat there dumbly as C clambered on in and 
kind of tiptoed through the various puddles and rolled Fackelmann's head back to check 
his pupils. C clucked his tongue and let Fackelmann's head fall back against the wall. Fax 
still softly bleating. He turned smartly on his boot's heel and started across toward the 
apartment door, and Gately sat there looking at him. When he got to where Gately was 
sitting on the floor with his wet legs curved parenthesized out in front of him like some 
sort of huge pre-verbal rug-rat C stopped as if to say something he'd just remembered, 
looking down at Gately, his smile wide and warm, and Gately noticed he had a black 
front tooth just as C caught him over the ear with the Taurus-PT and put him back down. 
The floor got the back of Gately's head worse than the gun-butt did. His ears belled. It 
wasn't stars he saw. Then Bobby C kicked Gately in the balls, S.O.P. to keep your man 
down, and Gately drew his knees up and turned his head and was sick out onto the 
floor. He heard the apartment door opening and the leisurely sound of C's boots going 
down the stairs to the complex's door. Between spasms, Gately urged Fackelmann to go 
for the window as rickety-tick as he could. Fackelmann was slumped back against the 
wall; he was looking at his legs and saying he couldn't feel his legs, that he was numb 
from the scalp on down and climbing. 

C returned shortly, and at the head of a whole entourage-type group of people Gately 



didn't like the looks of at all. There were DesMonts and Pointgrave, Canadian Harvard 
Square small-time thug-types Gately knew slightly, small-time freelancers, too 
Canadianly dumb for anything but the brutalest work. Gately was unglad to see them. 
They wore overalls and nonmatching flannel shirts. The poor eczematic pharmacist's- 
assistant guy was behind them, carrying a black Dr.-bag. Gately was on his back pedal¬ 
ling his legs in the air, which is what anybody that's played organized ball knows is what 
you do for a brody to the groin. The pharmacist's assistant stopped behind C and stood 
there looking at his own Weejuns. Three big unfamiliar girls entered in red leather coats 
and badly laddered hose. Then poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, her taffeta torn and 
stained and her face gray with shock, got borne in through the door by two Oriental 
punks in shiny leather jackets. They had their hands under her ass and carried her as if 
seated, one leg out and a white stick of bone protruding from her shin, which her shin 
was a serious mess. Gately saw all this upside-down, pedalling his legs until he could get 
up. One of the big girls carried an old-type Graphix bong and a Glad Cinch-Sak kitchen- 
can bag. Either Pointgrave or DesMonts — Gately could never remember which of them 
was who — carried a case of bonded liquor. C asked generally if it was Party Time. The 
room brightened as the sun climbed. The room was filling up. Another of the girls made 
negative comments about the urine on the floor. Fackelmann in the corner began saying 
it was all a goddamned lie. C pretended to answer himself in a falsetto and said Yes 
indeedyweedy it was Party Time. Now a very bland groomed collegeish guy in a 
Wembley tie entered with a TaTung Corp. box and put it down by where the 
pharmacist's assistant was still standing, and the bland guy rehung the teleplayer on the 
wall and ejected the TP's small-flame cartridge, dropping it on the wet floor. The two 
Oriental toughs carried Pamela Hoffman-Jeep over to a far corner of the living room, 
and she screamed when they dropped her onto a box of counterfeit little 
Commonwealth of MA peel-off seals. They were small, the Orientals, and they were 
looking down at him, but neither had bad skin. A small grim woman with a tight gray 
bun and sensible shoes entered last and shut the apt. door behind her. Gately rolled 
slowly to his knees and stood up, still bent a bit at the waist, not moving, one eye still 
swollen shut. He could hear Fackelmann trying to stand. P.H.-J. stopped shrieking and 
blacked out and slumped down until her chin was on her chest and her ass half off the 
box. The room smelled like Dilaudid and urine and Gately's vomit and Fackelmann's 
bowel movement and the red leather girls's fine leather coats. C came on over and 
reached up and put his arm around Gately's shoulders and stood with him like that 
while two of the tough girls in their coats passed around bottles of bourbon from the 
case. Gately could focus best when he squinted. The A.M. sun hung in the window, up 
and past the tree, yellowing. The bottles were the black-labelled boxy bottles that 
signified Jack Daniels. A churchbell off in the Square struck seven or eight. Gately had 
had a bad experience with Jack Daniels at age fourteen. The bland groomed corporate 
guy had inserted a different TP cartridge and now was getting a portable CD player out 
of the TaTung box while the pharmacist's assistant watched him. Fackelmann said 
whatever it was was a total goddamn lie. Pointgrave or DesMonts took the bottle C had 
taken from the tough girls and handed to Gately. The sunlight on the floor through the 
window was spidered with shadows of branches. Everybody in the room's shadows 



were moving around on the west wall. C also held a bottle. Soon just about everybody 
had their own individual bottle of Jack. Gately heard Fackelmann asking somebody to 
open his for him he was numb to the ceiling and climbing and he couldn't feel his hands. 
The small grim librarianish woman went to Fackelmann, removing her purse from her 
shoulder. Gately was figuring out what he was going to say on the Faxter's behalf when 
Whitey Sorkin arrived. Until then he figured it was C's party and just not to unnecessarily 
rile C. It seemed to take a long time to formulate mental thoughts. Pamela Floffman- 
Jeep's shin looked like ground chuck. C lifted his square bottle and asked for general 
permission to like propose a toast. P.H.-J.'s lips were blue with shock. Gately felt bad 
that he felt so little romantic concern now that she'd fallen out of the tree. Fie spent no 
time wondering if she'd ratted them out, if she'd brought Bobby C to them or vice-versy. 
At least one of the girls in the red leather coats had an awful big Adam's apple for a girl. 
C roughly turned Gately's shoulders toward Fackelmann in the corner and toasted to old 
friends and new friends and what looked like a serious fucking-A score for Gene Gene 
the Fax Machine, given the size of this Dilaudid-pile and all the evidence of some serious 
fucking partying they could see, and smell. Everyone drank from their bottle. The grim¬ 
faced little woman had to help Fackelmann find his mouth with the mouth of his bottle. 
All three of the big women displayed Adam's apples when they tilted way back to chug. 
The polite swallow of Jack almost made Gately heave. C's Item in his belt pressed 
against Gately's thigh and so did some of the belt's spikes. DesMonts and Pointgrave 
both had S&W Items in shoulder-holsters. The Oriental punks didn't display any arms 
but had a look about them like they didn't ever even shower unarmed; safe bet they at 
least had little weird sharp chinky things you threw at people, Gately figured. Several of 
C's group chugged their whole bottle. One of the big girls hurled her bottle at the west 
wall, but it didn't break. Why is it you feel it in your gut and not your nuts per se, when 
you get brodied? Gately was turning and looking wherever C's arm was turning him. The 
contorted face on the rehung viewer from the corporate guy's cartridge was Whitey 
Sorkin's, a portrait Sorkin had let some neuralgic painter do of him having a cluster- 
headache out at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation in the city, for a series for 
an ad for aspirin. The cartridge seemed like just a continuous still of the painting, so that 
it looked like Sorkin on the wall was sort of presiding over the gathering in a mute 
pained way. The librarianish little woman was threading a sewing needle with thread, 
her mouth real tight. The pharmacist's assistant was getting little skin-flakes all over the 
black bag as he hunkered down over the bag removing several syringes from the bag 
and filling them out of a 2500-IU ampule and handing them up to be passed around. The 
N.C.-F.P.F. painting had a red fist pulling a handful of brain out of the top of Sorkin's 
skull while Sorkin's face looked out of the viewer with the classic migraine-sufferer's 
look of super-intense thought, almost more meditative than hurt-looking. One Oriental 
kid was squatting chinkishly in the corner drinking Jack and the other was sweeping up 
spilled laminates off the floor, using a flap from the TaTung box for a dustpan. Chinks 
could do some serious sweeping, Gately reflected. Another of the girls threw her bottle 
at the wall. It was when C didn't even have Gately facing them that it dawned on Gately 
the girls in coats and slatternly hose were fags dressed up as girls, like as in transvestals. 
Bobby C was beaming. The first bit of real personal-ass fear Gately felt was when he 



realized these people looked like mostly members of Bobby C's personal set, that they 
weren't the people Sorkin would dispatch if he was sending his own people and coming 
himself, soon, that Sorkin's painting on the wall was symbolic of Sorkin wasn't coming, 
that Sorkin had given Bobby C free rain on this piece of painful business. The 
pharmacist's assistant removed two pre-filled syringes from the bag, unwrapping their 
crinkly plastic. C told Gately quietly how Whitey said to say he knew Bonnie wasn't part 
of Fackelmann's score to fuck Sorkin and Eighties Bill. That he didn't need to do anything 
except kick back and enjoy the party and let Fackelmann face his own music and to not 
let any like 19th-century notions of defending the weak and pathetic drag Gately into 
this. C said he was sorry about the bit of the beating, he had to make sure Gately didn't 
try and get Fackelmann out the window while he was down unlocking the door. That he 
hoped Gately wouldn't hold it against him 'cause he wished him no particular ill and 
wanted no beef, later. This was all said very quietly and intensively while the two fags in 
wigs that had tried to break bottles were sitting on a box filling the Graphix's huge party- 
bowl with grass from the Glad bag, which contained grass. DesMontes sat in a director's 
chair. Everybody else was drinking out of their square bottle, standing around the sunny 
room in the awkward postures of way more people than seats. Their arms were pale 
and hairless. The two Oriental toughs were tying each other off. The draft through the 
fist-hole in the window made Gately shiver. The other fag was making like comments 
about Gately's physique. Gately asked C quietly if he and Fackelmann couldn't get 
cleaned up real quick and they could all go see Sorkin together and Whitey and Gene 
could reason together and work out an accord. Fackelmann found his voice and asked 
loudly if anybody wanted to hike on over here to Mt. Dilaudid and get fucking fucked up. 
Gately winced. Bobby C smiled at Fackelmann and said it looked like Fax had had about 
enough. But at the same time the psoriatic assistant came to Fackelmann and checked 
his pupils with a penlight and then shot him up with a pre-filled, using an artery in his 
neck. The back of Fackelmann's head hit the wall several times, his face flushing 
violently in the standard clinical reaction to Narcan. 386 The pharmacist then came C and 
Gately's way. The portable CD player started in with poor old Linda McCartney as C held 
Gately and the asst, pharmacist tied him off with an M.D.'s rubber strap. Gately stood 
there slightly hunched. Fackelmann was making sounds like a long-submerged man 
coming up for air. C told Gately to fasten his seatbelt. Urine had turned part of the apt.'s 
luxury-hardwood floor's finish soft and white, like soap-scum. The CD playing was one 
C'd played all the fucking time in the car when Gately had been with him in a car: 
somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings — as in the historical 
Beatles's McCartney — taken and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every 
track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup 
and playing tambourine. When the fags called the grass 'Bob' it was confusing because 
they also called C 'Bob.' Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and 
having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack 
corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing — her 
voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups' voices; 
Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney — in his Staff room's wall's picture a kind of 
craggy-faced blonde — imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband's pro 



noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her 
tambourine: C's depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like 
drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom. Two of the transvestals were 
doing the Swim to the awful tape in the swept center of the floor; the other had one of 
Fackelmann's arms while the bland guy in the Wembley tie gripped Fackelmann's other 
arm and was slapping Fackelmann lightly as the Dilaudid fought the Narcan. They'd 
seated Fackelmann in his corner in Gately's special Demerol-chair. Gately's balls 
throbbed with his pulse. The pharmacist's assistant's face was right up in Gately's. His 
cheeks and chin were a mess of silvery scaly flakes, and an oily sweat on his forehead 
caught the window's sunlight as he gave Gately a tight smile. 

'I'm pretty much straight already, C-man, after that nut-shot,' Gately said, 'if you don't 
want to waste the Narcan.' 

'Oh this isn't no Narcan,' C said softly, holding Gately's arm. 

'Hadly,' said the assistant, uncapping the syringe. 

C said 'Hold on to your hat.' Fie poked the assistant's shoulder. 'Tell him.' 

'It's pharm-grade Sunshine,' 387 the assistant said, tapping for a good vein. 

'Hold on to your heart,' C said, watching the needle go in. The pharmacist slid it in 
expertly, horizontal and flush to the skin. Gately had never done Sunshine. Next to 
ungettable outside a Canadian hospital. Fie watched his own blood ruddle the serum as 
the pharmacist extended his thumb to ease the plunger back. The pharmacist's assistant 
could really boot. C's tongue was in the corner of his mouth as he watched. The 
corporate guy had Fackelmann's arms held tight and a transvestal who'd gotten in 
behind the chair held his head by the chin and hair as the gray lady knelt before him 
with her threaded needle. Gately couldn't keep himself from watching the stuff go in 
him. There was no pain. Fie wondered for a second if it was a hot shot: it seemed like a 
whole lot of trouble to go to just to get him off. The pharmacist's thumbnail was 
ingrown. There were a couple eczema-flakes on Gately's arm where the guy was inclined 
over it. You get to like the sight of your own blood after a while. The pharmacist had him 
half booted when Fackelmann started screaming. The scream's pitch got higher as it 
drew out. When Gately could look away from the stuff going in, he saw the librarian- 
type lady was sewing Fackelmann's eyelids open to the skin above his eyebrows. As in 
they were sewing poor old Count Faxula's eyes open. A kid on the playground had used 
to turn his lids inside out at girls like they were doing now to the poor old Faxter. Gately 
gave a reflexive jerk toward him, and C hugged him tight with one arm. 

'Easy,' C said very softly. 

The taste of the hydrochloride in the Sunshine was the same, delicious, the taste of 
the smell of every Dr.'s office everywhere. He'd never done Talwin-PX. Impossible to get 
scrips for, the PX, a Canadian blend; U.S. Talwin's 388 got .5 mg. of naloxone mixed in, to 
cut the buzz, is why Gately only did NX on top of Bam-Bams. Fie understood they'd given 
Fackelmann the anti-narc so he'd feel the needle as they sewed his eyes open. Cruel is 
spelled with a u, he remembered. The two Orientals left the room at C's direction. Linda 
McC. sounded borderline-psychotic. The little gray lady worked fast. The eye that was 
already sewed open bulged obscenely. Everybody in the room except C and the 
corporate guy and grim lady started shooting dope. Two of the fags had their eyes shut 



and their faces at the ceiling as if they couldn't take watching what they were doing to 
their arm. The pharmacist was tying off the passed-out Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, which 
seemed like insult + injury. There was every different kind of style and skill-level of 
injection and boot going on. Fackelmann's face was still a scream-face. The corporate- 
tool type was dropping fluid from a pipette into Fackelmann's sewed-open eye while the 
lady rethreaded the needle. It was just seeming to Gately he'd seen the fluid-in-eye 
thing in a cartridge or movie the M.P.'d liked when he was a Bim playing ball on the 
chintz in the sea when the Sunshine crossed the barrier and came on. 

You could see why the U.S. made them cut the buzz. The air in the room got overclear, 
a glycerine shine, colors brightening terribly. If colors themselves could catch fire. The 
word on the C-ll Talwin-PX was it was intense but short-acting, and pricey. No word on 
its interaction with massive residual amounts of I.V.-Dilaudid. Gately tried to figure 
while he still could. If they were going to eliminate his map with an O.D. they'd have 
used something cheap. And if the librarian was going to sew his eyes open. Gately was 
trying to think. Too they wouldn't have got him. Flim. Got him off. 

The very air of the room bulged. It ballooned. Fackelmann's screams about lies rose 
and fell, hard to hear against the arterial roar of the Sun. McC. was trying to muffle a 
cough. Gately couldn't feel his legs. Fie could feel C's arm around him taking more and 
more of his weight. C's arms's muscles rising and hardening: he could feel this. His legs 
were, like: opting out. Attack of floors and sidewalks. Kite used to sing a ditty called '32 
Uses For Sterno Me Lad.' C was starting to let him down easy. Strong squat hard kid. 
Most heroin-men you can knock down with a Boo. C: there was a gentleness about C, 
for a kid with the eyes of a lizard. Fie was letting him down real easy. C was going to 
protect Bimmy Don from the bad floor's assault. The supported swoon spun Gately 
around, C moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall. Gately got a rotary view of 
the whole room in almost untakable focus. Pointgrave was vomiting chunkily. Two of 
the fags were sliding down the wall they had their backs to. Their red coats were aflame. 
The passing window exploded with light. Or else it was DesMontes that was vomiting 
and Pointgrave was taking the TP's viewer off the wall and stretching its fibroid wire 
over toward Fackelmann against the wall. One of Fax's eyes was as open as his mouth, 
disclosing way more eye than you ever want to see on somebody. Fie was no longer 
struggling. Fie stared piratically straight ahead. The librarian was starting on his other 
eye. The bland man had a rose in his lapel and he'd put on glasses with metal lenses and 
was blind-high and missing Fax's eye with the dropper half the time, saying something 
to Pointgrave. A transvestal had P.H.-J.'s torn hem hiked up and a spiderish hand on her 
flesh-colored thigh. P.H.-J.'s face was gray and blue. The floor came up slowly. Bobby C's 
squat face looked almost pretty, tragic, half lit by the window, tucked up under Gately's 
spinning shoulder. Gately felt less high than disembodied. It was obscenely pleasant. His 
head left his shoulders. Gene and Linda were both screaming. The cartridge with the 
held-open eyes and dropper had been the one about ultra-violence and sadism. A 
favorite of Kite. Gately thinks sadism is pronounced 'saddism.' The last rotating sight 
was the chinks coming back through the door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As 
the floor wafted up and C's grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental 
bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a 



reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally 
pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the 
freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out. 


1 Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth. 

2 Orin's never once darkened the door of any sort of therapy-professional, by the way, 
so his takes on his dreams are always generally pretty surface-level. 

3 E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs, convexly 
rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid's curve, with the tennis courts and 
pavilions at the center and the staff and students' parking lots in back of Comm.-Ad. 
forming the little bashed-in dent that from the air gives the whole facility the Valentine- 
heart aspect that still wouldn't have been truly cardioid if the buildings themselves 
didn't have their convex bulges all derived from arcs of the same r, a staggering feat 
given the uneven ground and wildly different electrical-and-plumbing-conduit wallspace 
required by dormitories, administrative offices, and polyresinous Lung, pull-offable 
probably by on the whole East Coast one guy, E.T.A.'s original architect, Avril's old and 
very dear friend, the topology world's closed-curve-mapping-Obermensch A.Y. ('Vector- 
Field') Rickey of Brandeis U., now deceased, who used to wow Hal and Mario in Weston 
by taking off his vest without removing his suit jacket, which M. Pemulis years later 
exposed as a cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic features of continuous 
functions, which revelation Hal mourned in a Santa's-not-real type of secret way, and 
which Mario simply ignored, preferring to see the vest thing as plain magic. 

4 Those younger staffers who double as academic and athletic instructors are, by con¬ 
vention at North American tennis academies, known as 'prorectors.' 

5 Known usually as 'drines — i.e. lightweight speed: Cylert, Tenuate, 3 Fastin, Preludin, 
even sometimes Ritalin. It's worth an N.B. that, unlike Jim Troeltsch or the Preludin- 
happy Bridget Boone, Michael Pemulis (out of maybe some queer sort of blue-collar 
street-type honor) rarely ingests any 'drines before a match, reserving them for 
recreation — some people are wired to find heart-pounding eye-wobbling 'drine- 
stimulation recreational. 

a Tenuate's the trade name of diethylpropion hydrochloride, Marion Merrell Dow 
Pharmaceuticals, technically a prescription antiobesity agent, favored by some 
athletes for its mildly euphoric and resources-rallying properties w/o the tooth¬ 
grinding and hideous post-blood-spike crash that the hairier-chested 'drines like Fastin 
and Cylert inflict, though with a discomfitting tendency to cause post-spike ocular 
nystagmus. Nystagmus or no nystagmus, Tenuate's a particular favorite of Michael 
Pemulis, who hoards for personal ingestion every 75-mg. white Tenuate capsule he 
can lay hands on, and does not sell or trade them, except sometimes to roommate Jim 
Troeltsch, who nags Pemulis for them and also goes into Pemulis's special entrepot¬ 
yachting-cap and promotes still more of them on the sly, a couple at a time, feeling 
that they help his sports-color-commentary loquacity, which secret promotions 
Pemulis knows about all too well, and is biding his time to retaliate, never you fear. 

6 Lightweight tranqs: Valium-Ill and Valrelease, good old dependable Xanax, Daimane, 



Buspar, Serax, even Halcion (legally available in Canada, unbelievably, still); with those 
kids inclined toward a heavier slide — reds, Meprospan, 'Happy Patch' transdermals, 
Miltown, Stelazine, the odd injury-'scrip Darvon) never lasting for more than a couple 
seasons for the obvious reason that serious tranqs can make even breathing seem like 
too much trouble to go to, the cause of a meaty percentage of tranq-related deaths 
being attributed off the record by Emergency Room personnel to 'P.S.' or 'Pulmonary 
Sloth.' 

7 Top jr. players are for the most part pretty cautious with alcohol, mostly because the 
physical consequences of heavy intake — like nausea and dehydration and poor hand- 
eye interface — make high-level performance almost impossible. Very few other 
standard substances have prohibitive short-term hangovers, actually, though an evening 
of even synthetic cocaine will make the next day's Dawn Drills very unpleasant indeed, 
which is why so few of E.T.A.'s hard core do cocaine, though there's also the issue of 
expense: though many E.T.A.s are the children of upscale parents, the children 
themselves are rarely flush with $ from home, since the gratification of pretty much 
every physical need is either taken care of or prohibited by E.T.A. itself. It's maybe worth 
noting that the same people hardwired to enjoy recreational 'drines also tend to 
gravitate toward cocaine and methedrine and other engine-revvers, while another 
broad class of more naturally higher-strung types tend more toward the edge-bevelling 
substances: tranqs, cannabis, barbiturates, and — yes — alcohol. 

8 l.e.: psylocibin; Happy Patches 3 ; MDMA/Xstasy (bad news, though, X); various low- 
tech manipulations of the benzene-ring in methoxy-class psychedelics, usually home- 
makable; synthetic dickies like MMDA, DMA, DMMM, 2CB, para-DOT l-VI, etc. — though 
note this class doesn't and shouldn't include CNS-rattlers like STP, DOM, the long- 
infamous West-U.S.-Coast 'Grievous Bodily Harm' (gamma hydroxybutyric acid), LSD-25 
or -32, or DMZ/M.P. Enthusiasm for this stuff seems independent of neurologic type. 

a . Homemade transdermals, usually MDMA or Muscimole, with DDMS or the over¬ 
counter-available DMSO as the transdermal carrier. 

9 A.k.a. LSD-25, often with a slight 'drine kicker added, called 'Black Star' because in 
metro Boston the available acid usually comes on chip-sized squares of thin cardboard 
with a black stencilled star on them, all from a certain shadowy node of supply down in 
New Bedford. All acid and Grievous Bodily Harm, like cocaine and heroin, come into 
Boston mostly from New Bedford MA, which in turn gets most of its supply from 
Bridgeport CT, which is the true lower intestine of North America, Bridgeport, be ad¬ 
vised, if you've never been through there. 

10 Like most sports academies, E.T.A. maintains the gentle fiction that 100% of its 
students are enrolled at their own ambitious volition and not that of, say for instance, 
their parents, some of whom (tennis-parents, like the stage-mothers of Hollywood 
legend) are bad news indeed. 

11 An involved Arab women's game involving little shells and a quilted gameboard — 
rather like mah jongg without rules, by the diplomatic and medical husbands' estimate. 

22 Meperedine hydrochloride and pentazocine hydrochloride. Schedule C-ll and C-IV 3 
narcotic analgesics, respectively, both from the good folks over at Sanofi Winthrop 



Pharm-Labs, Inc. 

a . Following the Continental Controlled Substance Act of Y.T.M.P., O.N.A.N.D.E.A.'s 
hierarchy of analgesics/antipyretics/anxiolytics establishes drug-classes of Category-ll 
through Category-VI, with C-ll's (e.g. Dilaudid, Demerol) being judged the heaviest 
w/r/t dependence and possible abuse, down to C-VIs that are about as potent as a kiss 
on the forehead from Mom. 

13 Though masked in the evidentiary photo and never once given up or named by Gately 
to anyone, this can be presumed to have been one Trent ('Quo Vadis 1 ) Kite, Gately's old 
and once-gifted friend from his Beverly MA childhood. 

14 This A.D.A.'s little personal trademark was that he always wore an anachronistic but 
quality Stetson-brand businessman's hat with a decorative feather in the band, and fre¬ 
quently touched or played with the hat in tense situations. 

15 The Bureau of Alcohol/Tobacco/Firearms, at that time under the temporary aegis of 
the United States Office of Unspecified Services. 

16 Extremely unpleasant Quebecois-insurgents-and-cartridge-related subsequent devel¬ 
opments make it clear that this was (again) Trent ('Quo Vadis') Kite. 

17 The codeineless kind, though — almost the first physical datum Gately took in in the 
nasty flashbulb-flash shock of the occupied bedroom's light coming on, to give you an 
idea of an oral-narcotics man's depth of psychic investment. 

18 On top of the seascape safe's more negotiable contents, themselves on top of an 
unplugged and head-parked and absolutely top-hole genuine InterLace state-of-the-art 
TP/viewer ensemble in a multishelved hardwood Tollable like entertainment-system- 
console thing, with a cartridge-dock and double-head drive in a compartment 
underneath with doors with classy little brass maple-leaf knob things and several 
shelves crammed tight with upscale arty-looking film cartridges, which latter Don 
Gately's colleague just about drooled all over the parquet flooring at the potential 
discriminating-type-fence-value of, potentially, if they were rare or celluloid-transferred 
or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid. 

19 'Une Personne de I'Importance Terrible,' presumably. 

20 Fluorescence has been banned in Quebec, as have computerized telephone solicita¬ 
tions, the little ad-cards that fall out of magazines and have to be looked at to be picked 
up and thrown in the trash, and the mention of any religious holiday whatsoever to sell 
any sort of product or service, is just one reason why his volunteering to come live down 
here was selfless. 

21 Q.v. Note 211 sub. 

22 Trade name of terfenadine, Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the tactical nuclear 
weapon of nondrowsy antihistamines and mucoidal desiccators. 

25 Office of Naval Research, U.S.D.D. 

24 JAMES 0. INCANDENZA: A FILMOGRAPHY 3 

a . From Comstock, Posner, and Duquette, The Laughing Pathologists: Exemplary Works 
of the Anticonfluential Apres Garde: Some Analyses of the Movement Toward Stasis in 
North American Conceptual Film (w/ Beth B., Vivienne Dick, James 0. Incandenza, Vigdis 



Simpson, E. and K. Snow).' ONANite Film and Cartridge Studies Annual vol. 8, nos. 1-3 
(Year of D.P. from the A.H.), pp. 44-117. 

The following listing is as complete as we are able to make it. Because the twelve 
years of Incandenza's directorial activity also coincided with large shifts in film venue — 
from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace 
TelEntertainment laser dissemination and reviewable storage disk laser cartridges — 
and because Incandenza's output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, 
advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic noncommercial, nondramatic ('a nti- 
confluential') noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial 
works, this filmmaker's career presents substantive archival challenges. These 
challenges are also compounded by the facts that, first, for conceptual reasons, 
Incandenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of 
Subsidized Time, secondly, that his output increased steadily until during the last years 
of his life Incandenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, 
that his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different 
changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his high-conceptual projects' 
agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making 
their status as film subject to controversy. 

Accordingly, though the works are here listed in what is considered by archivists to be 
their probable order of completion, we wish to say that the list's order and 
completeness are, at this point in time, not definitive. 

Each work's title is followed: by either its year of completion, or by 'B.S.,' designating 
undated completion before Subsidization; by the production company; by the major 
players, if credited; by the storage medium's ('film' 's) gauge or gauges; by the length of 
the work to the nearest minute; by an indication of whether the work is in black and 
white or color or both; by an indication of whether the film is silent or in sound or both; 
by (if possible) a brief synopsis or critical overview; and by an indication of whether the 
work is mediated by celluloid film, magnetic video. Interlace Spontaneous 
Dissemination, TP-compatible InterLace cartridge, or privately distributed by 
Incandenza's own company(ies). The designation UNRELEASED is used for those works 
which never saw distribution and are now publicly unavailable or lost. 

Cage. b Dated only 'Before Subsidization.' Meniscus Films, Ltd. Uncredited cast; 16 
mm.; .5 minutes; black and white; sound. Soliloquized parody of a broadcast-television 
advertisement for shampoo, utilizing four convex mirrors, two planar mirrors, and one 
actress. UNRELEASED 

b . With the possible exception of Cage III — Free Show, Incandenza's Cage series bears 
no discernible relation to Sidney Peterson's 1947 classic. The Cage. 

Kinds of Light. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. No cast; 16 mm.; 3 minutes; color; silent. 4,444 
individual frames, each of which photo depicts lights of different source, wavelength, 
and candle power, each reflected off the same unpolished tin plate and rendered 
disorienting at normal projection speeds by the hyperretinal speed at which they pass. 



CELLULOID, LIMITED METROPOLITAN BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT .25 
NORMAL SPROCKET DRIVE 

Dark Logics. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Players uncredited; 35 mm.; 21 minutes; color; 
silent w/ deafening Wagner/Sousa soundtrack. Griffith tribute, limura parody. Child¬ 
sized but severely palsied hand turns pages of incunabular manuscripts in mathematics, 
alchemy, religion, and bogus political autobiography, each page comprising some 
articulation or defense of intolerance and hatred. Film's dedication to D. W. Griffith and 
Taka limura. UNRELEASED 

Tennis, Everyone? B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./U.S.T.A. Films. Documentary cast w/ 
narrator Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 35 mm.; 26 minutes; color; sound. Public 
relations/advertorial production for United States Tennis Association in conjunction 
with Wilson Sporting Goods, Inc. MAGNETIC VIDEO 

'There Are No Losers Here.' B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./ U.S.T.A. Films. Documentary 
cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 35 mm.; color; sound. Documentary on B.S. 1997 U.S.T.A. 
National Junior Tennis Championships, Kalamazoo Ml and Miami FL, in conjunction with 
United States Tennis Association and Wilson Sporting Goods. MAGNETIC VIDEO 

Flux in a Box. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./Wilson Inc. Documentary cast w/ narrator 
Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 35 mm.; 52 minutes; black and white/color; sound. Documentary 
history of box, platform, lawn, and court tennis from the 17th-century Court of the 
Dauphin to the present. MAGNETIC VIDEO 

Infinite Jest (I). B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 16/35 mm.; 90(?) 
minutes; black and white; silent. Incandenza's unfinished and unseen first attempt at 
commercial entertainment. UNRELEASED 

Annular Fusion Is Our Friend. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./Sunstrand Power & Light Co. 
Documentary cast w/ narrator C. N. Reilly; Sign-Interpreted for the Deaf; 78 mm.; 45 
minutes; color; sound. Public relations/advertorial production for New England's 
Sunstrand Power and Light utility, a nontechnical explanation of the processes of DT- 
cycle lithiumized annular fusion and its applications in domestic energy production. 
CELLULOID, MAGNETIC VIDEO 

Annular Amplified Light: Some Reflections. B.S. Heliotrope Films/Sunstrand Power & 
Light Co. Documentary cast w/ narrator C. N. Reilly; Sign-Interpreted for the Deaf; 78 
mm.; 45 minutes; color; sound. Second infomercial for Sunstrand Co., a nontechnical 
explanation of the applications of cooled-photon lasers in DT-cycle lithiumized annular 
fusion. CELLULOID, MAGNETIC VIDEO 

Union of Nurses in Berkeley. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Documentary cast; 35 mm.; 26 
minutes; color; silent. Documentary and closed-caption interviews with hearing- 
impaired RNs and LPNs during Bay Area health care reform riots of 1996. MAGNETIC 
VIDEO, PRIVATELY RELEASED BY MENISCUS FILMS, LTD. 

Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. 
Documentary cast; 35 mm.; 26 minutes; color; silent w/ heavy use of computerized 
distortion in facial close-ups. Documentary and closed-caption interviews with 
participants in the public Steven Pinker-Avril M. Incandenza debate on the political 
implications of prescriptive grammar during the infamous Militant Grammarians of 



Massachusetts convention credited with helping incite the M.l.T. language riots of B.S. 
1997. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION 

Widower. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Ross Reat; 35 mm.; 
34 minutes; black and white; sound. Shot on location in Tucson AZ, parody of broadcast 
television domestic comedies, a cocaine-addicted father (Watt) leads his son (Reat) 
around their desert property immolating poisonous spiders. CELLULOID; INTERLACE 
TELENT CARTRIDGE RERELEASE #357-75-00 (Y.P.W.) 

Cage II. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Disney Leith; 35 mm.; 
120 minutes; black and white; sound. Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict 
(Watt) and a deaf-mute convict (Leith) together in 'solitary confinement,' and the two 
men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other. LIMITED CELLULOID 
RUN; RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO 

Death in Scarsdale. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon R. 
Bain; 78 mm.; 39 minutes; color; silent w/ closed-caption subtitles. Mann/Allen parody, 
a world-famous dermatological endocrinologist (Watt) becomes platonically obsessed 
with a boy (Bain) he is treating for excessive perspiration, and begins himself to suffer 
from excessive perspiration. UNRELEASED 

Fun with Teeth. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Herbert G. Birch, Billy Tolan, 
Pam Heath; 35 mm.; 73 minutes; black and white; silent w/ non-human screams and 
howls. Kosinski/Updike/Peckinpah parody, a dentist (Birch) performs sixteen 
unanesthetized root-canal procedures on an academic (Tolan) he suspects of 
involvement with his wife (Heath). MAGNETIC VIDEO, PRIVATELY RELEASED BY 
LATRODECTUS MACTANS PROD. 

Infinite Jest (II). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath; 35/78 mm.; 90(?) 
minutes; black and white; silent. Unfinished, unseen attempt at remake of Infinite Jest 
(I). UNRELEASED 

Immanent Domain. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Judith 
Fukuoka-Hearn, Pam Heath, Pamela-Sue Voorheis, Herbert G. Birch; 35 mm.; 88 
minutes; black and white w/ microphotography; sound. Three memory-neurons 
(Fukuoka-Hearn, Heath, Voorheis (w/ polyurethane costumes)) in the Inferior frontal 
gyrus of a man's (Watt's) brain fight heroically to prevent their displacement by new 
memory-neurons as the man undergoes intensive psychoanalysis. CELLULOID; 
INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RERELEASE #340-03-70 (Y.P.W.) 

Kinds of Pain. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Anonymous cast; 35/78 mm.; 6 
minutes; color; silent. 2,222 still-frame close-ups of middle-aged white males suffering 
from almost every conceivable type of pain, from an ingrown toenail to cranio-facial 
neuralgia to inoperable colo-rectal neoplastis. CELLULOID, LIMITED METRO BOSTON 
RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT .25 NORMAL SPROCKET-DRIVE 

Various Small Flames. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Pam 
Heath, Ken N. Johnson; 16 mm.; 25 minutes w/ recursive loop for automatic replay; 
color; silent w/ sounds of human coitus appropriated from and credited to Caballero 
Control Corp. adult videos. Parody of neoconceptual structuralist films of Godbout and 
Vodriard, n-frame images of myriad varieties of small household flames, from lighters 



and birthday candles to stovetop gas rings and grass clippings ignited by sunlight 
through a magnifying glass, alternated with anti-narrative sequences of a man (Watt) 
sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway 
representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway. 
UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION BY 1960s US CONCEPTUAL DIRECTOR OF VARIOUS 
SMALL FIRES ED RUSCHA - INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RE-RELEASE #330-54-94 
(Y.T.-S.D.B.) 

Cage III — Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/lnfernatron Animation 
Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial 
animation; 35 mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) 
presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch 
performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the 
spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are 
transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent 
the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in 
which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness 
ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE 
CARTRIDGE #357-65-65 

The Medusa v. the Odalisque. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; 
zone-plating laser holography by James 0. Incandenza and Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; 
holographic fight-choreography by Kenjiru Hirota courtesy of Sony Entertainment-Asia; 
78 mm.; 29 minutes; black and white; silent w/ audience-noises appropriated from 
network broadcast television. Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythologic 
females duel with reflective surfaces onstage while a live crowd of spectators turns to 
stone. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; PRIVATELY RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY 
LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS 

The Machine in the Ghost: Annular Flolography for Fun and Prophet. B.S. Heliotrope 
Films, Ltd./National Film Board of Canada. Narrator P. A. Heaven; 78 mm.; 35 minutes; 
color; sound. Nontechnical introduction to theories of annular enhancement and zone¬ 
plating and their applications in high-resolution laser holography. UNRELEASED DUE TO 
US/CANADIAN DIPLOMATIC TENSIONS 

Flomo Duplex. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Narrator P. A. Heaven; Super-8 
mm.; 70 minutes; black and white; sound. Parody of Woititz and Shulgin's 
'poststructural antidocumentaries,' interviews with fourteen Americans who are named 
John Wayne but are not the legendary 20th-century film actor John Wayne. MAGNETIC 
VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE) 

Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Ken N. Johnson, 
Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Otto Brandt, E. J. Kenkle; 35 mm.; 82 minutes; black and 
white/color; silent. The intricate Ocha-Kai is conducted 2.5 m. off the ground in the 
Johnson Space Center's zero-gravity-simulation chamber. CELLULOID; INTERLACE 
TELENT RERELEASE #357-40-01 (Y.P.W.) 

Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Fieaven and Flell. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/ 
Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Animated w/ uncredited voices; 35 mm.; 59 



minutes; color; sound. God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an 
alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.' 
PRIVATELY RELEASED ON CELLULOID AND MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS 
MACTANS PRODUCTIONS 

The Joke. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Audience as reflexive cast; 35 mm. X 
2 cameras; variable length; black and white; silent. Parody of Hollis Frampton's 
'audience-specific events,' two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the 'film' 
's audience and project the resultant raster onto screen — the theater audience 
watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious 
and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film's involuted 'antinarrative' 
flow. Incandenza's first truly controversial project. Film & Kartridge Kultcher's Sperber 
credited it with 'unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in 
terms of sheer annoyance.' NONRECORDED MAGNETIC VIDEO SCREENABLE IN THEATER 
VENUE ONLY, NOW UNRELEASED 

Various Lachrymose U.S. Corporate Middle-Management Figures. Unfinished. 
UNRELEASED 

Every Inch of Disney Leith. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Medical Imagery of 
Alberta, Ltd. Disney Leith; computer-enlarged 35 mm./x 2 m.; 253 minutes; color; silent. 
Miniaturized, endoscopic, and microinvasive cameras traverse entire exterior and 
interior of one of Incandenza's technical crew as he sits on a folded scrape in the Boston 
Common listening to a public forum on uniform North American metricization. PRIVATE 
RELEASE ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS; INTERLACE 
TELENT RERELEASE #357-56-34 (Y.P.W.) 

Infinite Jest (III). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; 16/35 mm.; 
color; sound. Unfinished, unseen remake of Infinite Jest (I), (II). UNRELEASED 

Found Drama I. 

Found Drama II. 

Found Drama III.... conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED 

The Man Who Began to Suspect Fie Was Made of Glass. Year of the Whopper. 
Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Gerhardt Schtitt; 35 mm.; 21 
minutes; black and white; sound. A man undergoing intensive psychotherapy discovers 
that he is brittle, hollow, and transparent to others, and becomes either 
transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE 
#357-59-00 

Found Drama V. 

Found Drama VI. ... conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED 

The American Century as Seen Through a Brick. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus 
Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narration by P. A. Heaven; 35 mm.; 52 
minutes; color w/ red filter and oscillophotography; silent w/ narration. As U.S. Boston's 
historical Back Bay streets are stripped of brick and repaved with polymerized cement, 
the resultant career of one stripped brick is followed, from found-art temporary 
installation to displacement by E.W.D. catapult to a waste-quarry in southern Quebec to 
its use in the F.L.Q.-incited anti-O.N.A.N. riots of January/Whopper, all intercut with 



ambiguous shots of a human thumb's alterations in the interference pattern of a 
plucked string. PRIVATELY RELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS 
PRODUCTIONS 

The ONANtiad. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Claymation 
action sequences © Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. 
Heaven, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Squyre Frydell, Maria-Dean 
Chumm, Herbert G. Birch, Everard Meynell; 35 mm.; 76 minutes; black and white/color; 
sound/silent. Oblique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle played out 
against live-acted backdrop of the inception of North American Interdependence and 
Continental Reconfiguration. PRIVATELY RELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY 
LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS 

The Universe Lashes Out. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. 
Documentary cast w/ narrator Herbert G. Birch; 16 mm.; 28 minutes; color; silent w/ 
narration. Documentary on the evacuation of Atkinson NH/New Quebec at the inception 
of Continental Reconfiguration. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE) 

Poultry in Motion. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. 
Documentary cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 16 mm.; 56 minutes; color; silent w/ 
narration. Documentary on renegade North Syracuse NNY turkey farmers' bid to 
prevent toxification of Thanksgiving crop by commandeering long, shiny O.N.A.N. trucks 
to transplant over 200,000 pertussive fowl south to Ithaca. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED 
RELEASE) 

Found Drama IX. 

Found Drama X. 

Found Drama X. ... conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED 
Mdbiu$ Strips. Year of the Whopper. Lactrodectus Mactans Productions. 'Hugh G. 
Rection,' Pam Heath, 'Bunny Day,' 'Taffy Appel'; 35 mm.; 109 minutes; black and white; 
sound. Pornography-parody, possible parodic homage to Fosse's All That Jazz, in which a 
theoretical physicist ('Rection'), who can only achieve creative mathematical insight 
during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath). INTERLACE 
TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-32 (Y.W.) 

Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans 
Productions. Everard Maynell, Phillip T. Smothergill, Paul Anthony Heaven, Pamela-Sue 
Voorheis; 16 mm.; 19 minutes; black and white; sound. Possible parody/homage to B.S. 
public-service-announcement cycle of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, c a 
harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over. 

c . See Romney and Sperber, 'Has James 0. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One 
Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?' Post-Millennium Film 
Cartridge Journal, nos. 7-9 (Fall/Winter, Y.P.W.), pp. 4-26. 

Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans 
Productions. Telma Hurley, Pam Heath, Maria-Dean Chumm, Diane Saltoone, Soma 
Richardson-Levy, Cosgrove Watt; 35 mm.; 90 minutes; color; sound. Parody of 
revenge/recidivism action genre, a formerly delinquent nun's (Hurley's) failure to reform 
a juvenile delinquent (Chumm) leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge. INTERLACE 



TELENT PULSE-DISSEMINATION 21 JULY Y.T.M.P., CARTRIDGE #357-87-04 

Infinite Jest (IV). Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. 
Pam Heath (?), 'Madame Psychosis'(?); 78 mm.; 90 minutes(?); color; sound. Unfinished, 
unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (III). UNRELEASED 

Let There Be Lite. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment 
Unlimited. Documentary cast w/ narrator Ken N. Johnson; 16mm.; 50 minutes(?); black 
and white; silent w/ narration. Unfinished documentary on genesis of reduced-calorie 
bourbon industry. UNRELEASED 

Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED 

No Troy. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. No cast; liquid- 
surface holography by Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; 35 mm.; 7 minutes; enhanced color; silent. 
Scale-model holographic recreation of Troy NY's bombardment by miscalibrated Waste 
Displacement Vehicles, and its subsequent elimination by O.N.A.N. cartographers. 
MAGNETIC VIDEO (PRIVATE RELEASE LIMITED TO NEW BRUNSWICK, ALBERTA, QUEBEC) 
Note: Archivists in Canada and the U.S. West Coast do not list No Troy but do list titles 
The Violet City and The Violet Ex-City, respectively, leading scholars to conclude that the 
same film was released under several different appellations. 

Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED 

Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick 
Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. Smothergill, Diane Saltoone; 16 mm.; 
52 minutes; color; silent. Possible Scandinavian-psychodrama parody, a boy helps his 
alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for 
rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular 
fusion. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED) 

Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick 
Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary or uncredited cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 16 
mm.; 45 minutes; black and white; sound. Children and adolescents play a nearly 
incomprehensible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment against the real or 
holography?) backdrop of sabotaged ATHSCME 1900 atmospheric displacement towers 
exploding and toppling during the New New England Chemical Emergency of Y.W. 
CELLULOID (UNRELEASED) 

Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick 
Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary cast w/ narrator Soma Richardson-Levy; Super-8 
mm.; 52 minutes; black and white/color; sound. Shot on location north of Lowell MA, 
documentary on Essex County Sheriff's Dept, and Massachusetts Department of Social 
Services' expedition to track, verify, capture, or propitiate the outsized feral infant 
alleged to have crushed, gummed, or picked up and dropped over a dozen residents of 
Lowell in January, Y.T.M.P. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-12-56 

As of Yore. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. 
Cosgrove Watt, Marlon Bain; 16/78 mm.; 181 minutes; black and white/color; sound. A 
middle-aged tennis instructor, preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes 
intoxicated in the family's garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while 
the son weeps and perspires. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE # 357-16-09 



The Clever Little Bastard. Unfinished, unseen. UNRELEASED 

The Cold Majesty of the Numb. Unfinished, unseen. UN RELEASED 

Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available 
Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency. Unfinished due to hospitalization. UNRELEASED 

Low-Temperature Civics. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment 
Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Herbert G. Birch, Ken N. Johnson, Soma Richardson-Levy, 
Everard Maynell, 'Madame Psychosis,' Phillip T. Smothergill, Paul Anthony Heaven; 35 
mm.; 80 minutes; black and white; sound. Wyler parody in which four sons (Birch, 
Johnson, Maynell, Smothergill) intrigue for control of a sandwich-bag conglomerate 
after their CEO father (Watt) has an ecstatic encounter with Death ('Psychosis') and 
becomes irreversibly catatonic. NATIONAL DISSEMINATION IN INTERLACE TELENT'S 
'CAVALCADE OF EVIL' SERIES -JANUARY/YEAR OF TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR -AND 
INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-89-05 

(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor 
Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, 'Hugh G. Rection'; 78 mm.; 
26 minutes; black and white; sound. The headmaster of a newly constructed high- 
altitude sports academy (Watt) becomes neurotically obsessed with litigation over the 
construction's ancillary damage to a V.A. hospital far below, as a way of diverting 
himself from his wife's (Heath's) poorly hidden affair with the academically renowned 
mathematical topologist who is acting as the project's architect ('Rection'). CELLULOID 
(UNRELEASED) 

(The) Desire to Desire. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment 
Unlimited. Robert Lingley, 'Madame Psychosis,' Maria-Dean Chumm; 35 mm.; 99 
minutes(?); black and white; silent. A pathology resident (Lingley) falls in love with a 
beautiful cadaver ('Psychosis') and the paralyzed sister (Chumm) she died rescuing from 
the attack of an oversized feral infant. Listed by some archivists as unfinished. 
UNRELEASED 

Safe Boating Is No Accident. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad(?). Poor Yorick 
Entertainment 

Unlimited/X-Ray and Infrared Photography by Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems, 
Enfield MA. Ken N. Johnson, 'Madame Psychosis,' P. A. Heaven. Kierkegaard/Lynch (?) 
parody, a claustrophobic water-ski instructor (Johnson), struggling with his romantic 
conscience after his fiancee's ('Psychosis"s) face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard 
propeller, becomes trapped in an overcrowded hospital elevator with a defrocked 
Trappist monk, two overcombed mis-sionarjes for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- 
Day Saints, an enigmatic fitness guru, the Massachusetts State Commissioner for Beach 
and Water Safety, and seven severely intoxicated opticians with silly hats and exploding 
cigars. Listed by some archivists as completed the following year, Y.T.-S.D.B. 
UNRELEASED 

Very Low Impact. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment 
Unlimited. Maria-Dean Chumm, Pam Heath, Soma Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne; 35 mm.; 30 
minutes; color; sound. A narcoleptic aerobics instructor (Chumm) struggles to hide her 
condition from students and employers. POSTHUMOUS RELEASE Y.W.-Q.M.D.; 



INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-97-29 

The Night Wears a Sombrero. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (?). Ken N. Johnson, 
Phillip T. Smothergill, Dianne Saltoone, 'Madame Psychosis'; 78 mm.; 105 minutes; 
color; silent/sound. Parody/homage to Lang's Rancho Notorious, a nearsighted 
apprentice cowpoke (Smothergill), swearing vengeance for a gunslinger's (Johnson's) 
rape of what he (the cowpoke) mistakenly believes is the motherly brothel-owner 
(Saltoone) he (the cowpoke) is secretly in love with, loses the trail of the gunslinger after 
misreading a road sign and is drawn to a sinister Mexican ranch where Oedipally 
aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun ('Psychosis'). Listed 
by some archivists as completed the preceding year, Y.W. INTERLACE TELENT 
CARTRIDGE #357-56-51 

Accomplice! Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. 
Cos-grove Watt, Stokely 'Dark Star' McNair; 16 mm.; 26 minutes; color; sound. An aging 
pederast mutilates himself out of love for a strangely tattooed street hustler. INTERLACE 
TELENT CARTRIDGE # 357-10-10 withdrawn from dissemination after Cartridge Scene 
reviewers called Accomplice! '...the stupidest, nastiest, least subtle and worst-edited 
product of a pretentious and wretchedly uneven career.' NOW UNRELEASED 

Entitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Untitled. 
Unfinished. UNRELEASED 

Dial C for Concupiscence. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment 
Unlimited. Soma Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne, Maria-Dean Chumm, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Yves 
Fran-coeur; 35 mm.; 122 minutes; black and white; silent w/ subtitles. Parodic noir-style 
tribute to Bresson's Les Anges du Peche, a cellular phone operator (Richardson-Levy- 
O'Byrne), mistaken by a Quebecois terrorist (Francoeur) for another cellular phone 
operator (Chumm) the FLQ had mistakenly tried to assassinate, mistakes his mistaken 
attempts to apologize as attempts to assassinate her (Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne) and 
flees to a bizarre Islamic religious community whose members communicate with each 
other by means of semaphore flags, where she falls in love with an armless Near Eastern 
medical attache (Chawaf). RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT'S 'HOWLS FROM THE 
MARGIN' UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES - MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B. - AND INTERLACE 
TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-75-43 

Insubstantial Country. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment 
Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt; 16 mm.; 30 minutes; black and white; silent/sound. An 
unpopular apres-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and 
becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else's delusion that his (Watt's) 
temporal lobe seizure has left him mute. PRIVATE CARTRIDGE RELEASE BY POOR YORICK 
ENTERTAINMENT UNLIMITED 

It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him. Year of the 
Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. 
Smothergill; 16 mm.; 5 minutes; black and white; silent/ sound. A father (Watt), 
suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is 
pretending to be mute, poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the 
boy out. RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT'S 'HOWLS FROM THE MARGIN' 



UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES - MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B -AND INTERLACE TELENT 
CARTRIDGE #357-75-50 

Cage IV— Web. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Cage V — Infinite Jim. Unfinished. 
UNRELEASED Death and the Single Girl. Unfinished. UNRELEASED. 

The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss's 'The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as 
Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the 
Marquis de Sade.'Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. 
James 0. Incandenza, Disney Leith, Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr., Jane Ann Prickett, Herbert G. 
Birch, 'Madame Psychosis,' Maria-Dean Chumm, Marlon Bain, Pam Heath, Soma 
Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf, Ken N. Johnson, Dianne Saltoone; Super-8 mm.; 88 
minutes; black and white; silent/ sound. Fictional 'interactive documentary' on Boston 
stage production of Weiss's 20th-century play within play, in which the documentary's 
chemically impaired director (Incandenza) repeatedly interrupts the inmates' 
dumbshow-capering and Marat and Sade's dialogues to discourse incoherently on the 
implications of Brando's Method Acting and Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty for North 
American filmed entertainment, irritating the actor who plays Marat (Leith) to such an 
extent that he has a cerebral hemorrhage and collapses onstage well before Marat's 
scripted death, whereupon the play's nearsighted director (Ogilvie), mistaking the actor 
who plays Sade (Johnson) for Incandenza, throws Sade into Marat's medicinal bath and 
throttles him to death, whereupon the extra-dramatic figure of Death ('Psychosis') 
descends deus ex machina to bear Marat (Leith) and Sade (Johnson) away, while 
Incandenza becomes ill all over the theater audience's first row. 8 MM. SYNC- 
PROJECTION CELLULOID. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION, HOSPITALIZATION 

Too Much Fun. Unfinished. UNRELEASED 

The Unfortunate Case of Me. Unfinished. UNRELEASED 

Sorry All Over the Place. Unfinished. UNRELEASED 

Infinite Jest (VI). Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. 
'Madame Psychosis'; no other definitive data. Thorny problem for archivists. 
Incandenza's last film, Incandenza's death occurring during its post-production. Most 
archival authorities list as unfinished, unseen. Some list as completion of Infinite Jest 
(IV), for which Incandenza also used 'Psychosis,' thus list the film under Incandenza's 
output for Y.T.M.P. Though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists, two short 
essays in different issues of Cartridge Quarterly East refer to the film as 'extraordinary' d 
and 'far and away [James 0. Incandenza's] most entertaining and compelling work.' 8 
West Coast archivists list the film's gauge as '16...78...n mm.,' basing the gauge on 
critical allusions f to 'radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context' as 
IJ(VI)'s distinctive feature. Though Canadian archivist Tete-Beche lists the film as 
completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the 
filmmaker's will, all other comprehensive filmographies have the film either unfinished 
or UNRELEASED, its Master cartridge either destroyed or vaulted sui testator. 

d . E. Duquette, 'Beholden to Vision: Optics and Desire in Four Apres Garde Films,' 
Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 2, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 35-39. 

e . Anonymous, 'Seeing v. Believing,' Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 4, Y.W.- 



Q.M.D., pp. 93-95. 
f . Ibid. 


25 More like July-October, actually. 

26 Synthetically enhanced enkephalin, an opiate-like pentapeptide or so-called 
endorphin manufactured in the human spine, one of the compounds prominently 
involved in the infamous 'CadaverGate' scandal that brought down so many funeral 
directors in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. 

27 Metro Boston subdialectical argot — origin unknown — for cannabis, pot, grass, du- 
Bois, dope, ganja, bhang, herb, hash, m. jane, kif, etc.; with 'Bing Crosby 1 designating 
cocaine and organic methoxies ('drines), and — inexplicably — 'Doris' standing for syn¬ 
thetic dickies, psychs, and phenyls. 

28 Monoamine-oxidase inhibitors, a venerable class of antidepressants/anxiolytics, of 
which Parnate — SmithKline Beecham's product-name for tranylcypromine sulfate — is 
a member. Zoloft is sertraline hydrochloride, a serotonin-reuptake-inhibitor (SRI) not all 
that dissimilar to Prozac, manufactured by Pfizer-Roerig. 

29 Electro-Convulsive Therapy. 

30 A neutral boric acid eyewash, a kind of turbo-charged Visine, available over-counter 
from Wyeth Labs, with its own eye-cup of apothecary-blue plastic that's downright gor¬ 
geous when held up to a window's light. 

31 Schtitt's term for Mr. A. deLint, which means technically 'soulmate' or 'spouse' but 
isn't meant at all sexually w/r/t deLint, we can rest assured. 

32 Roughly, 'They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier.' 

33 l.e., 'Before Subsidization 1 or the beginning of the subsidized O.N.A.N.ite lunar cal¬ 
endar under President Gentle; see sub. 

34 A.k.a. 'E.L.D.,' that still-green shoot off the pure branch of math that deals with 
systems and phenomena whose chaos is beyond even Mandelbrotian math's Strange 
Equations and Random Attractants, a delimiting reaction against the Chaos Theories of 
fractal-happy meteorologists and systems analysts, E.L.D., whose post-Godelian theo¬ 
rems and nonexistence proofs amount to extremely lucid and elegant admissions of 
defeat in certain cases, hands thrown up w/ complete deductive justification. 
Incandenza, whose frustrated interest in grand-scale failure was unflagging through four 
different careers, would have been all over Extra-Linear Dynamics like white on rice, had 
he survived. 

35 l.e., presumably, 'of-Georg-Cantor,' Cantor being a 1900s-era set-theorist (German 
also) and more or less founder of transfinite mathematics, the man who proved some 
infinities were bigger than other infinities, and whose 1905-ish Diagonal Proof demon¬ 
strated that there can be an infinity of things between any two things no matter how 
close together the two things are, which D. Proof deeply informed Dr. J. Incandenza's 
sense of the transstatistical aesthetics of serious tennis. 

36 Low-Bavarian for something like 'wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory 
beyond all charted limits and orienting markers,' supposedly. 

37 Wheelchair. 



38 Ghostly light- and monster-shadow phenomenon particular to certain mountains; e.g. 
q.v. Part I of Goethe's Faust, the Walpurgisnacht six-toed danceathon on the Harz- 
Brocken, in which there's described a classic 'Brockengespenstphanom.' (Gespenst 
means specter or wraith.) 

39 Marathe's superior in the A.F.R., 3 the leader of the Wheelchair Assassins' U.S.A. cell, 
and the former boyhood friend of Remy Marathe's late older brothers, both struck and 
killed by trains. b 

a . Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a.k.a. Wheelchair Assassins, pretty much 
Quebec's most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell. 

b . See Note 304 sub. 

40 In other words, M. Fortier and the A.F.R. (as far as Marathe knew) believed that 
Marathe was functioning as a kind of 'triple agent' or duplicitous 'double agent' — at 
Fortier's direction, Marathe had pretended to approach B.S.S. seeking to trade 
knowledge of the A.F.R.'s anti-O.N.A.N. activities for protection and medical care for his 
hideously ill wife (Marathe's) — only (as far as Marathe can know) Marathe and very 
few B.S.S. operatives know that Marathe is now only pretending to pretend to betray, 
that M. Steeply is fully aware that Marathe responds to B.S.S.'s summonses with what 
M. Fortier believes is his (Fortier's) full knowledge, that M. Fortier is not (as far as 
Marathe and Steeply can reasonably posit) aware that Steeply and B.S.S. are aware that 
Fortier is aware of Marathe's meetings with Steeply, and that Marathe's own violent 
death will be the smallest of his (Marathe's) problems should his Mont-Tremblant coun¬ 
trymen come to suspect the even-numbered total of his final loyalties. 

41 Intra-O.N.A.N. sobriquet for 'acting as a double agent'; similarly w/ 'tripling,' and so 
on. 

42 The 'thing of important' seems to be that Marathe's A.F.R. superiors believe he only is 
pretending to betray them in order to secure advanced U.S. cardiac-prosthetic technol¬ 
ogy for his wife; but that in fact he really is betraying them (the superiors, his country) 
— probably actually for that medical tech — and is thus only pretending only to 
pretend. 

43 Chronic inflammation of the terminal ileum and adjacent tissues, named in dubious 
honor of a Dr. Crohn in B.S. 1932. 

44 Professional euphemism for involuntary interrogation, either w/ or w/o physical in¬ 
ducements. 

45 See Note 304 sub. 

46 Over-the-counter topical stuff for the corticatization of skin, tincture of benzoin facil¬ 
itates the development of the kinds of callus that don't get blood-blisters underneath. 
Way more common and universal among serious players than Lemon Pledge. Finding 
the smell of t. of b. nauseous, some junior players prefer an applied layer of corn starch 
or baby powder, which makes the t. of b. easier to wash off later but also leaves weird 
little white fingerprints over everything you touch. 

47 Le Front de la Liberation de la Quebec, rather a younger and rowdier and less impla¬ 
cably businesslike cell than the A.F.R., and symbolically adopting certain cultural cus¬ 
toms, musics and motifs associated with Hawaii, supposedly an ironic nod to the idea 



that Quebec is now, too, a kind of annex or territory of the U.S., a Canadian province 
only on paper, and separated from its real captor-nation by distances of space and 
culture that are unbridgeable. 

48 The progressive asymmetrical narrowing of one or more cardiac sinuses; can be either 
atherosclerotic or neoplastic; rare before continental Interdependence; now the third- 
leading cause of death among adults of Quebec and New Brunswick and the seventh 
among adults of the Northeastern U.S.A.; associated with chronic low-level exposure to 
2,3,7,8 Tetrachlorodibenzo-P-Di- and -Trioxin compounds. 

49 Redundancy sic. 

50 Said galoots also known, in the old founder's AA circle, Enfield MA's White Flag Group, 
as 'The Crocodiles.' 

51 Syntax sic , which had helped drive Mrs. Avril Incandenza — her Op-Ed letters and 
formal complaints apparently ignored at every political level — to help found the 
Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, ever since a bramble in the flank of advertisers, 
corporations, and all fast-and-loose-players with the integrity of public discourse — see 
sub. 

52 The Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectometry scan uses particle-bombardment and a 
positive-ion read by a spectrometer. It's the mid-range test of choice for corporations 
and athletic bodies, way less expensive than chromosomatic breakdowns of hair 
samples, but — as long as environmental controls on the hardware're strictly observed 
— more comprehensive and reliable than the older E.M.l.T. and AbuScreen/RIA urine 
tests. 

53 Eschaton is a real-participant and tennis-court-modified version of the EndStat® ROM- 
run nuclear-conflagration game. 

54 Viz. Prescriptive Grammar (Grade 10), Descriptive Grammar (11), Grammar and 
Meaning (12). 

55 Hal, who personally thinks the term that'd apply here would be suborned , not 
entrapped — unless the caller were himself a police officer — keeps his own counsel on 
this point and basically goes along to get along. 

56 or PMA, Grievous Bod., nutmeg's myristicin, or Hawaiian baby-woodrose seeds' 
ergine, or the African iboga's ibogaine, the yage's harmaline ... or the fly agaric fungus's 
well-known muscimole, which fitviavi's derived DMZ resembles chemically sort of the 
way an F-18 resembles a Piper Cub. . . 

57 Ingesters' accounts of the temporal-perception consequences of DMZ in the literature 
are, as far as Pemulis is concerned, vague and inelegant and more like mystical in the 
Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous or referentially clear; one account Pemulis 
doesn't completely get but can at least get the neuro-titillating gist of is one 
monograph's toss-off quote from an Italian lithographer who'd ingested DMZ once and 
made a lithograph comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, 
plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally 
ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes. 

58 Certified (by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) Substance Abuse Counselor. 

59 Oxycodone hydrochloride w/ acetaminophen, C-ll Class, Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. 



60 Replacing the old neo-Georgian J. A. Stratton Student Center, right off Mass. Ave. and 
gutted with C4 during the so-called M.l.T. Language Riots of twelve years past. 

61 An apres-garde digital movement, a.k.a. 'Digital Parallelism' and 'Cinema of Chaotic 
Stasis,' characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of differ¬ 
ent narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence, the school derived 
somewhat from both the narrative bradykineticism of Antonioni and the disassociative 
formalism of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, comprising periods in the careers of 
the late Beth B., the Snow brothers, Vigdis Simpson, and the late J. 0. Incandenza 
(middle period). 

62 At the zenith of the self-help-group movement in the B.S. mid-1990s, there were 
estimated to be over 600 wholly distinct Step-based fellowships in the U.S.A., all mod¬ 
elled, however heretically or flakily, on the '12 Steps' of Alcoholics Anonymous. By 
Y.D.A.U., the number has dropped to about one-third of that. 

63 (the student engineer's analogy) 

64 Not 100% clear on this, but the thrust is that the T and Q. are the two basic courses of 
study leading historically to the like 18th-century equivalent of a H.S. diploma and a 
B.A., or maybe M.A., respectively, at nodes of hoary classicality like Oxford and 
Cambridge U. during the time of Samuel Johnson — more or less the original grammato- 
lexical-and-pedagogical hard-ass — and that the trivium makes you take grammar, logic, 
and rhetoric, and then if you're still standing you get the quadrivium of math, geometry, 
astronomy, and music, and that none of the classes — including the potentially 
lightweight astronomy and music — were in fact lightweight, which is one possible 
reason why the portraits of all these classical and neo-classical B.A.s and D.Phil.s at 
Oxford and Cambridge look so pale and wasted and haunted and grim. Not to mention 
that the only day E.T.A.s get off classes is Sunday, partly to make up for how much 
they're away from the classroom on trips; and back at E.T.A. classless Sunday is a three- 
session day on the courts, all of which strikes people outside academies as almost 
fanatically brutal. For more general pedagogy here see P. Beesley's somewhat frumpy 
and dated B.S.-era Revival of the Humanities in American Education, or better yet Dr. A. 
M. Incandenza's updated version of same, with its prose updated and typos eradicated 
and argument rather more keenly honed, available on CD-ROM through InterLace 
@cornup3.COM or in trade paperback from Cornell University Press, 3rd edition © Year 
of the Tucks Medicated Pad. 

65 E.T.A.s' moniker for the Headmaster's House. 

66 Some M.I.T.s are compulsive about taping the shows and then listening to the musics 
again and trying to track them down in stores and college archives, not unlike the way 
some of their parents had killed whole evenings trying to parse out the lyrics on R.E.M. 
and Pearl Jam tapes, etc. 

67 A couple of the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Security officers know E.T.A.'s 
Hal Incandenza from having met his brother Mario when James O. Incandenza had hired 
the officers as lineless figurant background-extra cops for both Dial Cfor Concupiscence 
and Three Cheers for Cause and Effect. The E.M. officers are sometimes down in The 
Unexamined Life tavern on Blind Bouncer nights when Hal is in there with like Axford, 



Hal hitting The Life quite a bit less frequently than Axford and Struck and Troeltsch, who 
rarely miss a Bring-Your-Braille-I.D. theme-night at The Unexamined Life, and seem able 
to function during A.M. drills even after several parasolled Mudslides or the House- 
Specialty Blue Flame cognac-based things you have to blow out before sipping from 
their huge blue-rimmed snifters. The E.M. cops are both young dim big good regular 
blue(literally)-collar Boston guys, high-school tackles now going soft, their jowls razor- 
burned and purpling with gin, and they'll sometimes regale the E.T.A.s w/r/t some of the 
more colorful E.M. specimens they're paid to keep secure. There's something a little 
compulsive about the cops' particular interest in #5 chronic catatonics, especially. The 
E.M. cops call Unit #5 'The Shed,' they say, because its residents don't seem housed 
there so much as more like stored there. The E.M. cops pronounce stored 'stew-wad.' 
The chronic catatonics themselves they refer to as 'objay darts,' which is something else 
Don G. over in #6 has never understood. Over Mudslides, they'll often give little 
thumbnail anecdotes about various of The Shed's objay darts, and one of the reasons 
why they regale the E.T.A.s only when Hal's down there at The Unexamined Life is that 
Hal is the only E.T.A. who seems truly interested, which is the sort of thing your veteran 
off-duty cop can always sense. E.g. one of the objay darts they're into is the lady who 
sits very still with her eyes closed. The cops explain that the lady is not catatonic in the 
strict sense of catatonic but rather a 'D.P.,' which is mental-health-facility slang for 
Debilitatingly Phobic. Her deal is apparently that she's almost psychotically terrified of 
the possibility that she might be either blind or paralyzed or both. So e.g. she keeps her 
eyes shut tight 24/7/365 out of the reasoning that as long as she keeps her eyes shut 
tight she can find hope in the possibility that if she was to open them she'd be able to 
see, they say; but that if she were ever to actually open her eyes and actually not be 
able to see, she reasons, she's lost that precious like margin of hope that she's maybe 
not blind. Then they run through her similar reasoning behind sitting absolutely 
motionless out of a phobia of being paralyzed. After each anecdote-tale like (they've got 
like an anecdote-routine, the E.M. cops), the shorter E.M. Security officer always uses 
his tongue to manipulate the little green parasol from one side of his mouth to the other 
as he holds his snifter tight in both hands and makes his jowls accordionize as he nods 
and posits that the terrifying thing is that the common unifying symptom of most of The 
Shed's objay darts is a terror so terrifying it makes the object of the terror come true, 
somehow, which observation always makes both of the big dim workingmen shiver an 
identical and kind of almost delicious-looking shiver, pushing their hats back and shaking 
their heads at their glasses, as Hal blows out the fire of the second Blue Flame they've 
bought him, making a wish before he blows. 

68 Freer's 'The Viking' moniker is his own invention, and nobody else uses it, instead 
referring to him as just 'Freer,' and regarding it as a classic pathetic Freer-type move 
that he goes around trying to get people to refer to him as The Viking.' 

69 NA = Narcotics Anonymous; CA = Cocaine Anonymous. In some cities there are also 
Psychedelics Anonymous, Nicotine Anonymous (also, confusingly, called NA), Designer 
Drugs Anonymous, Steroids Anonymous, even (especially in and around Manhattan) 
something called Prozac Anonymous. In none of these Anonymous fellowships 



anywhere is it possible to avoid confronting the God stuff, eventually. 

70 Not to mention, according to some hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, yoga, read¬ 
ing, politics, gum-chewing, crossword puzzles, solitaire, romantic intrigue, charity work, 
political activism, N.R.A. membership, music, art, cleaning, plastic surgery, cartridge¬ 
viewing even at normal distances, the loyalty of a fine dog, religious zeal, relentless 
helpfulness, relentless other-folks'-moral-inventory-taking, the development of hard¬ 
line schools of 12-Step thought, ad darn near infinitum, including 12-Step fellowships 
themselves, such that quiet tales sometimes go around the Boston AA community of 
certain incredibly advanced and hard-line recovering persons who have pared away 
potential escape after potential escape until finally, as the stories go, they end up sitting 
in a bare chair, nude, in an unfurnished room, not moving but also not sleeping or 
meditating or abstracting, too advanced to stomach the thought of the potential 
emotional escape of doing anything whatsoever, and just end up sitting there 
completely motion- and escape-less until a long time later all that's found in the empty 
chair is a very fine dusting of off-white ashy stuff that you can wipe away completely 
with like one damp paper towel. 

71 The Boston AA slogan w/r/t this phenomenon is 'You Can't Unring a Bell.' 

72 About which Pakistani manager and his ancestry and ratty little mustache and offi¬ 
cious management style McDade has a colorful thing or two to say, boy. 

73 One of the graduate prorectors' little tasks is supposedly to go around to different 
Subdorm floors and check the rooms for things like are the beds made up drum-tight, 
with unpleasant little extra drills added to the regimens of bed-making and toothpaste- 
cap-replacing slackers, though few of the prorectors have the combination anality and 
drive actually to go around to their assigned rooms with a checklist, the exceptions 
being Aubrey deLint, Mary Esther Thode, and the hatchet-faced Kenyan Tony Nwangi, 
who's got the Pemulis/Troeltsch/Schacht suite under extremely beady scrutiny at all 
times. 

74 Davis Cup is male, Wightman female. 

75 Hal's private dread is that Tavis will want him to offer up his personal competitive 
map and dignity to John ('N.R.') Wayne — who's never in several matches lost more 
than three games in a set to Hal — for the titillation of the alumni and patrons at the 
November Fundraiser-gala's exhibitions, though this is pretty unlikely right before the 
What-aBurger, when Hal'll be apt to face Wayne in the semis anyway, and Schtitt isn't 
apt to want an utter demapping that fresh in Hal's mind right before a major event. 

76 Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of 
Attention Deficit Disorder — partly because he read so fast and spent so little time on 
each level of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale 
kid even slightly to port or starboard of the bell curve's acme was thought at that time 
to have A.D.D. — and for a while there'd been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling, 
and many of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see Hal 
as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis's Child Development 
Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the 
other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted continuum, and for much of the glabrous part of 



his childhood Hal'd been classified as somewhere between 'Borderline Gifted' and 
'Gifted' — though part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.'s diagnostic tests 
weren't quite so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw neural gifts and the 
young Hal's mono-maniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his 
very life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had 
ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even 
exceptionally pleasing — and when he'd committed to memory entire dictionaries and 
vocab-check software and syntax manuals and then had gotten some chance to recite 
some small part of what he'd pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or 
even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these 
times of public performance and pleasure — the Weston MA School District in the early 
B.S. 1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competitions 
called 'Battle of the Books,' which these were for Hal pretty much of a public turkey- 
shoot and approval-fest — when he'd extracted what was desired from memory and 
faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he'd felt almost that same pale sweet 
aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved 
grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear 
that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second prize, ever. 

77 Granted, Pemulis, over the summer (he boards at E.T.A. during the summer but 
hasn't qualified for the European trip since Y.P.W.), had made and distributed (at cost) a 
few copies of a highly amusing low-memory TP game whose graphics featured a picture 
of deLint and a mock-up of the hell-panel from H. Bosch's tryptich The Garden of Earthly 
Delights, which TP game continues to enjoy a select late-night vogue among the sub- 
16's. 

78 (Subject to O.N.A.N. Dept, of Weights and Measures Oversight Committee ratification 
of final contract between G.F.R. Co., Zanesville OH, and the Bureau of Endorsement 
Revenue, United States Office of Unspecified Services, Vienna VA, 15 December 
Y.D.A.U.) 

79 And, it goes w/o saying, w/o one of those video-recorded suicide notes or fond fare¬ 
wells from the terminally ill, which digital halloos from beyond the grave were, after a 
brief and videophony-like vogue, by the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar used only by the 
tasteless and trailer-park tacky, w/ the very tackiest using Tableaux w/ famous dead 
Elvis-/Carson-grade celebrities to convey their farewells. 

80 Orin Incandenza knew that Joelle van Dyne and Dr. James 0. Incandenza weren't 
lovers; Mrs. Avril Incandenza did not know that they weren't lovers, although by the 
time of Joelle's acquaintance with him Jim wasn't in a position to be lovers with 
anybody, neurologically speaking, though it's not clear to Joelle whether Avril even 
knew this, since Jim and Avril hadn't been intimate with each other, i.e. conjugally, for 
quite some time, though Jim hadn't known the precise reason why Avril was so sanguine 
about their not being intimate until the incident with the Volvo, where apparently Avril 
had been with someone (Orin would not say who or whether he knew who) in the Volvo 
and had idly — and disastrously, whether w/ unconscious intent or not — and 
presumably post-coitally idly written the person's first name in the steam of the 



steamed-up car window, which name had disappeared with the steam but had 
reappeared the next time the window had steamed up, which had been when James 
had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed 
maternal Tm-so-terribly-sorry 1 monologue-scene of the last thing he'd done, and then 
never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge's burial in the brass casket w/ him in 
the same testament in which he'd willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) 
annuity, which Avril'd never have lowered herself to the level of contesting, but which 
could hardly be expected not to have solidified the appearance that they'd been lovers, 
Joelle and Jim. 

81 'Theory and Praxis in Peckinpah's Use of Red,' Classic Cartridge Studies vol. IX, nos. 2 & 
3, YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s). 

82 Maybe in like psychic opposition to their Moms's compulsive cleaning thing, both Orin 
when he was at E.T.A. and now Hal are horrific slobs. In Hal's case this is facilitated by 
the fact that the third floor of Subdorm C's prorector is the incredibly lax and laid-back 
Corbett Thorp, who may stutter and go in for half-baked motivational experiments on 
the younger players but never comes around with a white glove and clipboard. Mario 
makes his bed without fail, but you have to keep in mind that it's not like he's got all 
that much else to do. Hal's fitted sheet and sheet are Bean-James River flannels in 
matching green and black Night Watch plaid, and for a comforter he uses a green 
fiberfill winter-camp sleeping bag that's of unknown origin and price because he got it 
for Xmas and it had all the tags removed. 

83 Boston Police Department. 

84 Available on ROM via InterLace @deltad3.COM or in (remaindered) paperback from 
Delta/Delacorte division of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell-Little,-Brown, itself a division of Bell 
Atla ntic/TCI. 

85 = no academy affiliation. 

86 The O.N.A.N.T.A. junior tour allows court-side oxygen ever since an unfortunate 
embolism in Raleigh NC, Y.W.Q.M.D. 

87 Q.v. Note 24 supra. 

88 Since claiming rampant and mysterious breakage and then one time having the Dun¬ 
lop rep passing through Allston on his way out of Boston from E.T.A. see not one but 
three kids on three separate corners hawking shiny new Dunlop sticks in what 
amounted, Dunlop charged, almost to Conspiracy to Defraud, in 
YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,0,OM(s). 

89 The fact that it's not at all clear day-to-day what this it and caring mean, or how you 
can be expected both to care passionately and not care at all, that huge amounts of 
internal psychic energy get expended on trying to come to some acceptable 
understanding of all this stuff, particularly from 16 to like 18, is not accidental or a 
weakness in E.T.A. pedagogy, in Schacht's opinion, though a sizable contingent of E.T.A.s 
view Schtitt as bats and essentially a figurehead and choose to steer more by head 
prorector deLint's clipboard and reductive statistics, which at least afford you a firm idea 
of where you stand, comparatively, at all times. 



SELECTED SNIPPET FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE HOURS 
OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY 
HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE'S 
AA MTNG UP to ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. 

'I fear I simply have to deny the insinuation that it's disloyal or ungrateful to find 
oneself troubled by certain quite glaring inconsistencies in this master quote unquote 
Program you all seem to expect us simply to open up and blindly swallow whole and 
then walk around glazed with our arms right out straight in front of us parroting, 
reciting.' 'Geoff— Geoffrey, man, I don't think anybody's trying to insinuate anything 
over on you, brother. I know I ain't trying to.' 

'No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience 
that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility 
for insinuating anything aloud.' 

'Maybe when I look patient I'm really trying to be patient with myself, for not finishing 
school and etcetera and having a hard time keeping up with you.' 

'This AA tactic of masking condescension behind humility...' 

'I guess I'm just sorry for you you're feeling frustrated with the Program today. I know 
there's lots of days I'm frustrated with it. So I don't know what to say helpful to you 
except what they said to me, to just hang in there.' 

'One Day at a One Day at a One Day.' 

'Brother, that's just all I know to tell you that's worked for me. I know for me it don't 
matter if there's days I fucking hate it. I just have to do it. And it don't help me or 
anybody else if I go around negativing on newcomers and trying to take out my issues 
on trying to fuck them up with God-puzzles.' 

'Mr. Gately Sir, I found myself sitting tonight in yet another Alcoholics Anonymous 
Meeting the central Message of which was the importance of going to still more Alco¬ 
holics Anonymous Meetings. This infuriating carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to 
Meetings only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings.' 

'I hear you.' 

'As if, I mean, what's supposedly going to be communicated at these future meetings 
I'm exhorted to trudge to that cannot simply be communicated now, at this meeting, 
instead of the glazed recitation of exhortations to attend these vague future revelatory 
meetings?' 

'I'm doing my best to stay with you here Day man.' 

'And tonight I'm just settling in in yet another uneven-legged chair, cultivating that 
glazed passive spectatorial state of mind that is clearly what they're trying to inspire in 
the ephebe, settling in next to a positively redolent Emil M. and trying to hold my poor 
addled Denial-ridden mind open with all available main, listening to this ravaged-looking 
Yalie in yellow slacks detail episodes of tremens whose gruesomeness interdicted any 
possible Identification —' 

'I'm remembering I heard Pat tell you that thinking people who are walking ahead of 
you are following you is a pretty bad kind of D.T.s, brother.' 

'And I informed her that there's a well-known surveillance tactic known as the Box- 



surveillance, which involves certain members of the surveillance team establishing 
themselves \r\ front of the subject.' 

'Except I don't ever remember you explaining why a sociology teacher weaving his way 
from his fourth bar to his fifth bar is important enough for four guys from some you- 
never-mentioned-what kind of conspiracy to be pulling this real complex surveillance 
thing.' 

l l 

'Except I was interrupting your point you were sharing, I know, and I'm sorry.' 

'Your basic decency is why you're whom I bring my thoughts to, Don. You know that.' 

'That makes me feel good Day man.' 

'I mean to whom else might I speak? The girl who takes her eye out and fondles it? 
Poor Ewell with his obsessive tattoo charts? Lenz? 

'It makes me feel good you think I'm decent to talk to. That's supposed to be why I'm 
here. I sure needed to talk, at the start. Can you remember where you were headed 
before I broke i—interrupted?' 

'Something this broken Ivy Leaguer said, some AA sally. He said that only one new¬ 
comer in a million actually trudges into an Alcoholics Anonymous Closed Meeting and in 
fact doesn't belong there.' 

'Meaning doesn't turn out to have the Disease you mean.' 

'Yes. And that he said that quote if You — looking right at yours truly, seemingly, with 
that wearily amused patient expression you all must practice in front of the mirror — he 
said that only one newcomer in a million doesn't belong here, and if quote You think 
You're that one-in-a-million. You definitely belong here. And everyone howled with 
mirth, stomped their feet and blew coffee through their noses and wiped their eyes 
with the backs of their hands and elbowed each other. Howled with mirth.' 

'But you were, like, unsmiling at it.' 

'And everyone labels as Denial or ingratitude what's actually horror , Don. The horror of 
acknowledging that you do apparently have some sort of problem with mild sedatives 
and fine Chianti, and wanting with all sincerity to give every fair chance to a treatment- 
modality which millions swear up and down has helped them with their own problem.' 

'You're talking about AA.' 

'To want very much to believe in it, and to try, and then to your horror find the 
Program riddled with these obvious and idiotic fallacies and reductia ad absurdum 
which —' 

'I'm going to need to ask you to try and say that again in words I can follow, Geoffrey, 
if you want me to be right there alongside with you. And I'm sorry if that seems 
descending.' 

'Don, I am sincere when I say I'm frightened when I find that there are things about 
this allegedly miraculous Program's doctrine that simply do not follow. That do not co¬ 
here. That do not make anything resembling rational sense.' 

'I'm with you on that one now, brother.' 

'Tonight's example of the one-in-a-million, say. Don, let me ask you, Don. In all ear¬ 
nest. Why shouldn't every human being in the world be in AA?' 



'Now I'm not with you anymore again, Geoffrey.' 

'Don, why doesn't every featherless biped on earth qualify for AA? By AA's reasoning, 
why isn't everyone everywhere an alcoholic?' 

'Well Geoffrey man it's a totally private decision to admit the Disease, nobody can go 
tell another man he's —' 

'But indulge me for a moment. By AA's own professed logic, everyone ought to be in 
AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say 
you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a 
Substance-problem, why then you're by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently 
need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his 
problem.' 

'Don't look at me like that. Show me the flaw in my reasoning. I beg you. Show me 
why not everyone should be in AA, given the way AA regards those who don't believe 
they belong there.' 

'And now you don't know what to say. There's no cockle-warming cliche that applies.' 
'The slogan I've heard that might work here is the slogan Analysis-Paralysis' 'Oh lovely. 
Oh very nice. By all means don't think about the validity of what they're claiming your 
life hinges on. Oh do not ask what is it. Do not ask not whether it's not insane. Simply 
open wide for the spoon.' 

'For me, the slogan means there's no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the 
Program. Surrender To Win, Give It Away To Keep It. God As You Understand Flim. You 
can't think about it like an intellectual thing. Trust me because I been there, man. You 
can analyze it til you're breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk 
away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best 
you can.' 

'AA's response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the 
inadvisability of all such questions.' 

'I ain't AA Day man. No one like individual can respond for AA.' 

'Am I out of line in seeing something totalitarian about it? Something dare I say un- 
American? To interdict a fundamental doctrinal question by invoking a doctrine against 
questioning? Wasn't this the very horror the Madisonians were horrified of in 1791? 
Amendments I and IX? My Grievance is disallowed because my Petition for Redress is a 
priori interdicted by the inadvisability of all Petitioning?' 

'I'm about to get fucking lapped here I'm so not-following. You honestly don't see 
what's a little whacked-out about what you're saying about Denial?' 

'I'm thinking your failure to engage me on the question itself means either I'm right, 
and AA's whole Belonging-versus-Denial matrix is constructed on logical sand, in which 
case horror, or else it means you're stupefied with condescending pity for me for some 
reason I fail to grasp, doubtless because of Denial, in which case the look on your face 
right now is the same weary patience that makes me want to scream in meetings.' 

'So scream. They can't kick you out.' 

'Flow comforting.' 

'This is a thing I do know. They can't kick you out.' 



91 Pillow-biter's a North Shore term, one Gately grew up with, and it and the /-term are 
the only terms for male homosexuals he knows, still. 

92 Diane Prins, Perth Amboy NJ. 

93 An anxiety-fest captured nicely by the banner-shaped posters deLint used to have D. 
Harde put up each fall over the senior-locker sections of both locker rooms that had 
WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT until some of the other prorectors went to Schtitt and 
got him to make deLint take them down. 

94 It's surely been spelled out already that prorectors teach one marginal class per term 
and serve as on-court assistants to Schtitt's Lebensgefahrtin Aubrey deLint, and that 
their existence at E.T.A. is marginal and low-prestige and their spiritual state on the low 
continuum between embittered and accepting, and for many of the more neurasthenic 
E.T.A. students the prorectors are kind of repellent the way hideously old people are 
repellent, reminding the students of the kind of low-prestige purgatorial fate that awaits 
the marginal and low-ranked jr. player; and while a couple of the prorectors are feared, 
none of them is all that much respected, and they're avoided, and stick together with 
one another and keep to themselves and seem on the whole sad, with that grad- 
schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them. 

95 Pink being Microsoft Inc.'s first post-Windows DOS, quickly upgraded to Pink 2 when 
InterLace took everything 100% interactive and digital; by Y.D.A.U. it's kind of a 
dinosaur, but it's still the only DOS that'll run a MathpakVEndStat tree without having to 
stop and recompile every few seconds. 

96 A kind of prorectorishly sad post in Amateur Sports Administration at tiny Throp- 
pinghamshire Provincial College in Fredericton N.B., C.T.'s undergrad alma mater. 

97 It's both perverse and kind of understandable that getting some sort of college schol¬ 
arship (or 'Ride'), while very few E.T.A.s (and certainly not Orin Incandenza) have any 
real kind of financial need, that nevertheless a scholarship is enormously important self¬ 
esteem-wise, since opting for the college-tennis route in the first place is kind of an 
admission of defeat and a surrender of dearly held dreams of the professional Show. 

98 And to keep a distant but weirdly beady and obsessive eye on Mario, from whose 
lordotic presence in a room Tavis'd flee just as Avril was fleeing from the temptation of 
overlobbying Orin on B.U., such that for a few days when both Orin and Mario entered a 
room there'd be the sound of a tremendous collision in the hall outside as C.T. and 
Avril's flights' vectors met. 

qq 

MA Dept, of Revenue. 

100 The way a White Flagger formulates this, e.g., is that 99.9% of what goes on in one's 
life is actually none of one's business, with the .1% under one's control consisting mostly 
of the option to accept or deny one's inevitable powerlessness over the other 99.9%, 
which just trying to parse this out makes Don Gately's forehead turn purple. 

101 Some of their earliest dates were watching big-budget commercial films, and Orin 
had one time completely unpremeditatedly told her it was a strange feeling watching 
commercial films with a girl who was prettier than the women in the films, and she'd 
punched him hard in the arm in a way that just about drove him wild. 



102 International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers. 

103 A quote 'episode of excessive neuronal discharge manifested by motor, sensory 
and/or [psychic] dysfunction, with or without unconsciousness and/or convulsive 
[movements],' plus eye-rolling and tongue-swallowing. 

104 In order for O.N.A.N.T.A. academies to qualify as actual schools and not just like 
extended-term sports camps, all instructors and prorectors except the Head have to be 
listed as more like academic instructors who prorect on the side. 

105 A Dworkinite heavy-leather organization whose membership on the U.S. East Coast 
was in the five figures up until the ugly Pizzitola Riots of Providence Rl in Y.W.-Q.M.D. 
discredited the F.O.P.P.P.s, and fragmented them. 

106 There's a Viewing Room on each subdorm floor, and room-size TP's w/ phone 
consoles and (if a kid wants) modems are standard issue, but only E.T.A. juniors and 
seniors get to have actual cartridge-viewers in their subdorm rooms — a two-year-old 
administrative concession the credit for which goes largely to Troeltsch, who made such 
a pest of himself with Charles Tavis over the issue that Tavis finally relented just to keep 
the kid from lurking in his office's waiting room, speaking into his fist, pretending to 
report on 'the flames of controversy surrounding individual rights raging here in quaint 
and peaceful Enfield' — and none of these viewers (likewise the Viewing Room's units) 
can have motherboard-cards for Spontaneous InterLace Disseminations or for ROM- 
caliber games, which broadcasts and videoish games encourage a stuporous passivity 
that E.T.A.'s philosophy now regards as venomous to the whole set of reasons the kids 
are enrolled there in the first place. 

107 E.g. the WhataBurger Invitational will allegedly be recorded for fringe-market, order- 
only viewing, later this month. 

108 Sometimes, especially in early fall and late spring, this can involve a lapse of several 
weeks; WETA doesn't broadcast when most of the kids are away at some competitive 
thing, and Saturday classes are likewise often canceled — this is one reason why so 
many prorectors' classes are relegated by Mrs. A.M.I, to Saturdays. 

109 Apparently the Parti Q. is provincial, intra-Quebecois; the Bloc's its federal counter¬ 
part, w/ members in Parliament, and so on and so forth. 

110 Q.v. here later in the same day, 11/7, as Hal Incandenza sits on the edge of his 
unmade bed, undressed, with the good right leg curled under him and the bad ankle 
soaking in a janitor-pail of dissolved Epsom salts, looking through one of Mario's old 
Hush Puppy shoeboxes of letters and snapshots. Saturdays involve classes and drills and 
P.M. matches but no conditioning run or weight circuits. Afternoon's odd mismatched 
challenge matches held on staff-squeegeed Center Courts under a steady metal sunless 
sky. The air still damp after lunchtime's rain. Hal's own odd match was truncated when 
C-squadder Hugh Pemberton took a ball in the eye up at net and began wandering the 
service box in wobbled circles. Hal skipped a quick trip down to the Pump Room and got 
to shower nearly solo in the main locker room. Tomorrow's Interdependence Day 
communal supper at E.T.A. is a big deal and includes each person's own specially 
selected hat, plus real dessert, and a post-prandial Mario-made film, and sometimes a 
sing-along. Hal and Pemulis, Struck and Axford and Troeltsch and Schacht and 



sometimes Stice have their own special private day-before-l.-Day-ritualistic-supper-out- 
and-trip-to-The-Unexamined-Life blowout-gala, since Sunday is a day of total mandatory 
R&R. The untruncated matches are winding down out there, Hal can hear. The sun is 
coming out just in time to go down. The Comm.-Ad. pipes start to moan and sing with 
crowded showering kids. Pale net-shadows are starting to elongate acutely across the 
sidelines of the courts' north sides. Mario is more or less the Incandenza family archivist 
ex officio. Mario has been closeted with Disney Leith all day preparing things for 
Sunday's postprandial gala and filmiest. The phone sits mute atop the answering- 
machine attachment on the telephone's power unit's console. Its antenna is retracted 
and it simply sits there, exuding the vague contained menace of mute phones. The 
phone's ringer sort of twitters instead of ringing. The audio-only comm.-system's power 
console is bolted to a receptacle on the side of Hal and Mario's TP, and its red power 
light blinks at the slow liquid rate of a radio tower. The phone and answering machine 
are hand-me-downs from Orin's days at E.T.A., old models of transparent plastic, so you 
can see everything's quad-colored pasta of wires and chips and tin disks. The only 
message when Hal got in was from Orin at I4l2h. Orin had said he'd just called to ask 
whether by any chance Hal'd ever realized that all of Emily Dickinson — as in the Belle of 
Amherst Emily Dickinson, the canonical agoraphobic poet — that every single one of Ms. 
Dickinson's canonical poems could by sung without loss or syllabic distortion to the tune 
of 'The Yellow Rose (of Texas).' 'Because I could not stop for Death He kind\y stopped for 
Me,' Orin had sung illustratively onto the recording. 'I hope the Father in the skies Will 
lift his litt\e Girl.' Actually more like sort of sung. There'd been professional-locker-room 
sounds in the background — locker doors banging, bass voices on tile and steel, 
personal stereos, hisses of antiperspirant and styling-spritz. The odd enclosed echo of 
locker rooms everywhere, junior or pro. 'On my volcano grows the Grass / A med i ta tive 
spot/ and so on. The fleshy pop of a professionally snapped towel on adult skin. A black 
man's falsetto laughter. Orin's recorded voice said he'd just grabbed an odd free second 
to inquire what Hal's machine might make of this fact. 

Hal spits Kodiak tobacco juice into an old rocket-emblazoned NASA glass on the 
bedside table, idly and for no special reason riffling through densely packed letters tri- 
folded and packed upright, a kind of Rolodex of different mementos and postal corre¬ 
spondence Mario's rescued from wastebaskets and recycling bins and dumpsters and 
quietly saved in shoeboxes. Mario has no problem with Hal perusing his closet's stuff. 
Mario's closet has a canvas strap instead of a knob. Ideally there would also be a bucket 
of very cold water, and Hal would move the bad ankle from one bucket to the other and 
back again. A whistle sounds from down near the girls' West Courts. Someone little in 
the hall outside the closed door shouts 'Guess again!' to someone else farther down the 
hall. None of the Hush Puppy box's snail-mail letters are to or from Mario. Mario's bed is 
loosely, unanally made. Hal's bed is unmade. Hal and Mario's mother had done her 
undergraduate Honors work at McGill on the use of hyphens, dashes, and colons in E. 
Dickinson. The Epsom-water whitens his calluses. Unlaundered bedding swims around 
him. The phone twitters. Ample make this bed, or Ample make this bed. The phone 
twitters again. 



A MOVING EXAMPLE OF THE SORTS OF PHYSICAL-POST MAIL MRS. AVRIL 
INCANDENZA HAS SENT HER ELDEST CHILD ORIN SINCE the FELO DE SE OF DR. J. 0. 
INCANDENZA, THE SORT OF CHIRPILY QUOTIDIAN MAIL THAT -HERE'S THE MOVING 
PART -SEEMS TO IMPLY A CONTEXT OF REGULAR INTER-PARTY COMMUNICATION, 
STILL 

20 June Y.W.-Q.M.D. 

Dear Filbert, 3 

It's been a quiet week here on Mount Gawdforsaken b — today is perishing hot, 
windless, quiet as a tomb, lush and pretty. Every floral unit on the grounds has its pistil 
aprick and petals atremble in a truly shameless fashion, for the bees are about. The 
whole hill hums drowsily. Yesterday, your Uncle Charles was accosted on the north path 
by a bumblebee that he alleges was so enormous it sounded like a tuba, and he 
dispatched Mr. Harde and the grounds crew with skeet rifles and orders to '...bring the 
Sikorski-sized bugger down. 1 I shall spare you details of the subsequent misadventures 
of the grounds crew, two of whom are now recovering satisfactorily. 

The paucity of decibels here is due in part to all six A-teams' departure yesterday for 
Milan, with Gerhardt, Aubrey, Carolyn, and Urquhart at the pedagogical tiller. It seems 
not so many moons ago that we were seeing you, Marlon, Ross, and the rest off on the 
European clay junket. I recall pressing the maternal beak to the terminal window's glass, 
trying to make my Filbert out somewhere behind the airplane's impossible little bullet- 
hole windows. I cried like a fool every time, as of course I did all over again yesterday, 
embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried. 

As for me. I've swotted and wakked all morning, cranking up your Uncle Charles's 
videophone and trying to cajole the editors of various supermarket trade publications to 
run M.G.M.'s c latest plea for amending Less to Fewer in those !*#!*# Express Check-Out 
lanes. One old editorial codger said that he'd dearly love to help me out but that his 
newsletter was devoted exclusively to issues of promotional display. When I suggested 

that a little comic relief in the form of the L - >F bulletin might not be amiss, he 

chortled. Chortling is good. We like chortling. However, I did manage to twist the arms 
(harder to do telephonically than one might think) of Produce Weekly, Star Market s 
Quarterly Register, and PriceChopper's Shelf and Cart, so the wheels of adjectival justice 
continue, albeit creakily, to turn. 

The very last gobbet of Academy news is that your Uncle Charles had his blood 
cholesterol tested late last week. Though the verdict rendered was no worse than a 
rather unperspicuous "Normal to Upper-normal" (sic), the penultimate modifier has 
caused, as you might anticipate, much pacing and high-decibel whingeing, as well as 
vows of eternal xerophagy from here on out. Your Uncle Charles has already, for some 
months now, made a practice of swallowing three teaspoons of fish-liver oil just before 
he hurls the administrative skeleton bedward for the night. Your brothers have taken to 
trekking over on slow nights to watch him swallow his oil, purely out of enthusiasm for 
the faces Charles makes as the stuff goes gulletward. I e-ordered the poor man a low- 
lipid, artery-friendly cookbook as a sort of Whatthehell present the day the results came 
in, and your Uncle Charles has already pored over the thing and marked several 




yummers. We're to have a swot at cabbage patties tonight, fast-laners that we are. I do 
suppose the poor man will find a way to ladle rice bran d into his toothpaste before this 
spasm of angst subsides. Bless his heart — as it were I 

My, this machine does let one maunder on. I'd best get back to harrying grocers. One 
of this fall's matriculates 0 is the son of a man who's apparently become an immensely 
wealthy Telegrocer f in the Upper Midwest, so perhaps the Express Lane-Solecism issue 
will simply disappear in these here parts as well. 

It goes without saying that you are of course wearing your halo and mouth-guard at all 
appropriate times and eating at least one green, leafy vegetable per day. 

Oh — 'twas wonderful to hear about the arbitration and contract. Mr. deLint read a 
detailed account and told us all about it. Proud, as ever, to know you. 

Miss You and Love You Lots, and c. 

AND AN EXAMPLE OF THE INVARIANT RESPONSE THESE PIECES OF MAIL ELICIT 

Dear Ms. Incandenza 

Due to the large number of mail the New Orleans Saints® are so fortunate enough to 
receive from all across the 2nd InterLace Grid 8 , we regrettably say ORIN INCANDENZA 
#71 can not answer your letter in person, however, on behalf of the New Orleans 

Saints, ORIN _has asked me to say Thank-You for your message of support, and 

best wishes. 

Inclosed, please accept a special, color 20 X 25 centimeter personally autographed 
action photo of 

ORIN INCANDENZA #71 

as our way of saying Thank-You and how important you're letter has been to us. 

Cordjally, 

Jethro Bodine 

Assistant Mailroom Technician 

And c. 

'Mmyellow.' 

'Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.' 

'Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?' 

'A proviso up-front, Hallie: Number 7 never misses.' 

'And not every Dickinson poem is singable to 'Yellow Rose,' 0. Sorry to disappoint you. 
For instance like "Ample make this bed — Make this bed with awe” isn't even iambic, 
much less quatrameter/trimeter.' 

'Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine's consideration.' 

'A practice to be encouraged. This particular theory's unfortunately a dink. Plus I don't 
think you quite meant proviso." 

'Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a 
wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.' 

'You know I hate these Strategy calls.' 

'Also of course works if you really do happen to be married. In which case you've got a 



ring already.' 

'I'm sitting here soaking my ankle, 0.' 

'The object being, to present yourself to the Subject as married, as in happily married, 
and you engage her in a conversation in which you make a big deal of how head-over¬ 
heels in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean 
the pilot-light of passion still burns in the central heating system of your love for her, 
your wife, even after all these several years you've been hitched.' 

'I'm sitting here looking through an old box of letters to kill just a very few minutes 
before a bunch of us climb in the tow truck for Pemulis's annual I.-Day-Eve town¬ 
painting.' 

'But as you're saying all this to the Subject, your manner is nevertheless indicating that 
you're attracted to her.' 

'It's poignant somehow that you always use the word Subject when you mean the 
exact obverse.' 

'But it's not like flirtatious or salivious, your manner. More like just strongly involun¬ 
tarily attracted. Almost as if hypnotized against your will. Your manner can indicate this 
just by following the Subject's conversational movements and changes of posture or 
facial expression in that sort of vacant intense way a hungry person watches somebody 
eating. Following the movements of the fork as if memerized. With, of course now, the 
occasional flicker of pain and conflict in your eyes, at the fact that here you are 
involuntarily memerized by somebody other than your serapic wife, which the point —' 

'Time. Yo. I think you mean seraphic. I also think you meant lascivious and mes¬ 
merized. ' 

'You know what your problem is, Ha I lie?' 

'I have just one problem?' 

'But hang on until you see that 7's worth not making me digress away from, though. 
Because the point being to get across how it's an incredible tribute to the Subject's over¬ 
whelming female charms that you can even really even see her, the Subject, since you're 
so in love with your wife you barely even see most women as even female anymore, 
much less be involuntarily attracted to the Subject, much less have maybe the thought 
of infidelity skitter no matter how involuntarily across your devoted mind. And it's not 
like you'll have to volunteer any of this directly. The Subject'll draw the observations on 
her own. That's the point of the conflicted flickers in your memerized eyes, or at the 
most an involuntary tortured groan, a quick bite of the knuckle of the forefinger.' 

'A heel of the hand to the forehead or something like that.' 

'Get your manner down just conflicted-looking enough and the Subject herself'll actu¬ 
ally start drawing you out on this fact, the involuntary attraction that's so painful to you 
and so flattering and tributary to her.' 

'So wait. This is like a conversation where you're affecting all this flickering and groan¬ 
ing? Like you mean a cocktail-party-small-talk conversation? Or do you just brandish 
your fake ring at some girl at a bus stop and start a tortured tribute to your seraphic 
wife?' 

'It takes place anywhere. Venue-adjustable. 7's portable and never-miss. The point is 



to maneuver the issue of your devoted attracted conflicted pain to the point where you 
can appear to almost sort of break down and can ask the Subject in all tortured sincerity 
if she thinks your involuntarily finding her so visibly female and attractive makes you a 
bad husband. Display vulnerability and ask her to evaluate the like integrity of your 
heart. Seem desperate. Your whole married self-concept shaken. Practically beg the 
Subject to reassure you you're not a bad-hearted man. Plead with the Subject to say 
what she thinks it might be about her charms that could drive your serapic wife even 
momentarily from your heart. You present the attraction you feel for the Subject as this 
involuntary identity-threatening soul-searing-type crisis you just desperately need her 
help with, the Subject's, person to person.' 

'Sounds very moving.' 

'And if it so happens you really are married, the additional advantage to 7's pitch is 
that you and the Subject both, however briefly, get to believe it. The pitch. The involun¬ 
tary passionate doomed knight-errant-type pitch.' 

'And of course, 0., the Subject just happens to be married herself, often with small 
children, putting her directly in your crosshairs.' 

'A matter of what's the word personal preference and taste that doesn't impact 7's 
surefire no-miss quality one way or the other. It's the doomed involuntary conflicted 
good-man's-downfall-type quality that no Subject can seemingly resist.' 

'Ainsi, then.' 

'Well 0. the thing's sick. It's even sicker than 4. Was it 4? The one you said that Loach 
inspired, where you'd supposedly just that very day dropped out of Jesuit seminary after 
umpteen years of disciplined celibacy because of carno-spiritual yearnings you hadn't 
even been quite in touch with as carno-spiritual in nature until you just now this very 
moment laid eyes on the Subject? With the breviary and rented collar?' 

'That was 4, yes. 4's pretty much of a gynecopia also, but within a kind of narrower 
demographic psychological range of potential Subjects. Notice I never said 4 was no- 
miss.' 

'Well you must be a very proud young man. This is even sicker. The fake ring and 
fictional spouse. It's like you're inventing somebody you love just to seduce somebody 
else into helping you betray her. What's it like. It's like suborning somebody into helping 
you desecrate a tomb they don't know is empty.' 

'This is what I get for passing down priceless fruits of hard experience to somebody 
who still thinks it's exciting to shave.' 

'I ought to go. I have a blackhead I have to see to.' 

'You haven't asked why I called right back. Why I'm calling during high-toll hours.' 

'Plus I feel some kind of toothache starting, and it's the weekend, and I want to see 
Schacht before Mrs. Clarke's confectionery day in the sun tomorrow. Plus I'm naked.' 

'I'm surprised you were even there. In person. I was expecting the Disembodied Voice 
and asking you to call back ASAP on this. What is it out there, 1600? Why aren't you 
outside hard at play? Don't tell me Schtitt started cancelling P.M.'S for l.-Day Eve.' 

'I tagged this kid Pemberton in the eye up at net. It was inadvertent. We were only 
four games in. He hit a big soft fluffy goose of an approach and I was trying to handcuff 



him. I hit it at him only to handcuff him. He never even got his stick up. Right in the left 
socket. It made a sound like a champagne cork. A prorector named Corbett Thorp said 
he thought Pemberton might have detached a retina. Something sure seemed detached. 
He was walking around in diminishing circles like he'd been hit with a mallet.' 

'You sound really, like, remorse-riddled.' 

'Kitchens arid heat, 0. I've taken my share of balls in various spots. And whence 
bizarre metric theories about Emily Dickinson all of a sudden, by the way? And what's up 
with the lurking figures with wheelchairs?' 

'You're a Top-Ten junior stickman suddenly now this year, Hallie, what's Schtitt doing 
giving you a cloth mouse like Hugh Pemberton to bat around anyway?' 

'You remember him?' 

'Who could forget a kid that looks like he's curtsying when he serves? With the white 
visor and the little amber glasses? That kid's been hanging from the bottom of the 
ladder by his nails since he was nine.' 

'It's been carnage all week. Schtitt's playing the C teams against the A's. It's for the C's 
development, Donni said. Also because today word's down from the tower some of the 
staff thought some of the A's looked tentative against Port Wash.' 

'They despise tentativity.' 

'I think they want us just short of cocky for the Fundraiser and then the WhataBurger, 
where Wayne's got a chance to knock this Veach kid off the pole.' 

'Let's not forget you though either, H. I can get down for at least the WhataBurger 
semis if you get there, if you want incentive.' 

'As in in person, 0.?' 

'Word is you're worth watching now.' 

'Word?' 

'I keep my ear to the cement, Hallie.' 

'At least for very short Subjects, I'd imagine.' 

'We take off for the Patriots that Friday, what is that like the 27th or -8th, but it's a 
Saturday afternoon game. I can be down there by midday Sunday if you're still in the 
thick.' 

'You'll probably need to wear some sort of sign around your neck so I know it's you.' 

'So then you'll be up here just as we're down there, oddly, playing.' 

'It goes without saying you'd give me the advance skinny if anybody I didn't want to 
see was by any chance flying down there with you guys.' 

'The C versus A thing's been more like grotesque than confidence-building. Guys are 
taking out stress in kind of twisted ways. Struck beat Gloeckner in 40 minutes and then 
made a show of revealing he'd had 3-kilo ankle-weights on under his socks. Wayne 
made van Slack cry right there in front of everybody.' 

'Word is Wayne has exactly one gear.' 

'Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this 
new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.' 

'So but the reason I'm really calling, Hallie.' 

'And you're being evasive about the dread about the disabled. The like rolling stalkers.' 



'I haven't seen wheel one in days. I'm thinking possibly this was a kind of very shy sort 
of fan club of people without legs that look up to me —' 

'Grotesque entendre, 0.' 

'— as, like, the ultimate leg. They use different ruses to follow me around and never 
come close or say anything because they're really shy because they don't have legs. So 
now my mind's resting easier.' 

'Now if the roach- and spiders-at-heights fears'd subside you could really hold the 
head high.' 

'So the reason I'm calling.' 

'I already said I'd let you know when and if. No sightings of any journalists. Your 
Moment profiler.' 

'I'm actually glad I got you in person. I was going to ask you to call me ASAP.' 

'I'm pleased to call you a sap whenever you like, 0.' 

'That's below you. And I can hear you still chewing that grisly shit. That shit's going to 
make your lower jaw fall right off. I've seen it happen down here, believe me. And 
you're wondering why the tooth problems all the time suddenly.' 

'Snuff's saliva-stimulating. It's actually oral-hygiene-enhancing, when you factor in all 
the extra brushing. The caries are Himself's legacy. You know that. The Himself whose 
root canals put Dr. Zegarelli's kids through Andover.' 

'This basically nonsocial call, H., is because I need your feedback on some issues from 
these half-dozen or so very complex and far-ranging and in-depth conversations I had 
with a certain Subject.' 

'Not the mobile-home person, surely.' 

'Whole different ballpark of Subject. The Dickinson theory I have to admit came from 
these conversations.' 

'Sounds like one deep lady.' 

'Whole levels and dimensions to this one. We've had a whole series of very intense 
verbal interchanges. Transcendentalist poetics was just one of the in-depth issues 
ranged over. This subject keeps me on the cerebral toes.' 

'Dickinson's about as Transcendentalist as Poe. Your Subject's 0 for 2.' 

'This is all off to the side of the call. I told this Subject I'd consider certain issues very 
carefully before I really responded.' 

'Which meant you'd consider what she wanted to hear and how to ladle it on until she 
begs you to have intercourse with her.' 

'I hence need considered-sounding responses to two basic questions.' 

'Why this sick thing of making me complicit in these Strategic pursuits when you know 
I think they're troubled and sick? It's like asking somebody to help you culture anthrax 
or something.' 

'Just two questions is all.' 

'Now I'm beginning almost to be able to feel my pulse in the tooth, it feels like the 
infection's gathering force so fast.' 

'Firstly, what does the following word I can't find in the dictionary mean: s-a-m-i-z-d-a- 
t.' 



'Samizdat. Russian compound noun. Soviet twentieth-century idiom. Sam — stem: 
"self"; izdat — undeclined verb: "to publish." I think the literal denotation's technically 
archaic: the sub-rosa dissemination of politically charged materials that were banned 
when the Eschaton-era Kremlin was going around banning things. Connotatively, the 
generic meaning now is any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or 
the stuff published thereby. There's no real samizdat in the U.S. per se. First 
Amendment-wise, I don't think. I suppose ultra-radical Quebecois and Albertan stuff 
could be considered O.N.A.N.ite samizdat.' 

Tow.' 

'Not just Separatisteur pamphlets, now. It'd have to be more incendiary. Materials 
advocating violence, destruction of property, disruption of Grids, anti-O.N.A.N. terror¬ 
ism and so on. I don't think O.N.A.N.'s got technical bans per se, I don't think, but 
Poutrincourt said the R.C.M.P.s are empowered to impound literature and even 
desktop-publishing and InterLink hardware et cetera without any sort of warrant.' 

'R.C.M.P.' 

'Mounties, 0.' 

'The Nelson Eddy guys in silly hats and equestrian jaspers.' 

'Close enough. Next question.' 

'So you'd have no idea why The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection with 
somebody saying samizdat.' 

'This is the second question?' 

'Call it 1(a).' 

'Not in any strict sense of the term. I guess I could see some Separatisteurs trying to 
read The ONANtiad or Brick as anti-Reconfiguration films. Maybe stuff like Poultry in 
Motion. A lot of Himself's stuff was self-distributed, too. And Immanent Domain's 
allegedly on one level an allegory about the Concavity, though that overlooks that 
Gentle wasn't even President when the thing came out. But you can tell your Subject 
that Himself's work was all very self-consciously American. His interest in politics was 
subordinate to form. Always. And none of it's banned. Whatever's still on the InterLace 
back-menus is inter-Grid: you can order The ONANtiad in Manitoba, Vera Cruz, 
anywhere.' 

'Speaking of Quebec Separatism, interestingly.' 

'Why do I get a sinking feeling this is going to be l(a)-point-one or something. Maybe I 
could call you back tomorrow and we could chat on and on. I'm going to be here reading 
for Boards till the Eschaton at 1400. Holiday tolls are low.' 

'It's my nickel, here.' 

'Or maybe you could simply call the person who's really the person to chat with about 
all issues Canadian, 0.' 

'Droll.' 

'Moving right along to question 2, then — my Epsom salts are getting cold.' 

'The big one is what you'd have to say if some tough-minded and spectacular Subject 
asked you what you have to say about the way every Nuck Separatisteur up there, from 
the Bloc Quebecois and Fils de Montcalm all the way out to the really bug-eyed radical 



fringe-type sects and terroristic cells —' 

'I'm going to have to object to the word Nuck, 0.' 

'Beg pardon. The issue being why the whole Quebec-Separatisteur collection up there 
dropped the original Quebec-independence objective like a rock and switched 
seemingly overnight to putting everything into agitating against O.N.A.N. and the 
Reconfiguration and forcing the return of the Concavity to our map.' 

'0., this is O.N.A.N.ite politics. I'd look my Subject right in the big blue eye and tell her 
straight-out that the field of nanomicroscopy is not yet advanced enough to measure 
my interest in the intricacies of O.N.A.N.ite politics. Poutrincourt's class is disquieting 
enough. The whole thing's unpleasant and dry and repetitive and mostly dull. Thevet 
has a kind of compelling romanto-historical yarn to spin, though, about —' 

'I'm serious. You've had some background, at least. The only Nuck prorector we ever 
got taught ceramics.' 

'But you're the one with the Pleiades and the 5 on the French Achievement boards 
and the ability to trill your R's.' 

'That's Parisian. And now I don't even watch the sports summaries, much less the 
political stuff. Just try for just one second. This Subject raised issues that were way out 
of my depth.' 

'That's not even coherent enough to be a mixed metaphor, 0. Are you honestly telling 
me you want your depth increased? Or are you just looking for some Cliff-Note sum¬ 
mary so you can incorporate the impression of depth into some new panty-removal 
campaign? Are you going to tell her you studied O.N.A.N.ite politics under the Jesuits?' 

'The whole thing was dicey. I had to tell the Subject that I had to think about it and 
ponder, that I always took time to ponder at depth before I just dashed off an opinion.' 

'And don't tell me: this is your Moment profiler? Your Boswell in an E cup? Is this why 
she's en route? Was the whole familio-historical profile story last week a dodge? Am I 
really just supposed to sit down with her and paint you now as a political-minded ex¬ 
seminarian who's married to someone only some sort of heroically proportioned 
goddess could tempt you to betray? Because I'll tell you right now that Schtitt's not 
going to let any of us here talk to anybody from some glossy rag like Moment without 
him or deLint sitting right there with us. Gone are the days of Himself not caring how 
many who's-the-next-Venus-Williams-hype journalists haunt the grounds, man. Schtitt's 
now calling the shots on who talks to whom. DeLint has a whole scathing appendix to 
the Admissions Manual about junior development and toxic hype.' 

'Helen'II be able to get in.' 

'Schtitt's not going to let me hype your political acuity or pseudo-wife or anything else. 
He's got C.T. seeing this place as a sort of prophylactic against commercial attention. He 
thinks junior commercial attention's deforming. The Manual now invites us to see our¬ 
selves as in utero and hype as thalidomide. Schtitt'll let her in and stick her in with C.T. 
and let C.T. filibuster her till she throws herself out the window like that journalist from 
Conde Nast last fall.' 

'Forget the profile. Speak to her or don't. This is personal.' 



'Meaning you've discovered she has small children and maybe a marriage you can 
deform.' 

'I'm ignoring all this. Helen's a different sort of Subject. I've discovered levels and 
dimensions to Helen that have nothing to do with profiles.' 

'Meaning she's a tough nut. Meaning you've set your crosshairs and she hasn't suc¬ 
cumbed. And she knows you're not married and not a tormented Jesuit. She's Strategy- 
resistant because she knows too much to fall for a persona.' 

'Co-ponder with me a second, if you're through. Stop me at any time. Jump right in at 
any time. On both the ultra-left and -right, the brass ring up there has always been 
independent secession for Quebec, historically, no? Am I off? The Fronte Liberation and 
so on? The Fils de Montcalm. Or is it maybe du? Are they the ones in Spandex and 
pancake makeup? The giant pies dropped on Ottawa after the third Meech Lake 
Accord?' 

'Parizeau et all and so on. Feel free to stop me or jump in. It ail'd been about getting 
Quebec out of Canada, right? The Meech Lake and Charlottetown revolts. The Cretien 
assassination. "Notre Rai Pays." Terrorists in plaid flannel. French Canada for the Fran- 
cophonic. Acadian Zionism. "La Quebecois Toujours." "On ne parle d'Anglais ici." ' 

'With all the terrorism especially directed at Ottawa, pressure on Ottawa and Canada. 
"Permettez Nous Partir, Permettez Nous Etre." Or we blow up the Frontenac. Or we 
irradiate Winnipeg. Or we put a railroad-spike through Cretien's eye. This is not exactly 
deep-depth, 0.' 

'Yes and then but suddenly everything changes when Ottawa, under duress or no, puts 
itself under the surgically sterile like thumb of O.N.A.N., with the advent of O.N.A.N., 
Gentle, quote unquote Experialism.' 

'You don't sound like you need any input from me on all this, 0.' 

'But so but then in immediate unison all the various different Separatist groups drop 
secession and independence like rocks and all transfer their insurgent resentment to 
O.N.A.N. and the U.S., and now insurge against O.N.A.N. on behalf of the same Canada 
they'd spent decades treating like the enemy. Does this seem a little bit odd?' 

l l 

'Doesn't this seem a little odd, Hallie?' 

'I'm really the wrong blood-relative to ask about the intricacies of the Canadian radical 
mind, 0. We have a blood-relative who's got dual citizenship, if you recall. Who I'm 
sure'd be overjoyed to ponder Separatist ideological flux with you all you want and then 
some. I'm sure. Once her jaw recovered from being unhinged by joy that you actually 
called.' 

'I'm slapping not one but both knees at the dro—' 

''d you know she's never once asked me whether Booboo and I hear from you? Not 
once. A sort of appalled pride. She's ashamed of even hurting over it, some —' 

'Kidding all off to the side. I'm serious about this. The oddness of it. You know I respect 
your frontal lobes, Hallie. I'm asking for depth, not any kind of expertise.' 

'You just ignored the meat of everything I just said. You're like an old person about 
this. With an old person's weird selective hearing.' 



'I'm going to let this whole pot-insulting-the-kettle on selective awareness of things 
just slide right on by. As a gesture that this is a serious call. Why they all seemingly with 
one mind switched objectives.' 

'And acting on behalf of the whole of Canada, Quebec, suddenly, is what you want 
explained. Or do you simply want it confirmed as odd?' 

'The Subject cited polls from when they were still bothering to take polls up there that 
said like upwards of four-fifths of all Canadians wanted out of O.N.A.N. and hoped 
President Gentle had a ghastly accident in his UV-booth, et cetera.' 

'So the second and final question concerns this shift from anti-Canadian Quebecer 
nationalism to anti-O.N.A.N. Canadian nationalism.' 

'What I was thinking is is this maybe a textbook case of Johnny-Gentle-type-find-an- 
enemy-for-a-divided-nation-to-come-together-by-blaming-and-hating theory in action? 
Is this somehow Quebec like circling its wagons with Alberta and all the other provinces 
in the face of a common enemy?' 

l l 

'Hal?' 

'You could always point out to the profiler that there's a nice little irony to Gentle's 
strategy ending up bringing Canada together at our expense, when it was pretty 
obviously meant to bring us together at Canada's expense.' 

'But you sound like you think the more deeply pondered response would be 
something else.' 

'All I know is some very basic schoolboy history from Poutrincourt's class. And from 
the advantage of occasional contact with the Moms.' 

'Hit me.' 

'The historical record indicates pretty clearly that the one and only nationalism in the 
Quebecois soul is Quebecois nationalism. It's been "Nous v. La Plupart Toujours," and 
the more so the farther out on the fringes you get. I can't see the Separatisteurs 
considering Quebec a true part of Canada any more than Lesotho saw itself as part of 
SOUTHAF. Poutrincourt keeps thumping the fact that there's no valid comparison 
between Quebec and our own antebellum South. Why do you think Meech Lake lll h 
failed? It's because at root they've never seen themselves as anything other than 
hostages of Ottawa and the Anglophone provinces. Even moderate Separatisteurs like 
Parizeau spoke of the final surrender on the Plains of Abraham as a kind of forced 
property-transfer, the whole original war 1 as one in which French-Canadians weren't the 
losers so much as the spoils. Booty. 1 

'This all checks with the Subject's take.' 

'The impression I get is that Quebec's hatred of anglophone Canada transcends any¬ 
thing they could work up against O.N.A.N. Just mention 1759 and the Morris's lips 
disappear. Pemulis and Axford keep coming early and putting a big gothic 1759 on the 
blackboard before G&M j just to watch the Moms's lips disappear when she comes in 
and sees it.' 

'My sense is the Subject concurs on the hatred-assessment. They want plain out, al¬ 
ways have. Health-care and NAFTA be damned. That's why they sabotaged all three 



Meech Lake Accords, she says. She seems to imply the anti-O.N.A.N. thing is some sort 
of anomalous dodge or something.' 

'I've got to confess a sort of curiosity now about this profiler you just last week were 
preparing to fend off about Himself. Not to mention comparing her to defensive 
linemen. Rubensian was never your type, I didn't think.' 

l l 

'Plus any Subject you're bothering about even giving the impression of depth to. This is 
more work than your type of Subject tends to demand, usually, isn't it?' 

l l 

'This is something else that isn't you. You've never exactly been shy about discussing 
Subjects with me.' 

'It's complex. She's grown on me.' 

'It's this certain way she takes notes on your explanation of Coffin-Corner punts.' 

'It's complicated. There's a lot I'm not saying. She's got levels. I've discovered levels 
and dimensions to her I didn't know were originally there.' 

'Oh 0., please don't let it just be you've just discovered she's married with little kids. 

That's not it by any chance is it? Please let it be something other than little kids.' 

l l 

'Let it be something other than the hordes of other Subjects I've sat and listened to 
excruciatingly detailed sadistic blow-by-blow Strategic accounts of. Orin "Home- 
wrecker" Incandenza, this is what the team calls you, in like jest? You sick pup.' 

'I'm a sick pup? I'm the sick one?' 

'...Wants to blame her, won't admit it, needs to, won't admit it, sweepingly blames the 
whole affair of Himself on her, won't interface with her or worse even acknowledge her, 
resents even the fact she forgives things like you and Marlon Bain killing her dog —' 

'— a hit-and-run-and-back-up-and-hit-again driver, I told you rep—' 

'— pretends he gets the most retardate PR staffer he can make hold the crayon to 
send grotesque solecistic pseudo-impersonal replies to her pathetic letters. Jethro 
Bodine, 0.? Jethro Bodine? 

'A private chuckle. She'd never get it.' 

'Disowns her — worse, sicker, tells himself he's convinced himself she doesn't even 
exist, as if she never existed, but by some coincidence has this rapacious fetish for 
young married mothers he can strategize into betraying their spouses and maybe 
damaging their kids for all time, and has this apparently even more rapacious 
compulsive need to call the blood-relative he hasn't even seen in four years and tell him 
all about every Subject and Strategy, blow-by-blow, long distance, in nanomicroscopic 
detail. Let's stop and ponder this all for a moment, 0., what say?' 

'I'm letting all this be just water off a duck's back. I can tell it's the tooth talking. I can 
remember the stress of the place. All I can say is that trust me here: this Moment 
Subject is like strickenly dissimilar from what you're indicting. The levels and 
circumstances aren't the ones you're so anxious to call rapacious. Is all I can say at this 
juncture.' 

'Why do I suspect it's simply that you tried to make the big X with her and she 



demurred and this simply piqued your interest? During my can't-miss nail-interval you 
were saying how enormous interior linemen were making comments about her bottom 
being so huge and soft you could whack it over and over with a car antenna and not hurt 
it.' 

'Ha I lie I never said any such fucking thing. You pulled that out of the air. And I'm sick?' 

'You said she was obese.' 

'I said she was a girl and a half in all directions. Which all of a sudden there was 
something that seemed cross-cultural about it: I had this sudden flash of understanding 
how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention 
queerly and oddly intense and alive and vibrant.' 

'And she declined a casual advance, and showed you pictures of her like enormous 
offspring, and you came to attention.' 

'With a heartbreakingly lovely face, too, Hal, all peachy and lissome, like big pretty 
girls get.' 

'I'm going to have to keep her away from this kid Ortho Stice up here, because he 
really is a Rubensophile. After P.M.s when we sit around he'll go on and on about enor¬ 
mous breasts and melon bellies and quivering laps until we're all grimacing and pinching 
our nose-bridges. And whatever you meant was not lissome.' 

'The reserve QB who's next to me in these godawful pre-game costumed swoop-and- 
glides said something I liked. Helen passed him in the locker room and he — do you 
want to hear this?' 

'She was in the locker room?' 

'It's the law. The pros aren't a PR-gulag. He said she had a face that'd break your heart 
and then also break the heart of whoever like rushed over to your aid as you pitched 
over sideways grabbing your chest.' 

'That is a pretty good one, 0.' 

'But so far we concur on the basic oddness, it sounds like. If the radicals want Quebec 
loose from Canada still, and that's always been the priceless pearl, why like dissipate 
themselves trying to wreak mayhem down here almost the precise moment Interdepen¬ 
dence is declared? 'ce pas?' 

'I'd rather just agree it's a stumper and then go dry my ankle and find a clean shirt and 
grab Schacht and hit him up for some Anbesol before we hit the truck.' 

'Right? And do these different groups get along, amongst themselves, the different 
Separatist flanges?' 

'Not according to Poutrincourt they don't.' 

'So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Quebec Go or we stick knives 
in the eyes of Canadian VIPs and drop huge confections on Rue Sherbrooke during St. 
Jean-Baptiste Day to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and 
stretch mirrors across U.S. highways and hang fleur-de-lis banners from U.S. monu¬ 
ments and disrupt InterLace pulses and skywrite Nuck obscenities over Buffalo and dicky 
with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven and shoot 
O.N.A.N.ite V.I.P.s on U.S. soil and only barely get foiled from injecting anaerobic toxins 
into jars of Planters peanuts?' 



'The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.' 

'Chortles are good. We like chortles. But what's the political motivation for the about- 
face? Account for this for me. All it has to do is sound soberly considered.' 

'Orin, I'm trying to reconcile your doubtless sincere seriousness about this with your 
choice of me as co-ponderer.' 

'All-' 

'I'm a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male. I'm a student at a tennis 
academy that sees itself as a prophylactic. I eat, sleep, evacuate, highlight things with 
yellow markers, and hit balls. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor 
circles. I am just about as apolitical as someone can be. I am out of all loops but one, by 
design. I'm sitting here naked with my foot in a bucket. What exactly is it you hope to 
get from me on this? I keep losing focus on whether you want a deep-sounding line of 
patter to facilitate Xing this fleshy Subject or have somehow been seduced into 
believing it's really worth pondering the weedy thought-processes of fringe Canadians. 
Of fringe anybody. How consistent do the Brazilian Nuevo Contras' objectives look? The 
Noie Storkraffs? Shining Path's? The Belgian CCCY? Pro-Life assault squads? The Ez-ed- 
Dean-el-Qassan? P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists' objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor 
C.U.S.P.s?' k 

'Poor C.U.S.P.s?' 

'Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term wacko and leave it at that? Why not 
tell her you're a radically simple and somewhat sick young man who kicks balls really 
high in the air for a living?' 

'All I-' 

'Why not just say who cares? This stuff isn't about you and me. The person this stuff is 
about is the person you say you've erased from all RAM. Why not tell the damn truth for 
once?' 

'Me tell the truth? Me lie?' 

'What, this ascapartic bathroom-mag journalist is going to give you like an SAT 
entrance-test on Francophone extremism? Like a gyno-entrance exam? You have to 
place above a certain percentile to get her to let you X her on the floor of the nursery 
right next to the bassinet? Whom are you trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really 
about? Can you be that sick that you can't even admit it over the fucking phone?' 

'Or what?' 

'I'm sorry, 0. I apologize.' 

'Think nothing of it. I know you didn't mean it.' 

'I hate losing the temper.' 

'You don't sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down.' 

Hal grinds at his eye with a finger. 'These tooth-episodes make me feel like that 
wobbled shrieking figure in that Munch lithograph.' 

'That chew's going to eat right through your membranes. It's a vicious vice. I'm urging 
in all earnest. Ask that Schacht kid.' 

Michael Pemulis cracks Hal's door slowly and slowly pokes his head and one shoulder 
in, saying nothing. He has showered but is still flushed, and his right eye gets wobbly in 



this certain way when two or three Tenuates are wearing off. He has his yachting cap, 
gold epaulets of fake naval braid, and in one ear a piratical gold hoop that lights up in 
sync with his pulse. With the door just cracked and his head poked in he brings his other 
arm in over from behind like it's not his arm, his hand in the shape of a claw just over his 
head, and makes as if the claw from behind is pulling him back out into the hall. W/ an 
eye-rolling look of fake terror. 

Hal is hunched, examining his finger for eye-material. 'In all the excitement we've 
neglected the most obvious response, then, 0. Your answer for the exam, and then I can 
go dry the ankle.' He can hear PemuJis asking Petropolis Kahn and Stephan 
Wagenknecht something off down the hall through the cracked door. 

'I think I already tried the obvious response on her, but hit me.' 

'Pemulis just made his first pass and left the door ajar. I'm sitting here nude in a draft 
through an open door neglecting the maybe deceptively obvious fact that something 
like, what, three-quarters of the Concavity's northern border runs contiguous to 
Quebec.' 

'Exactamundo.' 

'So that so what if Ottawa didn't formally subjoin the Concavity to any particular 
province. Really big favor. I'm sure. Because the map speaks for itself. Bits of western 
New Brunswick and a smidgeon of Ontario aside, the Concavity — the physical fact and 
fallout of the Concavity — it's Quebec's problem. Something like 750 clicks of border 
along the Concavity, with attendant seepage, for Notre Rai Pays.' 

'Yes plus the brunt of the airborne wastes from the high-altitude ATHSCMEs, plus 
being the province that gets splatted when the E.W.D. vehicles overshoot the Concavity. 
This is what I tried right off the bat on her.' 

'So what's the puzzle. Put yourself in Quebec's shoes. Once again they get the gooey 
end of the Canadian dipstick. It's mostly now western Quebecer kids the size of Volks- 
wagens shlumpfing around with no skulls. It's Quebecers with cloracne and tremors and 
olfactory hallucinations and infants born with just one eye in the middle of their 
forehead. It's eastern Quebec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely 
asymmetrical snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to 
get to their driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions and the Infant- 
depredations and the corrosive fogs.' 

'Although people aren't exactly flocking to New Brunswick or Lake Ontario either. And 
the coastal ATHSCMEs send the coastal phenols out over Fundy, and supposedly the 
lobsters out there are like monsters in old Japanese films, and supposedly Nova Scotia 
glows, at night, in satellite photos.' 

'Still and all, 0., tell her proportionally speaking it's Quebec that's borne the brunt of 
what Canada had to take. The brunt again, to their way of thinking, remember. Small 
wonder the fringe mentalities are violently anti-0.N.A.N. up there. There's got to be a 
real straw-and-camel feel to the whole thing.' 

The door swings all the way open and clunks against the wall behind it. Michael 
Pemulis has pretended to kick it in. 'Good Lard preserve us he's nekkid,' he says, coming 
in and closing the door to check behind it. Hal holds up a hand for him to wait a second. 



'Except here's the thing,' Orin says. Pemulis stands expectantly in an uncluttered patch 
of Hal's half of the floor and makes a show of looking at his wrist as if there were a 
watch there. Hal nods at him and holds up one finger. 

'Except here's the thing,' Orin is saying. 'The issue she raises is is there really any sort 
of realistic hope of Quebec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N. to reverse the 
Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge 
the waste as fundamentally American waste.' 

'Well probably of course not.' Hal looks up at Pemulis and makes his own hand into a 
claw and makes clawing motions at the phone. Pemulis is compulsively going around 
zipping and unzipping everything in the room with a zipper, a habit of his Hal loathes. 
'But now she's got you falling back into demanding realistic and consistent logic from 
fringe mentalities again.' 

'But Hallie just hang on. Canada as a whole couldn't oppose O.N.A.N. Wouldn't. 
Ottawa's so far in now they wouldn't say shit if they had three times the mouthful they 
already have. Of shit I mean.' 

Pemulis is pointing vehemently out the west window at the parking lot where the tow 
truck is parked and making exaggerated Henry VIll-like rending and chewing motions. 
His eyes, under the waning influence of P.M. stimulants, do not get mirthful or glazed. 

They just get tiny and lightless and even closer together in his narrow face, like a 
second set of nostrils. The right eye's little wobble is out of sync with the pulse of his 
earring. 

There's the sound of Orin switching phone-hands. 'So then I'll ask you what she 
seemed like she rhetorically asked: are the Separatists' and fringe cells' pathetic little 
anti-O.N.A.N. campaigns and gestures down here basically just hopeless and pathetic?' 

'Does fish-shit drift slowly bottomward, 0.? How could she see it as anything but, if 
she's as savvy as you say?' Hal removes his pruned white foot from the janitor-bucket 
and dries it on a woppsed-up sheet. He points at a pair of underwear near Pemulis's 
Dock-sider. Pemulis picks the briefs up off the floor with two fingers and tosses them to 
Hal with a pretend-shudder. 

'So simply largely symbolic at best, then?' 

Hal's lying back trying to get his legs into the briefs with one hand. 'Tell her after much 
chin-stroking simply yes, 0. 0., Pemulis is standing here already in his hat pretending to 
clang a dinner bell. He's got big glittery ropes of drool swinging from his lower lip.' 
Pemulis is actually making a complex system of motions indicating both the procedures 
for rolling a duBois and the lateness of the hour. For the past two years, Hal and Pemulis 
and Struck and Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual of nipping 
out to the little hidden clearing behind West House's parking lot's dumpsters and 
sharing an obscene cigar-sized duBois before the I.-Day-Eve expedition and supper out, 
while Schacht and sometimes Ortho Stice sit inside the tow truck, faces green in the 
green glow of the truck's instruments, warming it up. Hal sits up and makes a waggling 
go-on-ahead-on-down motion to Pemulis. 

'But you have the... Mr. Hope,' Pemulis stage-whispers. 

'One moment please.' Hal clamps a hand hard over the phone and covers phone and 



hand with two pillows and some bedding, and stage-whispers 'Where's your part of the 
Mr. H. all of a sudden? Why do we have to roll a zeppelin out of my part of the Hope I 
bought retail from you not three days ago?' 

The nystagmus makes the eye-rolling lurider. 'Extenuations. We can get it all sorted 
out right later. Nobody's going to like exploit you.' 

And then it's hard to extract the hand and phone. '0., I'm going to have to book out of 
here in just about one second.' 

'Just how about this. Ponder this in advance for me and try and stay upright til you can 
call me back. This was the Subject's crux-type proposal. You can call collect if you want.' 

'I don't have to respond,' Hal says. 

'Correct.' 

'I just listen and then break the connection.' 

'Calling me like tonight or tomorrow before lunch, collect if I.-Day's full-toll.' 

'I just sit here very briefly and then the conversation's over and we can go.' Hal's 
directing all this more at Pemulis, who's pacing and holding the Constantine bust in his 
hands and examining it at close range, shaking his head. 

'All set? This is it. Are you set?' 

'So go already.' 

'Her poser goes roughly like this. If the Separatists' big object has always been to 
independently secede, and if they've got about a snowball's chance of ever really getting 
O.N.A.N. de-Reconfigured, and if pretty much all Canadians despise Gentle and the 
transfer of the Concavity and the whole Experialist merde sandwich, but especially the 
Concavity, the cartographic fact of a Concavity in our map and a new Convexity in theirs, 
that the maps now say it's Canadian soil, this toxified like area: grant that all this is 
obviously right; then why don't the Separatists in Quebec use the fact of the odiousness 
of the Concavity to go put their parliamentary wigs on and go to Ottawa to parliament 
and say to the rest of Canada like: Look, let us secede, and we'll take the Concavity with 
us when we secede, it'll be our problem not yours, it'll go on the maps as Quebecois and 
not Canadian, it'll be our blot and our bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian 
honor will be desmirched, and Canada's pathetic standing in O.N.A.N. and the like world 
community of standings will be rehabilitated because of the ingenious way Ottawa's 
parliament will have re-gerrymandered O.N.A.N.'s map without taking on the U.S. 
directly? Why not this? Why don't they go to Ottawa and say Cuibono all around and say 
This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai Pays, and you get the slap in the 
face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject posited why the Nucks don't see the 
odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best thing that ever happened to them in 
terms of Canada's persuadability into letting Quebec go. She hit me with Why wouldn't 
your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity as a bargaining chip for independence, 
why would they want O.N.A.N. to take back the one thing odious enough to be a chip?' 

'Who's this you're talking to you can't call back?' Pemulis says loudly, pacing back and 
forth with little toy-soldier about-faces, his hoop flickering like mad. 

Hal lowers the phone but doesn't cover it. 'It's Orin, wanting to know why Quebec and 
the F.L.Q. and so on haven't tried bargaining with the Canadian administration, offering 



Quebec's cartographic adoption of the Concavity in exchange for Separation. 1 Hal cocks 
his head slightly. 'This could be Poutrincourt's so-called Separation and return's real 
meaning, it occurs to me.' 

'Orin as in your brother, with the leg?' 

'He's all in a swivet about inter-O.N.A.N.ite politics.' 

Pemulis makes a megaphone of his hands. 'Tell him who gives a bright flaming fart! 
Tell him to go read a book! Tell him to access any one of a dozen D-bases off of the Net! 
Tell him you're pretty sure he can afford it!' Pemulis's hands are slender and red- 
knuckled and his fingers long and sort of falcate. 'Tell him you can hear the truck getting 
impatiently revved as on one of the very few totally free nights we ever get our friends 
get ready to leave without you. Remind him how we have to eat on schedule up here or 
we get the wobbles. Tell him we read books and tirelessly access D-bases and run our 
asses off all day here and need to eat instead of we don't just stand there and swing one 
leg up and down over and over for seven-plus figures.' 

'Tell Penisless to go sit on something sharp,' Orin says. 

'0., he's right, I can feel that feeling of my body starting to feed on itself. You said I 
could think and call you back. I'll use your pager if you like.' 

Pemulis has used one foot to clear a path through laundry and diskettes and books 
and gear to the west window, where he's making broad involved gestures with a person 
or persons outside down on the grounds whom the window's big sill keeps Hal from 
being able to see. Hal's underwear is at a diagonal across his pelvis. Orin on the phone is 
saying: 

'Picture this and see what you think. Imagine this. The F.L.Q. and other various Sep¬ 
aratist cells all suddenly divert their terror's energies away from Canada and suddenly 
start mounting an insurgent campaign of U.S. and Mexican harassment. But the thing is 
they make a big deal of terroristically insurging against O.N.A.N. on the behalf of all of 
Canada. They even find a way to bring the Albertan ultra-rightists in on it, plus other 
provincial fringes, so it looks to O.N.A.N. like maybe all of Canada as a whole is in on the 
insurging.' 

'I don't have to picture it. It's what's going on. The C.P.C.P. 1 makes incursions against 
Montana like clockwork. There was that horrific jamming of InterLace pulses and substi¬ 
tution of porn-films for children's programming around Duluth in June traced to that 
psycho quintet in southwest Ontario. The Interstates north of Saratoga are still 
supposed to be undrivable after sunset.' 

'Exactly.' 

'So some point for me to ponder needs to emerge really fast, here, Orin.' 

'The point is I was rhetorically invited by the Subject to entertain the picture of it all 
really being the Nucks. The pan-Canadian thing being a dodge. The Separatists all 
somehow united and orchestrating the anti-O.N.A.N.ism. The rhetorical question 
becomes to imagine this and ask: Why would they do this?' 

'We're wearing a groove in the same track again, 0. It's because the Concavity impacts 
mainly Quebec.' 

'No, I mean she meant why would they make such a noise about insurging on behalf of 



all of Canada and go to such lengths to orchestrate the appearance of pan-Canadian 
anti-O.N.A.N.ism.' 

'And then judging by precedent the Subject gave a hypothetical answer to her own 
question. Have you gotten to get a word in edgewise throughout this series of inter¬ 
views, 0.?' 

'What if it's that the Nuck Separatists know totally well that if the O.N.A.N. adminis¬ 
tration sees Canada as a big enough roach in the ointment. Gentle and Unspecified Ser¬ 
vices' boys in white can get together with Mexico's Vichified puppet-state and make 
things like really unpleasant indeed for Ottawa. They could make Canada the sort of 
black scapegoat of all of O.N.A.N. There's little you can picture that might be worse than 
being the one country in a three-country continental Anschluss that the other two coun¬ 
tries are ganging up on and making things unpleasant for.' 

'Vichified Anschluss? This doesn't sound like any Orin I know. These are rabidly 
political catchwords. What kind of heartbreaking Rubensian Moment-type fluff- 
journalist is this you're so determined to — ?' 

'The unpleasantness is pretty easy to imagine a picture of. The E.W.D. vectors could 
easily be recalibrated further north. Gentle could tell them. Our waste-resources are ex¬ 
tensive. At the mildest, he could say, good-sized chunks of Canada could be Concav- 
itized.' 

'I have to go. Pemulis is slumped back against the wall with his hands over his stomach 
and is slumping all the way down the wall looking wobbly and pale.' 

'Ponder the picture of the parliament's nails bitten all the way down to the ragged 
pink pulpy stuff as the Nucks orchestrate the terrorism so it looks more and more like 
Canada versus O.N.A.N.' 

Hal's in slacks and one street-sock and one athletic sock and picking different shirts up 
off the floor, trying to smell a clean one. 'But this is all —' 

'Kyaaaa!' Pemulis vaults a corner of Hal's bed and tries to claw at the transparent 
phone's antenna like he's going to break it off. Hal turns to protect the phone with a 
shoulder, whipping at Pemulis with a sweatshirt. 

Orin is saying 'What I'm asking is for you to ponder could it maybe end up that 
Quebec, after wreaking various mayhi down here and making it look like it's all of Can¬ 
ada, the P.Q.s or somebody respectable gets wigged up and go to Ottawa and offers this 
deal: Parliament gets the P.M. and the government to get the other provinces to let 
Quebec go. Separate, aller, partir — and in return Quebec'll step up the anti-O.N.A.N. 
harassment and insurgency while dropping the pretense of other provinces being 
involved and all of Canada insurging and make it publicly clear that it's Quebec and 
Quebec alone that's O.N.A.N.'s real nemesis. They tell Ottawa they'll offer the 
contiguousness of the Concavity as their reason and send absolutely everything they've 
got in terms of terrorism at O.N.A.N. and Gentle, taking full credit each time. Offering 
themselves as the culprit and de-Reconfiguration as the objective.' 

'So your multilevelled journalist's hypothesizing a kind of meta-extortion.' Hal can hear 
Pemulis's whistle-lipped breathing. 'Separation is still the Quebecer insurgents' real goal, 
and their anti-O.N.A.N. insurgency is not what it appears.' Hal's in the dark under the 



desk that the fold-out TP and drives and phone console and modem are stacked on one 
corner of, surrounded by nests of wires, trying to find his other street-shoe. 'It's 
supposedly just been a ruse to arouse O.N.A.N.'s ire at Canada so the Quebecers can 
use the U.S. and Mexico as levers on Ottawa.' 

'Trying to engineer it so that Canada'II be more than happy to disassociate from them,' 
Orin says. 'And I'm saying I don't have the background or lobes to even know whether 
she might be putting me on, testing my depth.' 

'You've always had a special dread of depth-testing.' 

'How about why don't you just toss me the Bob and Axhandle and me'll go down and 
get things ready and wait for you,' Pemulis stage-whispers to Hal's slacks' bottom, which 
is pretty much all that's visible from under the desk. Hal's hand comes up out of the leg- 
space under the desk and raises one finger and shakes it a little for emphasis. Pemulis is 
standing next to the small TP viewer — which is propped up like a large photo with a 
buttressy thing that folds out of its back — and the TP's disk- and cartridge-drive, which 
takes up less than a quarter of the desktop and has the phone's console and power unit 
bolted into a receptacle on the drive's side. 

Hal's voice is muffled and has the strained pitch of someone trying to clear nests of 
dust-bunnied wire to find something. 'Except Orin I don't see a great deal of pondering 
required here. The total anti-U.S. insurgency so far's been too hapless and small-potato 
for her theory to work. The odd pie- and guano-bombardment, stretching mirrors across 
lonely roads, even demapping officials and botulizing the occasional peanut jar. None of 
this is exactly bringing anyone to his knees. None of this is making Canada or Quebec 
look like any kind of serious threat.' 

Michael Pemulis, his jaunty cap pushed back and his lips pursed as if whistling, but not 
whistling, is very casually brushing his hand over the drive and console's power unit, as if 
killing time by casually dusting. His other hand's jingling pocket-change. There's the 
sound of Hal clunking his head on something under the desk. His bottom is bony and his 
belt has missed two loops. The power unit's toggle's next to a little red jewel of a power- 
light that blinks at the same rate as a smoke alarm when the toggle's on ON. 

Hal sneezes twice. Pemulis taps his fingers in a little anapestic gallop over the unit's 
top. Orin sounds like he's sitting up straight. 'HaI lie kid now you're right with me, this is 
where your pondering lobes come in, because that was just my response, that there was 
nothing sufficiently more than just an annoying gnat-like annoyance about the insurgen¬ 
cies, which is where she moved beyond my depth back into 1(a), if you remember, when 
she raised this samizdat-word in connec—' 

a . Don't ask. 

b . Ibid. 

c . I.e., the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, a syntactic-integrity PAC Avril had 
put together with two or three very dear friends and colleagues around metro Boston. 

d . The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster's anti-sclerotic miracle-food 
craze. 

e . The then-skinny Eliot Kornspan, before Loach and Freer got hold of him. 

f . At once high-tech and somehow atavistic. Telegrocery services let you order off 



your TP and then have the stuff brought right to your door by college-studenty types, 
often within hours, saving one the stress and fluorescent hassle of public food-shopping. 
As of Y.D.A.U. it's still very big in some areas and not all that big in others. The first Tele- 
grocery service didn't even launch in metro Boston until YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ 
ITPSFH,0,OM(s), and it's still mostly in Boston a downscale and blue-collar thing, oddly. 

8 . Interlace serves just about all of habitable O.N.A.N.; each nation comprises (roughly 
speaking) an entertainment-dissemination 'Grid.' 

h . After Meech Lake I, Charlottetown I and II, and Meech Lake II, this was Ottawa's fifth 
and final attempt to placate Quebec with a constitutional amendment formalizing the 
Gallic province's right to 'preserve and promote' a 'distinct society and culture.' 

'. The French and Indian War, known to Quebecers as 'La Guerre des Britanniques et 
des Sauvages,' BS c. 1754-60, at the final battles of which, at the Plains of Abraham in 
'59 and Montreal in '60, the English and Americans kicked ass and took names in a large 
way that's never quite been forgotten by the Quebecois, whose memory for insult is the 
stuff of legend. The wily Amherst was there, too, at Ticonderoga and Montreal, with his 
trusty smallpox-blankets. 

Grammar and Meaning. 

k . The Clean U.S. Party of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner. 

'. The Calgarian pro-Canadian Phalanx. 

111 Hal's term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here 
because like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage by Avril, who's an ex¬ 
patriate Quebecer, whinge is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched 
complaining, almost like whining except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the com¬ 
plaint. 

112 The soon to be all-too-well-known and dread-inspiring Assassins des Fauteuils 
Rollents of the E.W.D.-receptacle-festooned Papineau region of southwestern Quebec. 

113 Which sinewy stuff is described by the OB-GYN specialist in his DictaChart as 'neural- 
gray.' 

114 © B.S. MCMLXII, The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH, sponsor of 
the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite Subsidized Time (q.v. Note 78). All Rights Reserved. 

115 Volkmann's contracture's some kind of severe serpentine deformation of the arms 
following a fracture that hadn't been set right or splinted or where the arm's been 
allowed to stay all woundedly bent in as it heals; bradyauxesis refers to some part(s) of 
the body not growing as fast as the other parts of the body — Himself and the Moms 
got plenty familiar with these sorts of congenital-challenge terms and many more, re 
Mario, particularly the variations on the medical root brady, from the Greek bradys 
meaning slow, such as bradylexia (w/r/t reading), bradyphenia (practical-problem¬ 
solving-type thinking), nocturnal bradypnea (dangerously slow breathing during sleep 
sometimes, which is why Mario uses four pillows minimum), bradypedestrianism 
(obvious), and especially bradykinesia, an almost gerontologic lentissimo about most of 
Mario's movements, an exaggerated slowness that both resembles and permits 
extremely close slow attention to whatever's being done. 



116 


Pretty much the BMW of 16mm. digital-cartridge recorders, brought out in limited 
numbers by Paillard Cinematique of Sherbrooke, Quebec, CAN, just weeks before its 
manufacturing facilities were annularly hyperfloriated and the company went belly-up. 

117 overshot the place to mention that Mario's head — in perverse contradistinction to 
the arm-trouble — is hyperauxet\c, and two to three times the size of your more aver¬ 
age elf-to-jockey-sized head and facies. 

118 You'd somehow think that Mario would be thick as thieves with the blue-collar 
custodial and kitchen and physical plant/grounds staff, but it's odd, he and they never 
have much to say to each other, and with rare exceptions none of the E.T.A.s including 
Mario has anything interpersonal to do with the nine-month part-time halfway-house 
rehabilitating workers, who mostly mow and mop and empty trash and load dishes into 
the dining hall's steamer, and who radiate a kind of slitty-eyed reserve that seems far 
more sullen and ungrateful than shy. 

119 also overshot the spot to include that Mario's a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids 
and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise; it's a source of unending struggle for 
Ted Schacht, who tends to avoid Mario because whenever he's around him he has to 
fight the urge to have him open up and submit to scrutiny, which Schacht can well 
imagine would hurt his feelings: nobody wants to be an object of clinical interest like 
that. 

120 This basic phenomenon being what more abstraction-capable post-Hegelian adults 
call 'Historical Consciousness.' 

121 Eschaton's pre- and post-procedures are convolved enough so that an actual game 
gets gotten up every like month or so at most, almost always on Sunday, but even then 
not all twelve of a year's kids can get the hours off to play, which is why the latitude and 
surplus in game-personnel. 

122 O.N.A.N.ite Classroom Cartographic Series W-520-500-268-6 w -9 w -9 w -14 W4 , © B.S. 
1994, Rand McNally & Company. 

123 Pemulis here, dictating to Inc, who can just sit there making a steeple out of his 
fingers and pressing it to his lip and not take notes and wait and like inscribe [sic] it 
anytime in the next week and get it verbatim, the smug turd. Using the Mean-Value 
formula for dividing available megatonnage among Combatants whose GNP/Military // 
Military/Nuke ratios vary from Eschaton to Eschaton keeps you from needing to crunch 
out a new ratio for each Combatant each time, plus lets you multi-regress the results so 
Combatants get rewarded for past thermonuclear largesse [occasional verbal flourishes 
Hal's — HJI], The formula's also provable by the Extreme Value Theorem, which the EV 
Theorem itself has a proof that's just about the biggest Unit-twisting bitch in the whole 
of applied differentiation, but I see Hal grimacing, so we'll keep it compact, even though 
this whole thing is real interesting if you're interested and whatnot. 

Say you've got a Combatant and a record of his past GNP/Military // Military/Nuke 
ratios. We want to give the Combatant the like exact average of all the past 
megatonnages he's gotten in the past. The exact average is called the 'Mean Value,' 
which ought to give us a bit of a giggle, given the hostility of the context here. 



So then but let A stand for the Mean Value of a Combatant's constantly fluctuating 
ratio and so constantly fluctuating initial megatonnage. We want to find A and give the 
Combatant exactly A megatons. How to do it's pretty elegant, and all you need for it is 
two pieces of data: the most his ratio's ever been and the least it's ever been. These two 
datums [sic] are called the Extreme Values of the cn-n function for which A's the Mean 
Value, by the way. 

So then but so let/be a continuous non-negative function (meaning the ratio) on the 
interval [a, b] (meaning the difference between the least the ratio's ever been and the 
most it's ever been and whatnot). Are these little explanations aggravating [sic]? Inc's 
looking at me like butter would freeze. It's hard to know what to assume v. what to 
explain. I'm trying to be as clear as I can be [sic]. And now he's looking at me like I'm 
digressing. Why don't you just pass that certain item back on over here, Inculator. But so 
we've got/and we've got [a, b]. And let r and R be the smallest and biggest values of the 
function /(x) on the interval [a, b]. So now check out the rectangles of height r and 
height R over the interval [a, b] in the diagram marked let's go ahead and mark it say 
PEEMSTER: 



PEEMSTER 

The Mean Value we're after. A, can now be expressed integrally as the Area of some 
intermediate-type rectangle whose height is taller [sic] than r but shorter [sic] than R. 
From here on it's just tit. We need a constant. You always need a constant. Inc's nodding 
his head sarcastically like I think I'm saying something sage. Let d be any constant, for 
computational reasons the closer to 1 the better, so like let d be the size of Hal's Unit. 

Hal Incandenza's Addendum: In meters. 

Michael Pemulis's Resumption: Very funny. So now, just looking at the wicked- 
illuminating PEEMSTER diagram above, you can see that this Area we want: 



a 


is going to be bigger than the area of the rectangle with height r and but also smaller 
than the area of the rectangle with height R. Pure mental reason [sic] compels, then, 
that [sic] somewhere in there between r and R there's an exact height , f(x'), such that (I 
have to say that every demonstration of a stats theorem has Let and such that in them, 
mostly I think because they're so wicked much fun to say) such that the rectangle of this 




height f(x') over the whole interval [a, b] has exactly the Area we want, the Mean Value 
of all the historic [sic] expenditure-ratios; in other words in abstracted form: 



a 

where (b - a) is just the size of the interval. And so have a look at the revealing 
diagram labeled HALSADICK: 



a x' b 


HALSADICK 

This fucking works. You don't have to crunch out a whole new ratio each time for each 
Combatant to dole out the ordnance. You just skim the highest and lowest ratios off the 
Eschaton records the Beanie-man keeps on each time. This is wicked. This is fucking 
elegant. Note that (Note that’s another like compulsitory [sic] term) note that the Com¬ 
batant's Mean-Value megatonnage will change, slightly, from Eschaton to Eschaton, ex¬ 
actly the way a like hitter's season average will alter just a bit from at-bat to at-bat, 
depending integrally on what he delivered on his last trip to the plate and whatnot. 
Note also that you can use this Mean-Value time-saver with anything that varies within 
a (definable) set of boundaries and whatnot — like any line, or a tennis court's 
boundaries, or like maybe say a certain drug's urine-level range between Clean and 
Royally Pinched. As a like exercise, if you're interested, play three hours of high-level 
competitive jr. top-level [sic] tennis and then calculate the Mean Value of the ratios of 
first serves to appearances at net and appearances at net to points won; for a serve- 
and-volleyer, this is how to tell how serve-dependent his match-performance is. DeLint 
does this kind of exercise every morning sitting on the can. It's going to be interesting to 
see if [sic] Hal, who thinks he's just too sly trying to outline Eschaton in the 3rd-person 
tense [sic] like some jowly old 

Eschatologist with leather patches on his elbows [sic], if Inc can transpose [sic?] the 
math here without help from his Mumster. Later. 

P.S. Allston Rules. 

124 Both EndStat and Mathpak are registered trademarks of Aapps Inc., itself now a 
division of InterLace TelEntertainment. 

125 Plastic-mesh laundry baskets take two hands to carry and keep you from being able 
to dribble up more balls with your stick's face; the cast-off janitorial buckets are the size 



of like a middle-size wastebasket, but they have a sturdy steel pail-type handle, and 
their hard-polymer composition makes for lasting wear. It was into just such a bucket 
that Pemulis threw up before his kind of suspicious V.D. down at Port Washington. 
(Various gear-companies sell various specially designed ball receptacles with names like 
'Ball-Hopper' and 'Ball-Bank' — the general Academy consensus is these are for dilet¬ 
tantes and pussies.) 

126 It being well-nigh impossible to keep the present from infecting even a playful and 
childlike Historical Consciousness, Canadians often end up playing picayune but vil¬ 
lainous roles in Eschatonic TRIGSITs. 

127 A lot of these little toss-ins and embellishments are Inc amusing himself, not Otis's 
TRIGSIT, which is 100% all biz. 

P.S. Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land. 

128 Most Valuable Lobber. 

129 M. Pemulis is, in the best Allston MA tradition, a good friend and a bad-news enemy, 
and even E.T.A.s who don't like him are careful not to do or even say anything that 
might call for score-settling, because Pemulis is a thoroughgoing chilled-revenge 
gourmet, and is not one bit above dosing someone's water-jug or voltaging their door¬ 
knob or encoding something horrid in your E.T.A. med-files or dickying with the mirror 
over the bureau in the little recessed part of your subdorm room so that when you look 
in the mirror in the A.M. to comb or tend to a blackhead or something you see 
something staring back at you that you'll never entirely get over, which is what took 
over two years to finally happen to M. H. Penn, who afterward wouldn't say what he'd 
seen but stopped shaving altogether and, it's agreed, has never been quite himself 
since. 

130 Pemulis doesn't actually literally say 'breath and bread.' 

131 Before Boston Groups' regular speaker meetings there are often closed, half-hour 
Beginners' Discussion Meetings, where newcomers can share their cluelessness, 
weakness, and despair in a warm supportive private atmosphere. 

132 The word Group in AA Group is always capitalized because Boston AA places 
enormous emphasis on joining a Group and identifying yourself as a member of this 
larger thing, the Group. Likewise caps in like Commitment, Giving It Away, and c. 

133 Gately's little bedroom in the damp Ennet House basement is plastered all over every 
part of every wall that's dry enough to take tape with cutout Scotch-taped photos of all 
sorts of variegated and esoteric celebrities past and present, which are varied as 
residents throw magazines into the E.M.P.H.H. dumpsters and are frequently selected 
because the celebrities are somehow grotesque; it's a kind of compulsive habit held 
over from Gately's fairly dysfunctional North Shore childhood, when he'd been a 
clipping and taping fiend. 

134 And if you're brand-new, as in like your first three days, and so on mandatory 
nonpunitive House Restriction — like veiled Joelle van Dyne, who entered the House 
just today, 11/8, Interdependence Day, after the E.R. physician at Brigham and Women's 
Hospital who last night had pumped her full of Inderal 3 and nitro had looked upon her 
unveiled face and been deeply affected, and had taken a special interest, a consequence 



of which after Joelle regained consciousness and speech had involved placing a call to 
Pat Montesian, whose paralyzying alcoholic stroke the physician had treated in this very 
same E.R. almost seven years before, and in whose case he'd also taken a special 
interest and had followed, such that he was now a personal friend of the sober Pat M.'s 
and sat honorarily on Ennet House's Board of Directors, so that his call to Pat's home on 
Saturday night had gotten Joelle into the House on the spot, as of Interdependence Day 
A.M.'S discharge from B&W, leap-frogging literally dozens of waiting-list people and 
putting Joelle into Ennet House's intensive program of residential treatment literally 
before she even knew what was happening, which in retrospect might have been lucky 
— if you're this new you're actually not supposed ever to leave the Staffer's sight, 
though in practice this rule gets suspended when you have to go to the ladies' room and 
the Staffer's male, or vice versa. 

a . Propranolol hydrochloride, Wyeth-Ayerst, a beta-blocking antihypertensive. 

135 A conviction common to all who Hang In with AA, after a while, and abstracted in the 
slogan 'My Best Thinking Got Me Here.' 

136 Trade-name Fastin, ®SmithKline Beecham Inc., a low-level 'drine not unlike Tenuate, 
though w/ more associated tooth-grinding. 

137 None of these are Don Gately's terms. 

138 In e.g. Boston: join Group, get Active, get phone #s, get sponsor, audio-call sponsor 
daily, hit meetings daily, pray like fiend for release from Disease, don't kid self that you 
can still buy rodneys in liquor stores or date your dealer's niece or think for a second 
you can still hang out in bars playing darts and just drinking Millennial Fizzies or vanilla 
Yoo-Hoos, etc. 

139 Volunteer Counselor Eugenio ('Gene') M. favors entomologic tropes and analogies, 
which is especially effective with brand-new residents fresh from subjective safaris 
through the Kingdom of Bugs. 

140 Don G.'s North Shore's vulgate signifier for trite/banal is: limp. 

141 Likewise that his private term for blacks is niggers, which is unfortunately still all he 
knows. 

142 The speaker doesn't actually use the terms thereon, most assuredly, or operant limbic 
system, though she really had, before, said chordate phylum. 

143 Sic. 

144 E.g. see Ursula Emrich-Levine (University of California-lrvine), 'Watching Grass Grow 
While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt Object: Fragmentation and 
Stasis in James 0. Incandenza's Widower, Fun with Teeth, Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, 
and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell,' Art Cartridge Quarterly, vol. Ill, nos. 1-3, 
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. 

145 TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENT FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE MOMENT 
MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINAL PROFESSIONAL PUNTER 0. J. 
INCANDENZA, BY PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE-WRITER HELEN 
STEEPLY, 3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. 

'Q-' 



'Well, there are odd sorts of consolations in having somebody go progressively bats in 
front of your eyes, such as for example sometimes The Mad Stork would go off on things 
in sort of a funny way. We always thought he was funny a good bit of the time. 

'You've got to remember he came at entertainment more from an interest in lenses 
and light. Most arty directors I think get more abstract as they go on. With him it was 
the opposite. A lot of his funniest stuff was very abstract. Are those earrings real 
copper? Can you wear real copper?' 

'Q.' 

'You've got to remember that he came out of all these old artish directors that were 
really "ne pas a la mode" anymore by the time he broke in, not just Lang and Bresson 
and Deren but the anti-New Wave abstracters like Frampton, wacko Nucks like 
Godbout, anticonfluential directors like Dick and the Snows who not only really 
belonged in a quiet pink room somewhere but were also self-consciously behind the 
times, making all sorts of heavy art-gesture films about film and consciousness and 
isness and diffraction and stasis et cetera. Most extremely beautiful women Pve ever 
met complain of getting a sort of itchy green crust when they wear real copper. So the 
tenure-jockeys and critics who were hailing this millennial new Orthochromatic 
Neorealism thing as the real new avant-garde thing were getting tenure by blasting Dick 
and Godbout and the flying Snow Brothers and The Stork for trying to be avant-garde, 
when really they were self-consciously trying to be more like apres- garde. I never did 
get straight on what Orthochromatic means, but it was very trendy. But The Mad Stork 
talked a lot about intentional atavism and retrogradism and stasis. Plus the academics 
who hated him hated the artificial sets and the chiaroscuro lighting, which the Stork had 
a total fetish for weird lenses and chiaroscuro. 

'After the thing about the Medusa and the Odalisque came out, and The Joke , and the 
film-establishment theory-queers were holding their noses and saying Incandenza's still 
mired in this late-century self-referencing unentertaining formalism and unrealistic ab¬ 
straction, after a while Himself, The Stork, in his own progressively bats way, decided to 
get revenge. He planned a lot of it out at McLean Hospital, which's out in Belmont, 
which is where Himself had almost his own private reserved room, by then. He made up 
a genre that he considered the ultimate Neorealism and got some film-journals to run 
some proc-lamatory edictish things he wrote about it, and he got Duquette at M.l.T. and 
a couple other younger tenure-jockeys who were in on it to start referring and writing 
little articles in journals and quarterlies about it and talking at art openings and avant- 
garde theater and film openings, feeding it into the grapevine, hailing some new 
movement they called Found Drama, this supposedly ultimate Neorealism thing that 
they all declared was like the future of drama and cinematic art, etc. 

'Because I'm thinking if you like copper stuff and little Aztec suns there's a small place 
down in Tempe where I know the owner and he has some incredible little copper pieces 
we could parp down and have you look at. My own theory is it takes an incredible 
natural complexion to be able to wear the baser metals, though it might just be an 
allergy-thing, the way some women react and some don't.' 

'Q.' 



'What Found Drama was — and you've got to keep in mind that Duquette and a 
Brandeis critic named like Posener who was in on the revenge each got a mammoth 
grant for this, and The Mad Stork got two smaller ones somewhere, grants, to go cross¬ 
country to graduate film programs giving turgid theoretical deadly-serious lectures on 
this Found Drama, and then they'd come back up home to Boston and The Stork and the 
couple critics would lay up drunk and invent new Found-Drama theoretical lectures and 
chortle and laugh till there was evidence it was time for Flimself to go back to detox 
again.' 

'Q.' 

'Like a family nickname. Hal and I either called him Himself or The Sad Stork. The 
Moms was the first to say Himself, which I think is a Canadian thing. Hal mostly said 
Himself. God knows what Mario used to call him. Who knows. I said Mad, The Mad 
Stork.' 

'Q.' 

'No see there weren't any real cartridges or pieces of Found Drama. This was the joke. 
All it was was you and a couple cronies like Leith or Duquette got out a metro Boston 
phone book and tore a White Pages page out at random and thumbtacked it to the wall 
and then The Stork would throw a dart at it from across the room. At the page. And the 
name it hit becomes the subject of the Found Drama. And whatever happens to the pro¬ 
tagonist with the name you hit with the dart for like the next hour and a half is the 
Drama. And when the hour and a half is up, you go out and have drinks with critics who 
like chortlingly congratulate you on the ultimate in Neorealism.' 

'Q.' 

'You do whatever you want during the Drama. You're not there. Nobody knows what 
the name in the phone book's doing.' 

'Q.' 

'The joke's theory was there's no audience and no director and no stage or set 
because. The Mad Stork and his cronies argued, in Reality there are none of these 
things. And the protagonist doesn't know he's the protagonist in a Found Drama 
because in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama.' 

'Q.' 

'Almost nobody. That's a very good point. Almost nobody. I'm going to take a chance 
and just tell you I'm a little bit intimidated here.' 

'Q.' 

'I'm worried this might sound sexist or offensive. I've been around very, very beautiful 
women before, but I'm not accustomed to them being really acute and sharp and politi¬ 
cally savvy and penetrating and multilevelled and intimidatingly intelligent. I'm sorry if 
that sounds sexist. It's simply been my experience. I'll go ahead and simply tell you the 
truth and take the chance that you might think I'm some kind of stereotypical Nean¬ 
derthal athlete or sexist clown.' 

'Q.' 

'Absolutely no, no, nothing got recorded or filmed. Reality being camera-free, being the 
joke I'll again underline. Nobody even knew what the guy in the phone book had been 



doing, nobody knew what the Drama had been. Although they liked to speculate when 
they'd go out after the time was up to have drinks and pretend to review how the 
Drama went. Himself usually imagined the guy was sitting there watching cartridges, or 
counting some pattern in his wallpaper, or looking out the window. It wasn't impossible 
maybe even the name you hit with the dart was somebody dead in the last year and the 
phone book hadn't caught up, and here was this guy who was dead and just a random 
name in a phone book and the subject of what people for a few months — until Himself 
couldn't keep a straight face anymore or had had enough revenge on the critics, 
because the critics were hailing — not just the critics in on the joke, but actual tenure- 
jockeys who were getting tenure to assess and dismiss and hail — they were hailing this 
as the ultimate in avant-garde Neorealism, and saying maybe The Stork deserved 
reappraisal, for a Drama with no audience and oblivious actors who might have moved 
away or died. A certain Mad Stork got two grants out of it and later made a lot of 
enemies because he refused to give them back after the hoax was like unveiled. The 
whole thing was kind of bats. He spread the grant money for Found Drama around a 
couple of local improvisation companies. It's not like he kept the money. It's not like he 
needed it. I think he especially liked the idea that the star of the show might have 
already moved away or recently died and there was no way to know.' 

146 See for example Incandenza's first narrative collaboration w/ Infernatron-Canada, 
the animated Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, made at the acknowledged 
height of his anticonfluential period — B.S. Private Release, L.M.P. 

147 The festivity here being due largely to the fact that both he and Gerhardt Schtitt 
returned from putting on little E.T.A. presentations at various tennis clubs too late to 
have been informed about the degenerative Eschaton free-for-all and serious Lord-, 
Ingersoll-, and Penn-injuries, both trainer Barry Loach and prorector Rik Dunkel having 
told Avril, and Schtitt to be told by whichever of Nwangi and deLint first works up the 
pluck, and the issue of telling Tavis being as would be S.O.P. left up to Avril, who will — 
because Tavis has already lost a certain amount of sleep preparing emotionally and 
rhetorically for the impending arrival of putative Moment journalist 'Helen' Steeply, 
whom he's been convinced to let onto the grounds by Avril's argument that the Moment 
office promises the profile's subject and inevitable hype involve only an E.T.A. alumnus 
(Avril neglected to tell Tavis she was pretty sure it was Orin) and that a certain amount 
of soft-news-publicity for E.T.A.-qua-institution couldn't hurt in either the fundraising- 
or the recruiting-goodwill department — who will almost certainly wait and tell Tavis 
(who's in far too festive a mood to notice three or four younger kids ominously absent 
from the supper and gala) in the morning, if the poor man's to have a chance at any real 
sleep at all (also giving Avril time to figure out how upperclass heads can roll, as of 
course they must, given chaos and season-ending injuries under the direct gaze of 
designated Big Buddies, without those heads including that of Hal, who — unlike, thank 
God, John — was identified at the scene with that Pemulis person). Hal can tell just by 
the dining hall's emotional gestalt that neither Schtitt nor Tavis knows about the 
Eschaton, but the Moms is next to impossible to read, and Hal won't know whether 
she's been told of the debacle until he is able to pry Mario away from Anton (The 



Boogerman 1 ) Doucette and get the Moms-skinny right from Booboo direct, after the 
film. 

148 Troeltsch wears an InterLace Sports baseball cap, and Keith Freer a two-horned 
operatic Viking helmet along with his leather vest, and Fran Unwin a fez, and fierce little 
Josh Gopnik the white beanie with the dirty cart-wheel-track across it from this after¬ 
noon's debacle. Tex Watson wears a tan Stetson with a really high crown, and little Tina 
Echt an outlandishly large plaid beret that covers half her little head, the Vaught twins a 
freakish bowler with two domes and one brim, Stephan Wagenknecht a plastic sa I let — 
this is just scanning at random; the headwear goes on and on, a whole topography of 
hats — and Carol Spodek a painter's cap with the name of a paint company, and Ber¬ 
nadette Longley a calpac that obstructs the view of people behind her. Duncan van Slack 
in a harquebus w/ buckle. Should probably also mention Avril's wearing a Fukoama 
microfiltration mask, it being way too early in the day for supper for her anyway. Ortho 
Stice wears a calotte and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent a slanted noir-style fedora and Tall 
Paul Shaw, way in back, a conquistadorial helmet and escudo, and Mary Esther Thode a 
plain piece of cardboard propped on her head that says HAT. Idris Arslanian's 
spectacular bearskin shako is held in place with a chinstrap. 

149 (l.e. silk-suited Vocalists snapping their fingers and telling their casino audiences they 
were beautiful human beings and but when it comes time to actually start crooning the 
Vocalists' lips move but nothing Velvety emerges, all sound withheld, a Job Action, 
rendered even more chilling by the skill with which the Frankies and Tonies lip-synch to 
utter silence — and the way the beautiful casino audiences, hit someplace they lived, 
somehow, clearly, responded with near-psychotic feelings of deprivation and abandon¬ 
ment, became a mob, almost tore lounges down, upended little round tables, threw 
free ice-intensive drinks, audiences in their well-heeled majority behaving like 
dysfunctional or inadequately nurtured children.) 

150 The years right around the millennium being a terrible U.S. time for waste, then, 
ozone-wise and landfill-wise and shoddily-disposed-of-dioxins-wise, w/ DT-cycle annular 
fusion at the stage where they had the generating-massive-amounts-of-high-R-waste 
part down a lot more pat than the consuming-the-waste-in-a-nuclear-process-whose- 
own-waste-was-the-fuel-for-the-first-waste-intensive-phase-of-the-circle-of-reactions 
part. 

151 Actual term employed is downer-type. 

152 A lightless and eye-averted late-night weight room being not exactly a last-name type 
of place. 

153 Sometimes it's as straightforward as directing someone to give her fiance the round¬ 
house forehand slap she's been secretly aching to give him ever since he'd once teased 
her about putting some Band-Aids on those insect bites on her chest. 

154 = the anticonfluental Cage III — Free Show; q.v. Note 24 supra. 

155 The Medusa wears a kind of chain-mail backless evening gown and Hellenic sandals, 
the Odalisque a Merry Widow. 

156 Mario's speculative puppet-show comes down maybe a little hard on the implication 
that former O.C.D.-support-group-sponsor and later Clean U.S. Party campaign manager 



and now O.U.S. Chief Rodney P. Tine is the real dark force behind Reconfiguration and 
New England's de-mapping and the transfer of the Great Concavity, that Johnny Gentle, 
Famous Crooner was and remains a slightly unbent but basically genial and befuddled 
figurehead, content mostly to twirl his mike and immolate his epidermis so long as his 
office is clean and his food's pre-tasted, and that it's actually been Tine behind C.U.S.P.'s 
geopolitical anality and Experialism, and that Tine was essentially pulling Gentle's strings 
all through the Concavity Cabinet and subsequent Reconfiguration and mass relocation. 
This is, in point of fact, simply one theory and direction for finger-pointing, and tends to 
founder on the unexplained issue of just what would motivate Tine to undertake all this 
anyway, since his own O.C.D. has been documented to be ruminative rather than 
hygienic, not to mention the fact that he's hopelessly smitten with the Quebecer Luria 
P—. J. 0. Incandenza's own ONANtiad, being an adult production, was considerably 
more restrained and ambiguous on the whole Tine-as-dark-force issue. 

157 An oblique little in-tribute from Mario to the Moms, at which line every year Avril at 
the Headmaster's Table takes off the witch's hat and holds it by the brim and whips it 
around in an enthused circle three times over her head. 

158 The umpires on the U.S. junior tour tend to be retired high-school principals whose 
only renumeration is the chance to exercise again some slight authority over the young. 

159 Clipperton eventually perfecting the toss-with-the-same-hand-you-serve-with ma¬ 
neuver pioneered by South African doubles specialist Colin van der Hingle after a 
hideous turbo-prop-charter-aircraft-propeller accident took off his right arm, ear, and 
sideburn in only the second year of his Show career, in Durban. 

160 Certain other and doubtless really disturbing footage of Clipperton's suicide still 
exists, having — with perhaps half a dozen other emotionally or professionally sensitive 
cartridge-Masters — been designated Unviewable by testatory codicil and, as far as 
either Hal or Orin knows, enclosed in some sort of vault-apparatus that only Himself's 
attorneys and maybe Avril have access to. As far as can be determined, only those 
lawyers, Avril, Disney Leith, and perhaps Mario know that the cartridges were, in fact, 
along with his case of special lenses, interred right there with J. 0. Incandenza's dead 
body 3 — yickily enough — there having been room in the bronze casket only because 
Incandenza's extreme height dictated a casket-size that his thin physique didn't nearly 
fill the width and depth of. 

a . (in the Mondragon-family-plot area of Le Cimetiere du St. Adalbert in the now over¬ 
lush potato-growing country off Provincial Autoroute 204 in L'lslet Province, Quebec, 

just over the border from what is now the eastern Concavity, such that the funeral had 

to be delayed and then rushed to be fit in between annulation-cycles) 

161 The other having been that predictive call for the catatonic hero, also for Ogilvie's 
Entertainment 2-termer. 

162 Every Nielsen respondent seemed to respond with especial neural repulsion to one 
or another particular portrait. There was one of a woman with every carpenter's tool 
known to God exiting her face. One of a young male with a spear of scarlet light through 
the right temple and coming clear out the other side. A woman with her crown between 
the incisors of some sort of shark so huge it passes from view past the frame. A grand- 



motherly type with roses, human hands, a pencil, and other lush-type flora all coming 
serpentine out of her open skull's top. A head coming out in a long string from a 
throttled tube of paste; a Talmudic scholar bearded in needles; a Baconian pope with his 
hat on fire. Three or four dental ones that sent people scrambling to the bathroom to 
floss themselves bloody. The painting that had particularly nailed nine-year-old Hal and 
had had him popping Nunhagen compulsively until his ears started ringing and didn't 
stop for almost a week had been of a deeply parlor-tanned and vaguely familiar upscale 
male, a disembodied fist yanking a handful of brains out of the guy's left ear while the 
guy's overhealthy face, like most of the ad's faces, wears a queer look of intense 
unhappy concentration, one more of like brooding than conventionally expressive of 
pain. 

163 NoCoat Inc. ended up occupying the #346 spot vacated by Hoechst's CBS, Hal noted 
with surprisingly little irony. 

164 Granted that this stuff is all grossly simplified in Hal's ephebic account; Lace-Forche 
and Veals are in fact transcendent geniuses of a particularly complex right-time-and- 
place sort, and their appeals to an American ideology committed to the appearance of 
freedom almost unanalyzably compelling. 

165 Granted, pace critics, this was partly to forestall A.C.D.C.'s apellate-court claims that 
InterLace was basically hopping up and down on the B.S. 1890 Sherman Act with spike 
heels. 

166 'Reduced Instruct-Set Computers,' descendents of the IBM/Apple 'Power PCs,' with 
mainframe-caliber response-time and .25 terabytes of DRAM and numerous expansion- 
slots for various killer apps. 

167 A couple of Incandenza's more accessible early documentaries were bought by 
InterLace on a distribution-factored contingency basis, but except for a flat PBS-ish one 
on the lay priciples of DT-annulation they never brought Meniscus/Latrodectus more 
than a fraction of the interest on the interest from Himself's rearview-mirror fortune. 
InterLace ended up optioning rights to only a couple of his higherbrow productions for 
its 'Howls from the Margin' low-volume-expectation product-line during Himself's 
lifetime; the bulk of his stuff didn't make any ILT menus until after his untimely death. 

168 It didn't do J. Gentle F.C.'s original grass-roots-intensive campaign a whole lot of good 
around ultra-liberal Enfield that one of his earliest sign-carrying faithful had been 
E.T.A.'s own Gerhardt Schtitt, who politically listed so far to starboard that even people 
without watches looked at their watches and referred vaguely to just-recalled appoint¬ 
ments whenever Schtitt's eyes got a certain particular navy-blue cast and he uttered any 
one of such terms as America, decadence. State, or Law; but Mario I. was pretty much 
the only one clued in to the fact that Schtitt's attraction to Gentle had more to do with 
Schtitt's take on tennis than anything else: the Coach was swept away with the athleto- 
Wagnerian implications of Gentle's proposals for waste, this business of sending from 
yourself what you hope will not return. 

169 Triaminotetralin, a synthesized hallucinogen whose high transdermal bioavailability 
makes it a popular ingredient in the 'Happy Patches' so prevalent in the American West 
and Southwest of Subsidized Time — Pharmochemical Quarterly 17, 18 (Spring, Year of 



the Trial-Size Dove Bar) provides a detailed account of the synthesis and transdermal 
physiochemistry of aminotetralins in general. 

170 Quebecois French: 'working up steam.' 

171 'Homestyle. Ready to Serve.' 

172 'Pursuit of happiness.' 

173 Q.v. Note 304 sub. 

174 'Absolutely no bonking,' presumably. 

275 The both-hands-full logistics of which are hard to envision, but realism wasn't really 
the point of the image for the bitter Brigade boys. 

176 It's also where Mario's most derivative of Himself, whose own ONANtiad was more 
centrally concerned with doomed high-office claymation romance than with political 
comment, though the love thing in Incandenza Sr.'s film had concerned not Tine and a 
Quebecois fatale but an alleged doomed and unconsummated affair between President 
J. Gentle and the equally hygiene-and-germ-obsessed wife of Canada's 'Minister of 
Environment and Resource-Development Enterprises,' the affair presented as doomed 
and unconsummated because the Minister hires a malevolent young Canadian Candida 
albicans specialist to induce in his wife a severe and more or less permanent yeast 
infection, driving both wife and Gentle to ardent-desire-v.-hygienic-neurosis 
breakdowns during which the wife throws herself across the tracks in front of a 
Quebecois bullet-train and Gentle decides to exact his revenge on a macrocartographic 
scale. The ONANtiad was not Him-self's strongest effort by a long shot, and pretty much 
everybody around E.T.A. agrees that Mario's own Reconfiguration-explanation-parody is 
funnier and more accessible than Himself's, if also a bit heavier-handed. 

177 The officially spun term for making Canada take U.S. terrain and letting us dump 
pretty much everything we don't want onto it is Territorial Reconfiguration. Great Con¬ 
cavity and Grand Convexite are more like U.S./Canadian street argot that got adopted 
and genericized by the media. 

178 A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time 
sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry about getting in touch with 
your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.' 

179 Presumably North Shore AA meetings, but Gately never recollects hearing the word 
AA; all he remembers from the time is just 'Meetings' and a Diagnosis he'd construed as 
chivalric. 

180 But Avril had gotten former M.l.T. #1 Men's Singles Corbett Thorp to drive Mario 
down to V.F. Rickey's cerebral Student Union thing, where Thorp used his old student 
I.D. (thumb over expiration date) to get them past the Security lady at the Rectus Bulbi 
and down to the YYY studio's freezing pink basement, where the only person who didn't 
talk like an angry cartoon character, a severely carbuncular man at the engineer's board, 
would by way of comment point only at a tripartite onionskin screen that stood folded 
beneath a handless wall-clock, possibly signifying that no hiatus could be all that long if 
the absent party hadn't taken her trusty screen. Mario hadn't had any idea M.P.'d used 
a screen, on-air. That's when he'd gotten agitated. 

181 Corbett Thorp's sobriquet among the less kind kids is 'Th-th-th-th.' 



182 Known also sometimes as 'Pukers.' 

iS5 The dull-metal Kenkle & Brandt kind, not the white plastic industrial-solvent buckets 
associated with Eschaton and yesterday's debacle. 

184 Moving fast in one direction and having the ball hit someplace behind you and having 
to try to stop and reverse direction very quickly is known also as a 'wrong-foot' or 
'contre-pied,' and it results in a fair number of injuries to junior knees and ankles; iron¬ 
ically enough it's Hal, since the explosion, who's known as the real E.T.A. master of 
placement and opponent-yanking-around and the old contre-pied. Also a quick insertion 
that Dennis van der Meer, father of Side-to-Sides, was a Dutch immigrant low-level pro 
who became a major pro coach and tennis-education-theory guru, on the same level 
with like a Harry Hopman or Vic Braden. 

185 Stice's legendarily dysfunctional parents are in Kansas, but he's got two vaguely 
lesbianic maiden aunts or great-aunts or something up in Chelsea who keep bringing 
him foods the staff won't let him eat. 

186 Serious juniors never pick up tennis balls with their hands. Males tend to bend down 
and dribble the balls up with the face of their stick; there are various little substyles of 
this. Females and some younger males less into bending stand and trap the ball 
between their shoe and racquet and bring their foot up in a quick little twitch, the stick 
bringing the ball up with it. Males who do this trap the ball against the inside of the 
shoe, while females trap the ball against the outside of the shoe, which looks a bit more 
feminine. Reverse-snobbism at E.T.A. has never reached the point of people bending 
way down and picking balls up manually, which, like wearing a visor, is regarded as the 
true sign of the novice or hack. 

187 N.b.: Europeans and Australians refer to overheads as 'overhands,' while South 
Africans sometimes also call them 'pointers.' 

188 The budget doesn't allow for communal suppers on weekends, and the weekly menu 
has below SATR and SUND the word forage, which with a certain percentage of this fall's 
residents ends up being literal. 

189 Expanding where appropriate on Note 12: Demerol is meperidine hydrochloride, a 
Schedule C-ll synthetic narcotic, available from Sanofi Winthrop Laboratories in banana- 
flavored syrup; 25, 50, 75, and 100 mg./ml. cartridge-needle units; and (most popular w/ 
D.W.G.) the 50 and 100 mg. tablets known up on the Shore as Pebbles and Bam-Bam, 
respectively. (D&D of course means Drunk and Disorderly, and P.D. and P.O. respectively 
mean Public Defender and Probation Officer or 'Probie,' by the way.) 

190 If somebody dies during the commission of a felony, even from so much as a defec¬ 
tive pacemaker or a lightning bolt, the felon's facing Murder-2 and unbargainable time, 
at least in MA, a ghastly statutory provision as far as most active drug addicts are 
concerned, since even though they're not violence-oriented, efficiency and safety- 
consciousness are not exactly hallmarks of addiction-motivated crimes, which tend to be 
impulsive and fuzzily thought out at best. 

191 Also known as a case being 'Blue-Filed,' meaning put in a kind of judicial limbo for a 
specified period, and reopenable ('Red-Filed') at any time P.O.s and Boards decide the 
defendant isn't making 'satisfactory progress.' 



192 She didn't literally say shitstorm. 

193 Gately didn't get any of this from Pat Montesian; it's mostly like Ennet House 
mythology, with some hard facts from Gene M. and Calvin Thrust, both of whom think 
Pat M. just about hung the moon. 

194 A totally different thing than Volkmann's contracture (cf. Note 115). 

195 Which he had to make a fucking Financial Amend to have fixed, which luckily semi- 
Crocodile Sven R. was a refinisher and voluntarily fixed the crack with some weird fake- 
wood-resin, so Gately only had to pay for the tube of fake-wood-resin instead of a 
whole new institutional table. 

196 E.g. 'Kid, sobriety's like a hard-on: the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it'; 
they'd rattle this kind of stuff off; they had a million of them. 

197 (Never yet having checked the side of a box of pasta for possible directions.) 

198 Project MK-Ultra, U.S.-C.I.A. inception 4/3/B.S.53: 'The central activity of the MK- 
Ultra program was conducting and funding brainwashing experimentation with dan¬ 
gerous drugs and other techniques [sic] performed on persons who were not volunteers 
by C.I.A. Technical Service Division employees, agents, and contractors.' — Civil Action 
#80-3163, Orlikow et al. v. United States of America, B.S. 1980. 

199 Alprazolam, Upjohn Inc.'s big hat-throw into the benzodiazepine ring, only Schedule 
C-IV but wickedly dependence-producing, w/ severe unpleasant abrupt-withdrawal 
penalties. 

200 Ennet House near-alumnus Chandler Foss's analysis, which you can bet was devel¬ 
oped outside Gately's earshot. 

201 Another vestige: Gately still always automatically notices bars and mesh, the foil and 
little magnetic contacts of residential alarms, plunger-buttons on the inside of hinges, 
etc. 

202 Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to 
Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car- 
lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving 
experience so forehead-drenching it's in the metro Police Union's contract they don't 
have to go anywhere near it. 

203 Whether English misspelling or Quebecois solecism, sic. 

204 Jolly-Jolt® hand-buzzers, Whoopi-Daisy® (celebrity-endorsed) cushions, Blammo® 
cigars. Oh, Waiter® plastic-ice-cubes-w/-fly, I See London!® X-ray specs, etc. usually just 
trucked over, along w/ the Saprogenic Greetings® treacly greeting and postcards, from 
the Waltham facilities of Acme Inc., a.k.a. 'The Acme Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre- 
Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises,' at a substantial and polit¬ 
ically motivated discount, seeing that the company's owned by the Quebec-sympathetic 
shadowy Albertan mogul who'd been such a force in the anti-broadcast A.C.D.C., and 
who over a decade back had exploited the then-U.S.-owned then-Acme's severe PR and 
cash-flow problems right after the serial Blammo Cigar tragedies to move in and hostile 
t/o the firm for about 30% of its real worth. 

205 Unknown to the hapless Antitois, this doesn't mean they're necessarily blank. Copy- 
Capable cartridges, a.k.a. Masters, require a 585-r.p.m.-drive viewer or TP to run, and 



on a conventional 450-drive decline to give off so much as static, appearing rather 
empty and blank. Q.v. here Note 301 sub. 

206 Being out of the sociolinguistic loop, L.A. has no way of knowing that 'To hear the 
squeak' is itself the very darkest of contemporary Canada's euphemisms for sudden and 
violent de-mapping. 

207 L.A. having a pretty good intuition that the lone communicable Vo chier, putain!' 
wouldn't be a good idea in this context. 

208 From Ch. 16, 'The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems,' in The Chill of 
Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle Lithiumized 
Annular Fusion , ed. Prof. Dr. Gunther Sperber, Institut fur Neutronenphysik und Reak- 
tortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously 
expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY. 

209 E.g.: Ted Schacht adjusting his wristbands and sash. Carol Spodek stretching for a 
volley at net, her whole body distended, face grim and full of cords. An old one of 
Marlon Bain at the follow-through of a big forehand, a corona of sweat shimmering 
around him, his bigger arm crossed across his throat. Ortho Stice doing a handstand. 
Yardguard gliding down through a low backhand. Wayne this summer sliding on Rome's 
fine clay, a red cloud hiding everything below the knees. Pemulis and Stice standing 
cross-armed against desert light and a fence. Shaw without his silly wispy pseudo- 
Newcombe mustache. The photos have been looked at so often they're pale. Hal at the 
height of his toss, knees more bent than he'd like. Wayne holding up a silver plate. The 
European-contingent males three summers past all lined up outside a square van with 
its steering wheel on the wrong side, somebody with either two or three fingers held up 
over Axford's head. Schtitt addressing kids you can only see the backs of. Todd 
Possalthwaite shaking a small black kid's hand at net. Troeltsch pretending to interview 
Felicity Zweig. The Vaught twins sharing a foot-long frank at a stand at the Bronx's U.S. 
Jr. Open. Todd Possalthwaite at the net with a P.W.T.A. kid. Every muscle in Amy 
Wingo's front leg ridged as she gets a little ahead of herself on a backhand. On and on. 
They're not in a straight line; they're more like chaotically placed. Heath Pearson, 
former tow-truck shareholder, now at Pepperdine, facing away from the camera, under 
Lung-light, running. The Palmer Academy courts looking cheesy in the heat. A lot of the 
photos are stills from Mario. Peter Beak falling nastily after a stretch-volley, both feet 
off what looks like Longwood's synthetic grass. The photos surrounded by locationless 
clouds and sky. Freer in the bleachers at Brisbane in thongs and a tank-top, giving the 
camera a peace-sign. The Lung in mid-assembly with Pearson and Penn and Vandervoort 
and Mackey and the rest of that year's seniors out in the pavilion's webbed chairs, feet 
up in the cold, kibbitzing Hal and Schacht and the other kids lugging parts. One of Mrs. 
Clarke's cooks in a hairnet mixing something with an arm-sized pestle in a bowl she has 
to tilt to hold. None of Mario or Orin. A battalion of kids in sweats doing sprints up the 
hill in deep snow, two or three well behind and ominously bent over. Some lighter-blue 
rectangles where pictures have been taken down and not yet replaced. A shirtless Freer 
playing microtennis with Lori Clow. A close-up of bespectacled Gretchen Holt staring in 
disbelief at a linesman's call. Wayne and a Manitoban in T-shirts with leaves on them. 



hands over their hearts, facing north. Kent Blott with a horrified boomerang mouth and 
his nose a protrusion in the supporter fit over his ears and nose and Traub and Lord 
collapsing around him in either hilarity or horror. Hal and Wayne at the net in doubles, 
both leaning way over left like the whole court's tilted. 

210 Hal and Mario have long since had to accept 3 the fact that Avril, at 50+, is still 
endocrinologically compelling to males. 

a . 'Accept' isn't the same as 'be crazy about,' of course. 

211 As with the neuro-gastric thing, only Ted Schacht and Hal know that Pemulis's 
deepest dread is of academic or disciplinary expulsion and ejection, of having to schlepp 
back down Comm. Ave. into blue-collar Allston diploma- and ticket-outless, and now in 
his final E.T.A. year the dread's increased many-fold, and is one reason Pemulis takes 
such elaborate precautions in all extracurriculars — making a Substance-customer 
explicitly suborn him, etc. — and is why Hal and Schacht presented him on his last 
birthday with the poster over Pemulis's room's console that has a careworn large- 
crowned King sitting on his throne stroking his chin and brooding, with the caption: YES, 
I'M PARANOID - BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH? 

212 Though it's unmentioned, everyone in the waiting room except Ann Kittenplan is 
keenly aware that Lord and Postal Weight are Pemulis's charges, Penn and Ingersoll Ax- 
handle's; plus that neither Struck nor Troeltsch seems to have been summoned for 
potential discipline. 

213 Since tennis courts are laid side to side and played on by hard-hitting but fallible 
humans, errant shots are always going off sticks' frames and net-posts and even fences 
and bouncing and rolling into other people's territory. In starting at usually the quarter¬ 
final rounds of serious tournaments there are ballboys to retrieve them. In early rounds 
and practice, though, the delicate etiquette is that you suspend play and get other 
people's balls for them, if they come rolling across, and shoot them back over to the 
court of origin. The way to signal for this sort of help is to yell 'Sorry!' or 'A little help on 
Three?' or something. But both Hal and Axford seem constitutionally incapable of doing 
this, asking for help with errant balls. They both have to hold everything and go and run 
all the way over to some other court, halting at each intervening court to wait for a 
point to be finished, to get their own balls. It's a curious inability to request aid that no 
amount of negative reinforcement from Tex Watson or Aubrey deLint can seem to 
correct. 

214 Where it's a non-overhead run-back-to-the-baseline-after-an-offensive-lob-then-run- 
all-the-way-back-up-and-tap-the-netcord-with-your-stick-just-as-Nwangi-or-Thode-hits- 
another-offensive-lob-over-your-head-you-have-to-run-back-and-get-successfully-back- 
or-they-pile-extra-lobs-onto-your-regular-allotment pure pain-fest. 

215 A Clipperton-level legend involves the now long-gone little E.T.A. who in Y.W.-Q.M.D. 
had called MA's Department of Social Services and characterized disciplinary Pukers as 
child abuse, resulting in the appearance at the portcullis of two stitchy-mouthed and 
humorless D.S.S.-ladies who hung creepily around all day and required Schtitt's actually 
confining Aubrey deLint to his room, so purply furious was deLint with the kid who'd 
dropped the dime. 



216 No clue. 

217 Hal had missed out on the soft grass, clay, and Har-Tru surfaces of the Jr. Slams, 
because a singular disadvantage of attending a North American academy is that 
O.N.A.N.T.A. rules for Jr. Slams permit just one entrant per academy in each age- 
division, and John Wayne got the nods. 

218 The late J. 0. Incandenza's Meniscus Optical Products Ltd.'s development of those 
weird wide-angle rear-view mirrors on the sides of automobiles that so diminish the cars 
behind you that federal statute requires them to have printed right on the glass that Ob¬ 
jects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, which little imprints Incandenza found so 
disconcerting that he was kind of shocked when U.S. automakers and importers bought 
rights on the mirrors, way back, for Incandenza's first unsettling entrepreneurial 
payday — E.T.A.s like to postulate that the mirrors had been inspired by the always- 
foreshortened Charles Tavis. 

219 Extremely annoying host of InterLace Spontaneous-Dissemm. children's program. 

220 ® CardioMed Fitness Products, a fourth-generation StairMasterish thing except set 
more to resemble a down-escalator somehow dickied to a sadistically high number of 
r.p.m.s, so that the exerciser has to sort of run climbing for his life to avoid getting 
hurled backwards all the way across the office by the machine, which is what accounts 
for the big square weight-room floor-mat attached to the cleared expanse of office wall 
opposite the rear of the machine, which Tavis had moved up to from his StairMaster 
after a frightening cholesterol-count report, and had had kind of a tricky time with at 
first, once requiring a back-brace. 

222 The Satellite pro Hal'd gotten a set from, a barrel-chested Latvian who thought Hal's 
name was ALL. 

222 N.b. again that Marathe's native tongue is not good old contemporary idiomatic 
Parisio/European French but Quebecois French, which is about on a par with Basque in 
terms of difficulty, being full of weird idioms and having both inflected and uninilected 
grammatical features, an inbred and obstreperous dialect, and which in fact Steeply 
barely got an 'Acceptable' in, in U.S.O. technical-interview training in Vienna/Falls 
Church VA, and which does not admit of easy coeval expression in English. 

223 Viz. at the allusion to the supposed samizdateur's anticonfluential and meta- 
entertainmentish and hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque thing, which in fact the 
play-within-film fight-scene part can be broken down into a series of what are called 
'Fast Fourier Transforms,' though what the hell 'ALGOL' is is anybody's guess, unless it's 
not an acronym but some actual Quebecois term, Talgol,' which if so it isn't in any 
dictionaries or on-line lexical sources anywhere in the 2nd or 3rd IL/IN Grid. 

224 Q.v. William James on '...that latent process of unconscious preparation often 
preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done,' the 
line that actually snapped Lenz to what he was up to when he chanced to read it in a 
huge large-print edition he'd found behind a bookshelf along the north wall of the Ennet 
living room of something called The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on 
Natural Religion, by William James (obviously), available in EZC large-font print from 
Microsoft/NAL-Random House-Ticknor, Fields, Little, Brown and Co., © Y.T.M.P., a 



volume that's come to mean a great deal to Lenz. 

225 ® The Mobil Chemical Co.'s Consumer Products Branch's Plastics Division, Pitts-ford 
NNY. 

226 ® Ibid. 

227 A.k.a. Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture 
several cups of Celestial Seasonings' Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled sap 
across the back of the skull. 

228 National Security Agency, absorbed w/ A.T.F. and D.E.A., C.I.A. and O.N.R. and Secret 
Service into the ambit of the Office of Unspecified Services. 

229 The A.A.O.A.A., Unspecified Services' most elite and least specific division, which on 
Hugh Steeply's latest field-assignment is paying his salary, though his checks and ali¬ 
mony's garnishment are routed through something called the 'Foundation for 
Continental Freedom,' which one fervently hopes is a shell/dummy. 

230 Charlestown/Southie street term for meters. 

231 Powdered vitamin B 12 , convincingly bitter and talc-textured, which Lenz has always 
preferred B 12 to Manitol as a cut because Manitol gives him this allergic thing where he 
got very tiny red bumps with weird pale caps on his fingertips. 

232 Hydrolysis is the metabolic process by which organic cocaine's broken down into 
benzoylecgonine, methanol, ecgonine, and benzoic acid, and one reason not everybody 
is wired to enjoy Crosbulation is that the process is essentially toxic and can yield 
unpleasant neurosomatic fallout in certain systems: e.g. in Don Gately's neurosystem, 
spider angiomas and a tendency to pluck at the skin on the backs of his hands, due to 
which tendency he's always loathed and hated coke and most cokeheads; in Bruce 
Green's system, binocular nystagmus and a walloping depression even while the coke- 
high's still on that accounts for the tendency toward fits of weeping with his nystagmic 
face hidden in the crook of his big right arm; in Ken Erdedy an unstoppable rhinorrhagia 
that sent him to the Emergency Room both times he ever did cocaine; in Kate Gompert 
blepharospecticity and now instant cerebral hemorrhage because she's on Parnate, an 
M. A.0.-inhibiting antidepressant; in Emil Minty a ballism so out-of-control he snorted 
Bing only once. Hemispasms of the oral labia are a common effect of coke-hydrolysis, 
one mild enough so that people can get them and still enjoy Bing very much; the 
spasming can range from a mild gnawing/writhing affect in Lenz, Thrale, Cortilyu, and 
Foss to an alternating series of Edvard Munch-Jimmy Carter-Paliacci-Mick Jagger-like 
expressive contortions so severe that everyone in a room except for them is 
embarrassed. In former cokehead Calvin Thrust, hydrolysis had caused a priapism that 
led directly to his early choice of career. Randy Lenz also gets nystagmus, but of the 
right eye only, as well as vascular constriction, diuresis extremus, phosphenism, 
compulsive tooth-grinding, megalomania, phobophobia, euphoric recall, delusions of 
persecution and/or homicidal envy, sociosis, postnasal drip, a mild priapism that makes 
the diuresis a dicey and gymnastic affair, occasional acne rosea and/or rhinophyma, and 
— especially if there's synergism from almost a whole pack of filterless Winstons and 
four cups of nipple-hardeningly strong and alkaline B.Y.P. coffee — confabulation 
concurrent with a manic garrulousness sufficient to cause lingual tendinitis, pulmonary 



phasece, and a complete inability to send from his presence anyone who seems at all 
willing to listen to him. 

233 A.k.a. lignocaine, xylocaine-L, a diethylamino-oxylidide compound used as a dental 
and maxillofacial anesthetic, the world's best Bing-cut because it numbs and produces a 
bitter drip just like the Bingster, and also even temporarily heightens the rush of LV. 
coke, though if it's 'based it tastes nothing like oxidized coke, and it's also more 
expensive than Manitol or B i2 and harder to get because it's prescription, meaning the 
orthodontist was a very popular fellow with dealers indeed. 

234 TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENTS FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE MOMENT 
MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINAL PROFESSIONAL PUNTER 0. J. 
INCANDENZA, BY PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE WRITER HELEN STEEPLY 
-NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. 

'I'm not going to talk about why I don't talk to the Moms anymore.' 

'Q.' 

'Or The Mad Stork's adventures in the mental-health community, either.' 

'Q.' 

'We're not off to a good start here, ma'am, no matter how lovely you're looking in that 
pantsuit.' 

'Q.' 

'Because the question doesn't mean anything is why. Insane is just like a catch-term, it 
doesn't describe anything, it isn't a reason for anything. The Stork was a full-blown de¬ 
mented alcoholic for the last three years of his life, and he put his head in the 
microwave, and I think just in terms of unpleasantness you'd have to be sort of insane to 
kill yourself in such a painful way. So but was he insane. In the last five years of his life 
he put together a tennis academy and got together a national-caliber coaching staff and 
U.S.T.A. accreditation and sanction and multi-Grid funding and set up the start of an 
endowment for E.T.A., and also came up with that new kind of window glass that 
doesn't fog or smudge from people touching it or breathing on it and drawing little 
finger-oil faces on it, then sold it to Mitsubishi, and also managed the revenues from all 
his previous patents, plus of course drank himself blind on a daily basis and then needed 
at least two hours to sit there naked under a scratchy blanket and shake, and went 
around impersonating various kinds of health-care professionals during the periods he 
believed he was a health-care professional, from when he had the delirium-tremen-type 
career delusions, and in his spare time made in-depth documentaries and a dozen art- 
films that people are still writing doctoral theses on. So was he insane? It's true, the 
New Yorker guy, the film guy who replaced the guy who replaced Rafferty, what was his 
name, it's true he kept saying the films were like the planet's most psychotic psyche 
working out its shit right there on the screen and asking you to pay to watch him. But 
you have to remember that that guy got third-degree burned by the whole Found 
Drama scam. That guy was one of the high-caliber critics who said in print that here 
Incandenza had put drama ahead three or four leaps in one visionary leap, and after The 
Stork finally couldn't keep a straight face anymore and spilled the beans on NPR radio 
during a 'Fresh Air' dramaturgy-panel the New Yorker guy dropped from critical sight for 



like a year and then when he came back he had it in for Himself in a very big way, which 
is understandable.' 

'Q.' 

'What I started to say is if quote unquote sources you cannot name say the reason I'm 
not in contact is I claim the Moms is insane, well, what is insane supposed to mean. Do I 
trust her I do not. Do I want to be in association with her in any way — that is a neg. Do I 
think she's irretrievably bats? One of her best friends is the E.T.A. counselor. Rusk, with 
doctorates in both Gender and Deviance. Does she think the Moms is bats?' 

■a.' 

'The criteria I was analogizing to The Stork is does the Moms function. And the Moms 
functions and then some. The Moms careers through the day turboed and in fifth gear. 
You've got the assorted Deaning at E.T.A. You've got the full teaching load there. You've 
got accreditation reports and structuring both quadrivium and trivium three years 
ahead of time at the start of every year. You've got writing prescriptive linguistics books 
that come out every thirty-six months so you could set your watch by them. You've got 
grammatical conferences and conventions, which she doesn't leave the grounds ever 
anymore but she's there videophonically rain or shine for them all. You've got the 
Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, which she co-founded with a couple quote 
cherished academic friends, also bats, where the M.G.M.s for instance go around to 
Mass, supermarkets and dun the manager if the Express Checkout sign says 10 ITEMS 
OR LESS instead of OR FEWER and so on. The year before The Mad Stork's death the 
Orange Crush people had an ad on billboards and little magazine-fall-out cards that said 
CRUSH: WITH A TASTE THATS ALL ITS OWN, with like a possessive '"s" and I swear the 
M.G.M. squad lost their minds; the Moms spent five weeks going back and forth to NNY 
City, organized two different rallies on Madison Avenue that got very ugly, acted as her 
own attorney in the suit the Crush people brought, never slept, never once slept, lived 
on cigarettes and salad, huge salads always consumed very late at night, the Moms has 
a thing about never eating until it's late.' 

'Q-' 

'Apparently it's the noise, she can't take urban noise, she says, is why Hallie says she 
hasn't set glass-slipper-one off the Grounds in — you'd have to ask Hallie. The Volvo was 
already up on blocks when I was at college downtown. But I know she went to The 
Stork's funeral, which was off the grounds. Now she's got a tri-modem and videophony 
out the bazoo, though she'd never use a Tableau, I know.' 

■a.' 

'Well it's been pretty obvious since early on out in Weston the Moms has O.C.D. 
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The only reason she's never been diagnosed or treated 
for it is that in her the Disorder doesn't prevent her from functioning. It all seems to 
come back to functioning. Traversion is character, according to Schtitt. One guy I was 
close to at E.T.A. for years developed the kind of impairing O.C.D. where you need 
treatment — Bain wasted huge amounts of time on all these countless rituals of 
washing, cleaning, checking things, walking, had to have a T-square on the court to 
make sure all the strings on his stick were intersecting at 90°, could only go through a 



doorway if he'd felt all around the frame of the doorway by hand, checking the frame 
for God knows what, and then was totally unable to trust his senses and always had to 
recheck the doorway he'd just checked. We had to physically carry Bain out of the locker 
room, before tournaments. Actually we've been close all our lives, notwithstanding that 
Marlon Bain is the single sweatiest human being you'd ever want to get within a click of. 
I think the O.C.D. might have started as a result of the compulsive sweat, which the 
sweat itself started after his parents were killed in a grotesque freak accident, Bain's. 
Unless the strain of the constant rituals and fussing itself exaculates the perspiring. The 
Stork used Marlon in Death in Scarsdale, if you want to see way more than you want to 
know about perspiration. But the E.T.A. staff indulged Bain's pathology about doorways 
because Schtitt's own mentor had been pathologically devoted to this idea that you are 
what you walk between. It's so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition 
when it's easier. Jesus I'm thinking usage again. This is why I avoid the topic of the 
Moms. The whole topic starts to infect me. It takes me days to clean myself out of it. 
Traversion being character according to Schtitt. It takes a certain type of woman to look 
that good in a pantsuit, I think. I've always —' 

'Q.' 

'I think the point being that with actual clinical Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder I had to 
watch much of my ex-doubles partner's life grind to a halt because it'd take him three 
hours to shower and then another two to get out through the shower door. He was in 
this sort of paralysis of compulsive motions that didn't serve any kind of function. The 
Moms, on the other hand, can function with the compulsions because she's also 
compulsively efficient and practical about her compulsions. Whether this makes her 
more insane than Marlon Bain or less insane than Marlon Bain, who can like say. As an 
instance the Moms solved a lot of her threshold-problems by having no real doors or 
doorways built on the first floor of HmH so the rooms are all split off by angles and 
partitions and plants. The Moms kept to a Prussian bathroom-schedule so she couldn't 
spend hours in there washing her hands until the skin fell off the way Bain's did, he had 
to wear cotton gloves the whole summer right before he left E.T.A. The Moms for a 
while had video cameras installed so she could obsessively check whether Mrs. Clarke'd 
left the oven on or check her plants' arrangement or whether all the bathroom towels 
are lined up with their fringes flush without physically checking; she had a little wall of 
monitors in her study at HmH; The Stork put up with the cameras but the sense I get is 
that Tavis isn't going to be keen on being photorecorded in the bathroom or anyplace 
else, so maybe she's had to have other recourse. 3 You can check that yourself out there. 
What I'm trying to say is she's compulsively efficient even about her obsessions and 
compulsions. Of course there are doors upstairs, lockable doors, but that's in service of 
other compulsions. The Moms's. You can go ahead and ask her what I mean. She's so 
compulsive she's got the compulsions themselves arranged so efficiently that she can 
get everything done and still have plenty of time left over for her children. These are a 
constant drain on her batteries. She's got to keep Hal's skull lashed tight to hers without 
being so overt about it that Hallie has any idea what's going on, to keep him from trying 
to pull his skull away. The kid's still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause 



from exactly two hands. He's still performing for her, syntax- and vocabulary-wise, at 
seventeen, the same way he did when he was ten. The kid is so shut down talking to him 
is like throwing a stone in a pond. The kid has no idea he even knows something's 
wrong. Plus the Moms has to obsess over Mario and Mario's various challenges and 
tribulations and little patheticnesses and worship Mario and think Mario's some kind of 
secular martyr to the mess she'd made of her adult life, all the while having to keep up a 
front of laissez-faire laid-back management where she pretends to let Mario go his own 
way and do his own thing.' 

'Q-' 

'I'm not going to talk about it.' 

'Q-' 

'No and don't insult my intelligence. I'm not going to talk about why I don't want to 
talk about it. If this is going to be a Moment article, Hallie's going to read it, and then 
he'll read it to Booboo, and I'm not talking about The Stork's death or the Moms's 
stability in a thing where they'll read about it and have to read some authoritative 
report on my take on it instead of coming to their own terms about it. With it, rather. 
Terms with, terms about. No, terms with it.' 

l l 

'They both might have to wait until they get away from there before they can even 
realize what's going on, that the Moms is unredeemably fucking bats. All these terms 
that became cliches — denial, schizogenic, pathogenic family like systems and so on and 
so forth. A former acquaintance said The Mad Stork always used to say cliches earned 
their status as cliches because they were so obviously true.' 

l l 

'I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy 
years, is all I'll say.' 'Q.' 

'The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my 
opinion, is all I'll say.' 

'All right. I'll relate one antidote b that might be more revealing of the Moms's emo¬ 
tional weather than any adjective. Jesus, see, I start explicitly referring to parts of 
speech just thinking about the whole thing. The thing about people who are truly and 
malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they 
themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.' 

'Q.' 

'I'm sorry? Right then, one illustrative thing. Which thing to pick. Embarrassment of 
riches. I'll pick one at random. I think I was maybe twelve. I was in 12's, I know, on that 
summer's tour. Though I was playing 12's when I was still ten. It was ten to thirteen that 
I was regarded as gifted, with a tennis future. I began to decline around what should 
have been puberty. Call me let's say twelve. People were talking about NAFTA and 
something called the quote Information Turnpike and there was still broadcast TV, 
though we had a satellite dish. The Academy wasn't even a twinkle in anybody's eye. 
The Stork would disappear periodically when money came in. I think he kept going back 
up to Lyle in Ontario. Call me age ten. We still lived in Weston, known also as Volvoland. 



The Moms gardened like a fiend out there. This was something else she hod to do. Had a 
thing about. Hadn't gone to indoor plants yet. Called the garden's crops her Green 
Babies. Wouldn't let us eat the zucchini. Never picked it, it got monstrous and dry and 
fell off and rotted. Big fun. But her real thing was preparing the garden every spring. She 
started making lists and pricing supplies and drafting outlines in January. Did I mention 
her own father had been a potato farmer, at one time a millionaire potato-baron-type 
farmer, in Quebec? 

'But so it's early March. Are those earrings electric, or is it you? How come I've never 
seen those earrings up to now? I thought women who could bring off copper earrings 
never wore anything but copper. You should see yourself in this light. Fluorescence isn't 
kind to most women. It must take an exceptional kind —' 

'Q-' 

'In the Moms's family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. 
His will said only not anywhere near his own dad's plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the 
Concavity. The Moms's home town's wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete- 
country. I'd have to try to recall the town. But so but then so the Moms is out in the cold 
garden. It's March and it's co -wold. I've got this story down. I've related this incident to 
several family-type professionals, and not one eyebrow stayed steady among them. This 
is the sort of antidote that makes pathogenic-systems-pros' eyebrows go all the way up 
and over their skull and disappear down the back of their neck.' 

'So then I'm let's say thirteen, which means Hallie's four. The Moms is in the backyard 
garden, tilling the infamously flinty New England soil with a rented Rototiller. The situa¬ 
tion is ambiguous between whether it's the Moms steering the Rototiller or vice versa. 
The old machine, full of gas I'd slopped through a funnel — the Moms secretly believes 
petroleum products give you leukemia, her solution is to pretend to herself she doesn't 
know what's wrong when the thing won't work and to stand there wringing her hands 
and let some eager-to-please thirteen-year-old puff out his chest at being able to 
diagnose the problem, and then I pour the gas. The Rototiller is loud and hard to 
control. It roars and snorts and bucks and my mother's stride behind it is like the stride 
of someone walking an untrained St. Bernard, she's leaving drunken staggery footprints 
behind her in the tilled dirt, behind the thing. There's something about a very very tall 
woman trying to operate a Rototiller. The Moms is incredibly tall, way taller than 
everybody except The Stork, who towered even over the Moms. Of course she'd be 
horrified if she ever brought herself to recognize what she was doing, orchestrating a 
little kid into handling the gas that she thinks might be cancerous; she doesn't even 
know she's phobic about gas. She's wearing two pairs of work-gloves and plastic 
surgery-type bags over her espadrilles, which were the only footwear she could garden 
in. And a Fukoama microfiltration pollution mask, which you might remember those 
from that period. Her toes are blue in the dirty plastic bags. I'm a few meters ahead of 
the Moms, in charge of preemptive rock- and clod-removal. That's her term. Preemptive 
rock- and clod-removal. 

'Now work with me, see this with me. In the middle of this tilling here comes my little 
brother Hallie, maybe like four at the time and wearing some kind of fuzzy red pajamas 



and a tiny little down coat, and slippers that had those awful Nice-Day yellow smile- 
faces on both toes. We've been at it maybe an hour and half, and the garden's dirt is 
just about tilled when Hal conies out and down off the pressure-treated redwood deck 
and comes walking very steadily and seriously toward the border of the garden the 
Moms had surveyed out with little sticks and string. He has his little hand out, he's 
holding out something small and dark and he's coming toward the garden as the 
RototiHer snorts and rattles behind me, dragging the Moms. As he gets closer the thing 
in his hand resolves into something that just doesn't look pleasant at all. Hal and I look 
at each other. His expression is very serious even despite that his lower lip is having a 
sort of little epileptic fit, which means he's getting ready to bawl. That's with a w. I 
remember the air was gray with dust and the Moms had her glasses on. He holds the 
thing out toward the Moms's figure. I squint. The thing covering his palm and hanging 
over the sides of the palm is a rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold. 
Underline big and old. It must have come from some hot furnace-hidden corner of the 
basement, some corner she must have missed with the flamethrower, after the flooding 
we had every January thaw. I heft a clod or rock. I'm staring, every follicle I've got is 
bunched and straining. You could feel the tension, it was like standing down at 
Sunstrand Plaza when they fired the transformers, every follicle bunches and strains. It 
was a sort of nasal green, black-speckled, hairy like a peach is hairy. Also some orange 
speckles. A patch of very bad-news-type mold. Hal looks at me in the noise, his lower lip 
all over the place. He looks to the Moms, the Moms is intent on a plumb-straight 
Rototi lied line, weaving. The piece is that the mold looks, like, strangely incomplete. As 
in it dawns on me right then chewed on, Helen. And yes as I squint some sickening hairy 
stuff is still there like impacted in the kid's front teeth and hairily smeared around the 
mouth. 

'Be there with me, Helen. Feel the sort of Wagnerish clouds gather. Hallie always said 
there was always this sense as a kid with the Moms that the whole cosmos was just this 
side of fulminating into boiling clouds of elemental gas and was being held materially 
together only through heroic exercise of will and ingenuity on the part of the Moms. 

'Everything slows waaay down. She's coming around with the machine at the end of a 
row and sees Hallie wearing his happy-slippers outside in the cold, which just in itself is 
enough to gut-shot the cosmos as far as she's concerned, usually. Now we're seeing the 
Rototi Her get shut down as she bends way down to where I'd showed her the choke. 
The machine diesels a little and farts some blue smoke. The machine sucks the nub of its 
starter-rope into itself. I can feel the voltage like I'm still there. Post-racket tingling quiet 
descends. There's the tentative chirp of a bird. The Moms comes toward Hal standing 
there in his little red coat. She's tucking a wisp of hair back under the special plastic 
cap's elastic. Her hair at that time was dark brown, she's addressing him, she has an 
unbelievably humiliating little family pet name for the kid that I'll show him the mercy of 
never telling anybody. 

'But so she's coming over. Hal is standing there. Holds the horrific patch of fungus out. 
The Moms sees at first only her child holding something out, and like all moms 
hardwired for motherhood she reaches to take whatever her baby holds out. The one 



sort of case where she wouldn't check before reaching out toward something held out.' 

U' 

'The Moms though now stops just inside the border of string and she squints, her 
glasses have dust, she starts to see and process just what it is the kid's holding out to 
her. Her hand's outstretched in the air over the garden's string and she stops. 

'Hallie takes one step forward, arm up and out in a kind of like Nazi salute. He goes "I 
ate this." 

'The Moms says she begs his pardon. 

'Helen, you decide. But consider the fragility of the obsesso-compulsive's control. The 
terrible life-ruling phobias. Her four horsemen: enclosure, communicational imprecision, 
and untidiness, which you can't get much untidier than basement-mold.' 

'Q.' 

'The fourth horseman stays hidden, of course, like in all quality eschatologies, the 
unturned card, under wraps till actual game-time. 

' "I ate this" Hal goes, he's still holding the thing out, not crying, a kind of clinical 
grimness to him about it, like the mold's some audit it's his job to show her. And do you 
want to know if she touched it?' 

'Q.' 

'It suddenly occurs to me that if you want stuff on the Moms and The Mad Stork you 
could contact Bain. He practically lived with us in Weston. As like a secondary source. 
I'm sure he'd discuss the Moms's foibles all you want. The man still practically holds up a 
crucifix at any mention. His little greeting-card company has just been bought up by a 
huge novelty concern, so I'm sure he's in his big room lying there having palm-fronds 
waved and his forehead wiped, feeling flush and voluble. I guess I'd rather you didn't ask 
him about my foibles, but he's inexhaustible on the subject of the Moms and O.C.D. He 
never leaves home, which home is one room, the converted Children's Reading Room of 
what used to be the Waltham Public Library, which is the whole third floor. He learned 
from the Moms how to minimize doorways to traverse. I'm afraid he's not InterNetted 
and has an O.C.D.-phobic thing about e-mail. His snail-mail address is Marlon K. Bain, 
Saprogenic Greetings Inc., BPL-Waltham Bldg., 1214 Totten Pond Road, Waltham MA 
021549872/4. It'd also be good if you could avoid mentioning the number 2 to him. He 
has problems with the number 2. I don't know if his not leaving home is similar to the 
Moms's not leaving home. This is the most I've thought about the Moms in a dog's age, 
to be honest with you. You have this way of getting stuff out of me. It's like you do 
nothing but sit there with that cigarette and you're all I can see and all I want is to 
please you. It's like I can't help it. Is this just good journalism, Helen?' 

'Or is there something more going on here, some kind of strange bond I feel between 
us that sort of like tears down all my normal personal-life boundaries and makes me 
open totally to you? I guess I have to hope you won't take advantage. Does this all 
sound like some kind of line? Maybe if it was a line it'd sound less lame. I guess I do wish 
I could come off more suave. I don't know what else to do except just tell what's going 
on inside me, even if it sounds lame. I never have any clue what you're thinking about 
it.' 



' "Help! My son ate this!" She screamed the same thing over and over, holding the 
mold-rhombus up like a torch, running around just inside the string border while I and 
Hallie staggered back, literally like staggered back, gaping at our first taste of 
apocalypse, a corner of the universe suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed out 
there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order. 

' "Help! My son ate this! My son has eaten this! Help!" she kept screaming, running in 
tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string, and I'm seeing The Mad 
Stork's face at the glass door over the deck, palms out and thumbs together to make a 
frame, and Mario my other brother next to him as usual down around his knee, with 
Mario's face all squished against the glass from supporting his weight, their breath on 
the window spreading, Hal inside the string finally and trying to follow her, crying, and 
not impossibly I also crying a little, just from the infectious stress, and those two 
through the back door's glass just watching, and fucking Booboo also trying to make 
that frame with his hands, so finally it was Mr. Reehagen next door, who was so-called 
"friends" with her, who had to come out and over and finally had to hook up the hose/ 

a . This may be a lie — no one else at E.T.A. knows anything else about there having 
been any cameras in HmH's kitchen, bathroom, etc. 

b . sic. 

235 She'd arrayed the photos herself, from her purse, on the dresser; he hadn't had to 
ask her to; it added to the sense of synchronous mercy, a cosmic kindness balancing out 
the Jacuzzi's dead bird and the frigidly invasive reporter. 

236 E.T.A. shorthand: Vector/Angle/Pace/Spin. 

237 The NW-to-NE angle at the former Monteplier VT isn't quite 90°, but it is very close. 
By the way, the Syracuse-Ticonderoga-Salem triangle is one of those endless-based 25- 
130-25 triangles that looks so hideous when projected onto one of Corbett Thorp's 
distorting globes in the Trivium's Cubular Trigonometry. 

238 Quod vide here Ch. 7, 'It All Started with a Colorectal Neoplastis, an Openness to 
Communicative Manifestations of Divine Grace, and a Seedy-Looking Fellow That Pub¬ 
licly Lifted a Chair He Was Standing On, That Was Clearly Just Such a Manifestation,' in 
The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle 
Lithiumized Annular Fusion, ed. Prof. Dr. Gunther Sperber, Institut fur Neutronenphysik 
und Reaktortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in 
ferociously expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY. (N.b. 
that while the annular meta-disease treatment is highly effective on metastatic cancers, 
it proved a disappointment on the HIV-spectrum viri, since AIDS is itself a meta-disease.) 

239 Because he'd been sworn to secrecy. Green doesn't tell Lenz that Charlotte Treat had 
shared with Green that her adoptive father had been one-time Chair of the Northeast 
Regional Board of Dental Anesthesiologists, and had been pretty liberal with the use of 
the old N 2 0 and thiopental sodium around the Treats' Revere MA household, for per¬ 
sonal and extremely unsavory reasons. 

240 ® The Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hilo HI - 'A LOW SODIUM FOOD.' 

241 Popular corporate-hard-rock bands, though it shows where Bruce Green's psychic 



decline really started that, except for TBA 5 , these bands were all truly big two or three 
years past, and are now slightly passe, with Choosy Mothers having split up entirely by 
now to explore individual creative directions. 

242 This is one reason why he consents to be hung way out into space from Schtitt's 
transom for filming all-court play, held only by some prorector with a firm grip on the 
back of his lock's vest, which the players looking up at Mario's forward ski-jump posture 
off the crow's nest find incredibly terrifying and audacious and ballsy, and Avril won't 
even leave HmH during all-court filmings. 

243 This though Avril's never come right out and articulated her worry about his P.M. 
safety to Mario, not wanting to seem as though she's making a special issue of his 
deficits and vulnerability or to seem inconsistent when she lets Hal go off nightly 
wherever he likes or just basically in any way to inhibit Mario's sense of autonomy and 
freedom by causing him to worry about her worrying — which he does, rather a lot, 
worry about Avril's worrying about him. If that makes sense. 

244 Mario, like his maternal uncle Charles Tavis, has a dislike of fluorescent lighting. 

245 'Is that supposed to mean something? What's that supposed to mean?' 

'Nothing. Literally nothing.' 

246 A depressing new Sober Club in Somerville's Davis Square where AAs and NAs — 
mostly new and young — get heartbreakingly dolled up and dance stiffly and tremble 
with sober sexual anxiety and they stand around with Cokes and M.F.s telling each other 
how great it is to be in an intensely social venue with all your self-conscious inhibitions 
unmedicated and screaming in your head. The smiles alone in these places are 
excruciating to see. 

247 A Restriction means just no Overnight that week and an extra Chore; a House 
Restriction means you have to be back an hour after work and nightly meetings; Full 
House is no leaving the House except for work and meetings, and 15 minutes to get 
back, and no even leaving to buy smokes or a paper, or even to go out in the lawn for 
oxygen, and one violation means a Discharge: F.H.R. is Ennet's version of the Hole, and 
it's dreaded. 

248 Ennet House takes its urines over to the methadone clinic, which has all manner of 
clients who have to submit weekly urines to courts and programs, and the clinic lets 
Ennet put its urines gratis in the weekly batch the clinic sends out to an E.M.l.T.-mill 
clinic all the way out in Natick, and in return every once in a while Pat gets a call from 
the trollish little social worker who runs #2 about some client down there who's decided 
he wants off the methadone, as well, and Pat will shoot the client way up on the 
Interview list and give him an interview and usually let the client in — Calvin T. and 
Danielle S. had both originally gotten into Ennet House this way, i.e. via #2. 

249 It's maybe significant that Don Gately never once failed to clean up any vomit or 
incontinence his mother'd just drunkenly left there or passed out in, no matter how 
pissed off or disgusted he was or how sick he himself was: not once. 

250 (who owns a Lincoln, Henderson does, origins unknown and suspicious) 

251 This is all for Insurance Reasons, the Staff sheet on which Gately doesn't understand 
all the language of, and fears. 



252 


It's against House rules to smoke upstairs in the bedrooms — more Insurance 
Reasons — and a week's Restriction is supposed to be mandatory, and Pat's personally a 
fanatic about the rule, but Gately, much as he fears the grim boilerplate on the 
Insurance Sheet, always pretends he doesn't see anything when he sees somebody 
smoking up here, since when he was a resident he actually used to sometimes smoke in 
his sleep he was so tense, and every once in a while will wake up and find that he has 
again, i.e. lit a gasper and apparently smoked it and put it out all in his sleep, down in 
bed in his Staff oubliette in the basement. 

253 (the items from the House's donated-clothes baskets that fit Gately being few and 
far) 

254 Gately's made it an iron point never again ever to run, once he got straight. 

255 NNE street argot for any kind of handgun. 

256 (Erdedy's hands still up, w/ keys) 

257 (NNE Region, trying hard not to irritate Tine Sr. by fidgeting) 

258 (Desert-SW Region, understated in a massive peasant skirt and sensible flats) 

259 These, ® a number of fine companies, are like enormous versions of the little 
windshield-washer implements at service stations — an industrial mop-handle w/ a 
canted rubber blade at the end, used for spreading puddle-water out so it dries faster, 
at some academies replaced with the EZ-DRI hinged-roller-of-dense-sponge-at-the-end 
court-dryer, which E.T.A. eschews because of how fast the rolling sponge at the end 
mildews and smells bad. 

260 Mrs. Incandenza always grades everything in blue ink. 

261 A phenomenon not unknown, viz. menial employees and shift-workers mining 
E.T.A.'s collected waste for cast-off value, and permitted by the administration and Mr. 
Harde, or rather just not actively discouraged, since 'One man's trash ...' and so on, with 
the only requirement being a certain visual discretion when carrying off E.T.A.'s offal, 
simply because the whole thing's kind of embarrassing for everybody. 

262 I.e. the Women's Tennis Association, the distaff equivalent of the A.T.P. 

263 Sic, presumably for Betamax (®Sony). 

264 Sic, but it's pretty obvious what Marathe means here. 

265 Reinforced Aluminum Spectation Unit. 

266 The occasional upscale parent could be seen exiting Comm.-Ad. and crossing behind 
the West Courts' south fence to the asphalt lot and what were unmistakably parental 
autos, all remarkable for their textbook tire-pressure and bristles of cellular antennae 
and the absence of any little dust-smiles on their rear or side windows. Charles Tavis 
had spent the morning interfacing with parents of those E.T.A. kids injured in I.-Day's 
Eschaton free-for-all. Lateral Alice Moore, for a treat, had been listening to Tavis and 
parents on her headphones, while typing, instead of her collection of aerobic favorites. 
Struck and Pemulis had cruised by before lunch and blarneyed her into putting the 
exchanges on her intercom's speaker for a couple minutes. You should hear C.T. 
enclosed with parents sometime. It was only some of the parents — Todd 
Possalthwaite's dad was on honeymoon in the Azores, and Otis P. Lord's mother had 
some inner-ear thing and the Lords couldn't fly. But Pemulis and Struck concurred that 



everyone with any kind of administration in his blood should hear E.T.A.'s Headmaster 
with parents and a placative mission, a master charmer past all social gauge, a Houdini 
with the manacles of fact, the interfaces like fluidless seductions — Pemulis said the 
man's missed a genuine calling in sales — everyone practically wanting to smoke a 
cigarette afterward, the parents leave weeping, pumping Tavis's hands — one parent 
per hand — practically begging him to accept both their thanks and their apologies for 
daring to even possibly think , even for a moment. Then, supporting each other, making 
their way over Lateral Alice's third rail and past the beaming extremely polite lads by her 
desk and out through the pressurized glass lobby doors and down off the white-pillared 
neo-Georgian porch and past courts and bleachers and into their well-maintained autos 
and out the portcullis and very slowly down the hill's brick drive before they even recall 
they'd forgotten to pop in on their injured kid, sign his cast, feel his forehead, say Hey. 

267 l.e. ace/double fault, rather like the ratio of strikeouts to walks for a pitcher. 

268 It was like Steeply'd never seen so many left-handed people: both Hal Incandenza 
and the boy in black were left-handed, one of the two little girls four courts down was 
left-handed, deLint was marking the chart with his left hand. Both A.F.R. turncoat Remy 
Marathe and Quebecer triple-operative Luria P— were southpaws, though Steeply 
realized that this could hardly be called significant. 

269 

Saprogenic Greetings* 

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU 
*a proud member of the ACME Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, 
Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises 
Ms. Helen Steepley 
And So On 
November Y.D.A.U. 

... (1) Orin Incandenza and I played, practiced, and generally hung out through most of 
what seemed at the time to be our formative years. We met because I kept 
encountering him across the net in the local tennis tournaments we played around 
metro Boston, Boys' 10's. We were the two best 10-year-old males in Boston. We soon 
became practice partners, our mothers driving us every weekday afternoon to a junior 
development program at the Auburndale Tennis Club in West Newton. After my own 
parents were horribly killed on the Jamaica Way commuter road one morning in the 
freak crash of a radio traffic-report helicopter, I became a sort of hanger-on at the 
Incandenza house out in Weston. When J.O.I, founded the Academy, I was one of the 
first matriculants. Orin and I were inseparable until around age 15, when I reached my 
own zenith in terms of early puberty and athletic promise and began to be able to beat 
him. He took it hard. We were never inseparable again. We spent quantity time 
together again briefly for a few months the next year, during a period when we both 
experimented heavily with recreational substances. We both ended up losing 
enthusiasm for substances after only a couple years, Orin because he had finally entered 
puberty and had discovered the weaker sex and found he needed all his faculties and 
guile, myself because a couple of really negative methoxy-psychedelic experiences left 



me with certain Disabilities that to this day make normal life an exceptional challenge, 
and which I tend to blame on having done deadly-serious hallucinogens at a sort of 
larval psychological stage during which no N. American adolescent should be allowed to 
do hallucinogens. These Disabilities led to my departure from the Enfield Tennis 
Academy at 17, prior to graduation, and my withdrawal from competitive junior tennis 
and contemporary life as we know it. Orin was largely burned out on tennis too by 17, 
though no one in his right mind could have foreseen a defection to organized U.S. 
football in his future. 

A grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism, football, Ms. Steepley, on 
my view. The exaggerated breadth of the shoulders, the masked eradication of facial 
personality, the emphasis on contact-vs.-avoidance-of-contact. The gains in terms of 
penetration and resistance. The tight pants that accentuate the gluteals and hamstrings 
and what look for all the world like codpieces. The gradual slow shift of venue to 
"artificial surface," "artificial turf." Don't the pants' fronts look fitted with codpieces? 
And have a look at these men whacking each other's asses after a play. It is like Swin¬ 
burne sat down on his soul's darkest night and designed an organized sport. And pay no 
attention to Orin's defense of football as a ritualized substitute for armed conflict. 
Armed conflict is plenty ritualized on its own, and since we have real armed conflict 
(take a spin through Boston's Roxbury and Mattapan districts some evening) there is no 
need or purpose for a substitute. Football is pure homophobically repressed nancy-ism, 
and do not let 0. tell you different. 

... (3c) I cannot help you too much with the facts surrounding Dr. Incandenza's suicide. 

I know that he erased his own cartography in a grisly way. I was told that in the year 
leading up to his death Dr. Incandenza was abusing ethyl alcohol on a daily basis and 
was working on a whole new genre of film-cartridge that Orin at the time claimed was 
driving Dr. Inc insane. 

... (3e) The supposed cause of their separation is that Dr. Incandenza began using her 
in his work more and more extensively and eventually asked her to perform in the 
prenominate completely radical new type of filmed entertainment that supposedly was 
driving him to a breakdown. They supposedly became close, James and Jo-Ellen, though 
Orin in my judgment is not a reliable source of information about their relationship. 

The only other apposite fact I have — and I have this not from Orin but from an 
innocent female relative of mine who was (briefly) in a position to interface with our 
punter in an intimate and unguarded way impossible between hetero males — is that 
some incident occurred in the Incandenzas' Volvo involving one of the windows and a 
word — all I am given is that 0. reports that in the days prior to Dr. Incandenza's felo de 
se, a so-called "word" appeared on a "fogged" "window" of Mrs. Inc's pale yellow Volvo, 
and the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions. This is it. 

... (5) The "vailed warning" (typo?) you refer to in my postal response to you is simply 
that you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way. I am not sure I would 
stand and point at Orin as an example of a classic pathological liar, but you have only to 
watch him in certain kinds of action to see that there can be such a thing as sincerity 
with a motive. I have no idea what your relationship with Orin is or what your feelings 



are — and if Orin wishes it I am afraid I can predict your feelings for him will be strong 
— so I shall just tell you that for instance at E.T.A. I saw Orin in bars or at post¬ 
tournament dances go up to a young lady he would like to pick up and use this fail-safe 
cross-sectional pick-up Strategy that involved an opening like "Tell me what sort of man 
you prefer, and then I'll affect the demeanor of that man." Which in a way of course is 
being almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but 
also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above- 
The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And -l-Transcend- 
The-Common-Disingenuity-ln-A-Bar-Herd-ln-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware- 
Way-,-And-lf-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-l-Will-Not-Only-Keep-Being-This-Wittily,- 
Transcendently-Open-,-But-Will-Bring-You-lnto-This-World-Of-Social-Falsehood- 
Transcendence, which of course he cannot do because the whole openness-demeanor 
thing is itself a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza 
is the least open man I know. Spend a little time with Orin's Uncle Charles a.k.a. "Gretel 
the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow" Tavis if you want to see real openness in motion, and 
you will see that genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's 
syndrome. 

It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth 
as constructed instead of reported. He came by this idea educationally, is all I will add. 
He studied for almost eighteen years at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker I 
have ever met, and even now he remains so flummoxed he thinks the way to escape 
that person's influence is through renunciation and hatred of that person. Defining 
yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it? I 
certainly think so. And men who believe they hate what they really/ear they need are of 
limited interest, I find. 

... Again I will remind you that Orin and I are on the outs a bit at the moment, so some 
of my judgments may be temporarily short on charity. 

One reason Orin is not a straight-out liar is that Orin is not a particularly skillful liar. 
The few times I saw him try consciously to lie were pathetic. This is one reason why his 
juvenile recreational-chemical phase passed so quickly compared to some of our 
colleagues at E.T.A. If you are going to do serious drugs while you are still a minor and 
under your parents' roof, you are going to have to -lie often and lie well. Orin was a 
strangely stupid liar. I am recalling there was one afternoon on Mrs. Clarke's day off 
when Mrs. Inc had to go off and overfunction somewhere and Orin was supposed to 
baby-sit Mario and Hal, who were at the kind of crazed-toddler age where they would 
hurt themselves if they were not closely supervised, and I was over, and Orin and I 
decided to dart up to the loft over the Weston house's garage to smoke a bit of Bob 
Hope, which is to say high-resin marijuana, and in the loft, high, wandered disastrously 
into the sort of pseudophilosophical mental labyrinth that Bob Hope-smokers are al¬ 
ways wandering into and getting trapped in and wasting huge amounts of time 3 inside 
an intellectual room they cannot negotiate their way out of, and by the time we hadn't 
resolved the abstract problem that had put us into the labyrinth but just as always had 
gotten so hungry we abandoned it and stumbled out and down the loft's wooden 



ladder, the sun was all the way on the other side of the sky over Wayland and Sudbury, 
and the whole afternoon had passed without Hal and Mario having received any 
protective supervision; and Hal and Mario somehow survived the afternoon, but when 
Mrs. Incandenza returned that night she asked Orin what we and the supervised 
toddlers had done all afternoon and Orin lied that we had all been right here, 
respectively playing and supervising, and Mrs. Incandenza expressed puzzlement to Orin 
because she said she had tried to call the house several times that afternoon but was 
unable to get through, and Orin replied that while supervising he had herded the 
toddlers carefully into rooms with phone-jacks and made calls and had been on the 
phone several times for Jong periods of time for this that or the other thing, was why 
she had been unable to get through, at which Mrs. Incandenza (who is extremely tall) 
had blinked several times and looked very confused and said that but the phone had not 
been busy, it had just rung and rung and rung. At a juncture like this, men and boys get 
separated in terms of prevarication, I submit. And all Orin could come up with was a 
steady gaze as he said, as if from the Rose Garden: "I have no response to that." Which 
incredibly stupid response he and I found very funny for weeks afterward, especially 
since Mrs. Incandenza never punished and refused to act as if she believed lying was 
even a possibility as far as her children were concerned, and treated an exploded lie as 
an insoluble cosmic mystery instead of an exploded lie. 

The worst instance of both Orin's mendacious idiocy and Mrs. Incandenza's un¬ 
willingness to countenance an idiotic lie came one grisly day soon after Orin had finally 
gotten his vehicle operator's license. 0. and I found ourselves with an idle weekday 
afternoon off in August after losing early at a synthetic-grass tournament down at Long- 
wood, and Hal was still alive in what was then Boys' 10's and thus a good bit of the 
E.T.A. summer community was still down at Longwood, including Mario and Mrs. 
Incandenza, who'd been driven down I remember by a sort of swarthily foreign-looking 
moniiial-internist medical resident Mrs. Inc had introduced as a so-called "dear and 
cherished friend" but hadn't explained how they'd met, and Dr. Incandenza was indis¬ 
posed and not in a position to bother anyone that day, I remember, and Orin and I had 
most of E.T.A. to ourselves, even the gate's portcullis unmanned and up, and this being 
at the acme of our interest in such things we wasted little time in ingesting some sort of 
recreational substance, I cannot recall what kind but I remember them as particularly 
impairing, and we decided however that we weren't yet impaired enough, and decided 
to drive down the hill to one of the disreputable liquor stores along Commonwealth 
Avenue that accepted your word of honor as proof of age, and we hopped into the 
Volvo and blasted down the hill and down Commonwealth Avenue, severely impaired, 
and wondered in a speculative way why people on the sidewalks all along Common¬ 
wealth seemed to be waving at us and holding their heads and pointing and jumping 
wildly up and down, and Orin waving cheerfully back and holding his own head in a sort 
of friendly imitation, but it was not until we got all the way down to the 
Commonwealth-Brighton Ave. split that the horrible realization hit us: Mrs. Incandenza 
often during summer days kept the Incandenzas' beloved dog S. Johnson leashed to the 
back of her Volvo within reach of his water and Science Diet bowls, and Orin and I had 



peeled out in the car without even thinking to check for whether S. Johnson was 
attached to it. I will not try to describe what we found when we pulled into a parking lot 
and slunk to the rear of the car. Let's call it a nubbin. Let's say what we found was a 
leash and collar, and a nubbin. According to the couple of witnesses who were able to 
speak, S. Johnson had made a valiant go of trying to keep up back there for at least a 
couple blocks down Commonwealth, but at some point he either lost his footing or got 
his canine affairs in order and figured it was his day to shuffle off, and gave up, and hit 
the pavement, after which the scene the witnesses described was unspeakable. There 
was fur and let's call it material down the middle of the inside east-bound lane for five 
or six blocks. What we had left to take slowly back up the Academy's hill was a leash, a 
collar with tags describing medication-allergies and food-sensitivities, and a nubbin of 
let's call it attached material. 

a . This tendency to involuted abstraction is sometimes called "Marijuana Thinking"; 
and by the way, the so-called "Amotivational Syndrome" consequent to massive Bob 
Hope-consumption is a misnomer, for it is not that Bob Hope-smokers lose interest in 
practical functioning, but rather Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of 
reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical 
functioning, and the mental labor of finding one's way out consumes all available 
attention and makes the Bob Hope-smoker look physically torpid and apathetic and 
amoti-vated sitting there, when really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth. 
Note that the overwhelming hunger (the so-called "munchies") that accompanies 
cannabis intoxication may be a natural defense mechanism against this kind of loss of 
practical function, since there is no more practical function anywhere than foraging 
for food. 

The point is that I defy you to imagine how it felt later that day to stand there with 
Orin in the HmH living room before the prone and piteously weeping Mrs. Incandenza 
and listen to Orin try to construct a version of events in which he and I had sensed 
somehow that S. Johnson was dying for a good brisk August walk and were walking him 
down Commonwealth, saying there we were walking good old S. Johnson demurely 
down the sidewalk when a hit-and-run driver not only swerved up onto the sidewalk to 
run the dog down but then backed up and ran him over again and backed up and ran 
him over again, and on and on, so more like a putverize-and-run driver, while Orin and I 
had stood there too paralyzed with horror and grief even to think of noticing the make 
and color of the car, much less the fiend's license plate. Mrs. Incan-denza on her knees 
(there's something surreal about a very tall woman on her knees), weeping and pressing 
her hand to her collarbone but nodding in confirmation at every syllable of Orin spinning 
this pathetic lie, 0. holding up the leash and collar (and nubbin) like Exhibit A, with me 
next to him wiping my forehead and wishing the immaculately polished and sterilized 
hardwood floor would swallow up the whole scene in toto. 

... (7) Ms. Steeples, to my way of thinking, the word "abuse" is vacuous. Who can 
define "abuse"? The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity 
of the abuse becomes part of the abuse. Thanks over the decades to the energetic exer- 



cise of your own profession, Ms. Steeley, we have all heard ACOAs and AlaTeens and 
ACONAs and ACOGs and WHINERS relate clear cases of different kinds of abuse: 
beatings, diddlings, rapes, deprivations, domineerment, humiliation, captivity, torture, 
excessive criticism or even just utter disinterest. But at least the victims of this sort of 
abuse can, when they have dredged it back up after childhood, confidently call it 
"abuse." There are, however, more ambiguous cases. Harder to profile, one might say. 
What would you call a parent who is so neurasthenic and depressive that any opposition 
to his parental will plunges him into the sort of psychotic depression where he does not 
leave his bed for days and just sits there in bed cleaning his revolver, so that the child 
would be terrified of opposing his will and plunging him into a depression and maybe 
causing him to suicide? Would that child qualify as "abused"? Or a father who is so 
engrossed by mathematics that he gets engrossed helping his child with his algebra 
homework and ends up forgetting the child and doing it all himself so that the child gets 
an A in Fractions but never in fact learns fractions? Or even say a father who is ex¬ 
tremely handy around the house and can fix anything, and has the son help him, but 
gets so engrossed in his projects (the father) that he never thinks to explain to the son 
how the projects actually get done, so that the son's "help" never advances past simply 
handing the father a specified wrench or getting him lemonade or Phillips-head screws 
until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way and 
all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost, and the son never 
learns how to be a handy homeowner himself, and when things malfunction around his 
own one-room home he has to hire contemptuous filthy-nailed men to come fix them, 
and feels terribly inadequate (the son), not only because he is not handy but because 
this handiness seemed to him to have represented to his father everything that was 
independent and manly and non-Disabled in an American male. Would you cry "Abuse!" 
if you were the unhandy son, looking back? Worse, could you call it abuse without 
feeling that you were a pathetic self-indulgent piss-puddle, what with all the genuine 
cases of hair-raising physical and emotional abuse diligently reported and analyzed daily 
by conscientious journalists (and profiled?)? 

I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in 
the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and 
functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in 
their children's lives, profligate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive crit¬ 
icism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of 
their children, conforming to every last jot/tittle in any conceivable definition of a good 
parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emo¬ 
tionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) 
borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically 
driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive 
permutation of (a) ... (g) Now, Orin had never once walked S. Johnson. Orin was not 
even all that keen on S. Johnson, because the dog was always trying to mate with his left 
leg. And anyway, S. Johnson was very much Mrs. Incandenza's dog, and was normally 
exercised only by Mrs. Incandenza, and at rigidly specific times of day. 



Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children 
who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel 
they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into 
having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous? 

Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately 
beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow 
that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really 
magnificent mother? Probably not. 

But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that's the child's view of 
himself? 

I am not speaking about my own mother, who was decapitated by a plummeting 
rotorblade long before she could have much effect one way or the other on my older 
brother and innocent younger sister and me. 

I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the 
woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable 
with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not right, is the 
only way to put it. Something creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface. For instance, 
after Orin had pretty clearly killed her beloved dog S. Johnson in a truly awful if acci¬ 
dental way, and then had tried to evade responsibility for it with a lie that a parent far 
less intelligent than Avril could have seen right through, Mrs. Inc's response was not 
only not conventionally abusive, but seemed almost too unconditionally loving and 
compassionate and selfless to possibly be true. Her response to Orin's pathetic 
pulverize-and-run-driver lie was not to act credulous so much as to act as if the entire 
grotesque fiction had never reached her ears. And her response to the dog's death itself 
was bizarrely furcated. On the one hand, she mourned S. Johnson's death very deeply, 
took the leash and collar and canine nubbin tenderly and arranged lavish memorial and 
funeral arrangements, including a heartbreakingly small cherrywood coffin, cried in 
audible private for weeks, etc. But the other half of her emotional energies went into 
being overly solicitous and polite toward Orin, upping the daily compliment-and- 
reinforcement-dose, arranging for favorite foods at E.T.A. meals, having his favorite little 
tennis appurtenances appear magically in his bed and locker with loving notes attached, 
basically making the thousands of little gestures by which the technically stellar parent 
can make her child feel particularly valued 0 — all out of concern that Orin in no way 
think she resented him for S. Johnson's death or blamed him or loved him less in any 
way because of the whole incident. Not only was there no punishment or even visible 
pique, but the love-and-support-bombardment increased. And all this was coupled with 
elaborate machinations to keep the mourning and funeral arrangements and moments 
of wistful dog-remembrance hidden from Orin, for fear that he might see that the Moms 
was hurt and so feel bad or guilty, so that in his presence Mrs. Inc became even more 
cheerful and loquacious and witty and intimate and benign, even suggesting in oblique 
ways that life was now somehow suddenly better without the dog, that some kind of 
unrecognized albatross had been somehow removed from her neck, and so on and so 



forth. 

What does a trained analyst of our cultural profile's soft contours like yourself make of 
this, Mrs. Starksaddle? Is it mind-bogglingly considerate and loving and supportive, or is 
there something... creepy about it? Maybe a more perspicuous question: Was the 
almost pathological generosity with which Mrs. Inc responded to her son taking her car 
in an intoxicated condition and dragging her beloved dog to its grotesque death and 
then trying to lie his way out of it, was this generosity for Orin's sake, or for Avril's own? 
Was it Orin's "self-esteem" she was safeguarding, or her own vision of herself as a more 
stellar Moms than any human son could ever hope to feel he merits? 

When Orin does his impression of Avril — which I doubt you or anyone else can get 
him to do anymore, though it was a party-stopper back in our days at the Academy — 
what he will do is assume an enormous warm and loving smile and move steadily to¬ 
ward you until he is in so close that his face is spread up flat against your own face and 
c. Yes — all right — this may start to touch on it: not "val uoble" but "valuec/."your 
breaths mingle. If you can get to experience it — the impression — which will seem 
worse to you: the smothering proximity, or the unimpeachable warmth and love with 
which it's effected? 

For some reason now I am thinking of the sort of philanthropist who seems humanly 
repellent not in spite of his charity but because of it: on some level you can tell that he 
views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces of exercise 
equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue. What's creepy 
and repellent is that this sort of philanthropist clearly needs privation and suffering to 
continue, since it is his own virtue he prizes, instead of the ends to which the virtue is 
ostensibly directed. 

Everything Orin's mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent. I 
suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing concrete to back this up. 

But if, Ms. Bainbridge, you have yielded your own charms to Orin, and if Orin strikes you 
as a wonderfully gifted and giving lover — which by various accounts he is — not just 
skilled and sensuous but magnificently generous, empathic, attentive, loving — if it 
seems to you that he does, truly, derive his own best pleasure from giving you pleasure, 
you might wish to reflect soberly on this vision of Orin imitating his dear Moms as 
philanthropist: a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling. 

270 ® The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH. 

271 (including K. McKenna, who claims to have a bruised skull but does not in fact have a 
bruised skull) 

272 This is why Ann Kittenplan, way more culpable for Eschaton-damage than any of the 
other kids, isn't down here on the punitive cleanup crew, is that it's become a defacto 
Tunnel Club operation. LaMont Chu was nominated to tell her she could blow it off and 
they'd mark her down as present, which was just fine with Ann Kittenplan, since even 
the butchest little girls don't seem to have this proto-masculine fetish for enclosure 
underneath things. 

273 = Stars, shooting stars, falling stars. 

274 Poutrincourt uses the Nuck idiom reflechis instead of the more textbook reflexes , and 



does indeed sound like the real Canadian McCoy, though her accent is without the long 
moany suffixes of Marathe, and but anyway it is for certain that a certain 'journalist' will 
be e-mailing Falls Church VA on the U.S.O.'s Clipper-proof line for the unexpurgated files 
on one 'Poutrincourt, Thierry T.' 

275 Using s'annuler instead of the more Quebecois se detruire. 

276 Using the vulgate Quebecois transpergant, whose idiomatic connotation of doom 
Poutrincourt shouldn't have had any reason to think the Parisian-speaking Steeply 
would know, which is the slip that indicates that Poutrincourt's figured out that Steeply 
is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even a female, which Poutrincourt's probably known 
ever since Steeply'd lit his Flanderfume with the elbow of his lighter-arm out instead of 
in, which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do, and which together with the 
electrolysis-rash comprises the only real chink in the operative's distaff persona, and 
would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person to notice the 
significance of. 

277 Trois-Rivieres-region idiom, meaning basically 'reason to get out of bed in the 
morning.' 

273 Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty 
'awake' until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up against the far wall, shell¬ 
breathing, silent as death, is what I'd want to know. 

279 The kid's the former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding and torturing Hal, who hasn't 
gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year, and 
doesn't feel very good at all, and finds the kid's name's elusiveness infuriating. 

230 Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 
19th-century Psychologic des Sentiments says he means it to denote the 
psychoequivalent of analgesia , which is the neurologic suppression of pain. 

281 This had been one of Hal's deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he'd come 
up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we're all lonely for 
something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that 
he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he's never even met? Without the 
universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense. 

232 (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be 
around) 

283 S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors. 

284 A crude and cheap form of combustible methedrine, favored by the same sort of 
addictive class that sniffs gasoline fumes or coats the inside of a paper bag with airplane 
glue and puts the bag over their face and breathes until they fall down and start to 
convulse. 

235 This has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis on R.v.C.'s part, since Clonidine 
— 2-(2,6-Dichloroanilino)-2-imidazoline — is a decidedly adult-strength anti¬ 
hypertensive; the infant'd have to be N.F.L.-sized to tolerate it. 

286 Kate G.'s never done Ice, or crack/'base/crank, nor even cocaine or low-impact 
'drines. Drug addicts tend to fall into different classes: those who like downs and Mr. 
Hope rarely enjoy stimulants, while coke- and 'drine-fiends as a rule abhor marijuana. 



This is an area of potentially fruitful study in addictionology. Note that pretty much 
every class of addicts drinks, though. 

287 Since last winter, when a stale smell, litter of dental stimulators, and single slender 
spit-wet butt signified that a certain upperclassman had been smoking panatelas late at 
night in V.R.3. 

288 The Continent's Best Yogurt®. 

289 In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal, BS:OTN was in fact a very sad self-hate- 
festival on Himself's part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship and Himself's own miserable 
distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA that M.D.s and 
counselors kept referring him to. 

290 Whether the girl's hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is 
never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that's the 
case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more 
spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity 
strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock. 

291 After a heyday during the pre-millennial self-help craze, CA's receded back to being a 
splinter of the still-enormous Narcotics Anonymous; and Pat Montesian and the Ennet 
House Staff, while they have nothing against a resident with cocaine-issues hitting the 
occasional CA venue, strongly suggest that residents stick with AA or NA and not make 
splinters like CA or Designer Drug Addicts Anonymous or Prescription Tranquilizers 
Anonymous their primary fellowship for recovery, mostly because the splinters tend to 
have way fewer Groups and meetings — and some none at all in certain parts of the U.S. 
— and because their extremely specific Substance-focus tends to narrow the aperture 
of recovery and focus too much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of com¬ 
plete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto. 

292 Fearful partly because the Ennet House Staff strongly discourages residents 
forming any kind of sentimental attachment to members of the opposite sex during 
their nine-month stay, 3 to say nothing of attachments to Staffers. 
a . This is a corollary of Boston AA's suggestion that single newcomers not get roman¬ 
tically involved for the first year of sobriety. The big reason for this, Boston AAs with 
time will explain if pinned down, is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an 
enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the 
newcomer's supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by and pray to have filled by 
Boston AA and the old Higher Power, and intense romantic involvements offer a 
delusive analgesic for the pain of the hole, and tend to make the involvees clamp onto 
one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings 
and Activity in a Group and Surrender, and then if the involvement doesn't pan out 
(which like how many between newcomers do you suppose do) both involvees are 
devastated and in even more hole-pain than before and now don't have the intensive- 
work-in-AA-dependent strength to make it through the devastation without going 
back to the Substance. Relevant gnomes here might include 'Addicts Don't Have 
Relationships, They Take Hostages' (sic) and 'An Alcoholic Is a Relief-Seeking Missile.' 
And so on. The no-involvement thing tends to be the Waterloo of all suggestions, for 



newcomers, and celibacy's often the issue that separates those who Hang from those 
who Go Back Out There. 

293 Apparently the current colored word for other coloreds. Joelle van Dyne, by the way, 
was aculturated in a part of the U.S.A. where verbal attitudes toward black people are 
dated and unconsciously derisive, and is doing pretty much the best she can — colored 
and so on — and anyway is a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of 
culture Don Gately was conditioned in. 

294 It's a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apos¬ 
trophe to some absent 'Jim,' Joelle's observed in a neutral sociologic way. 

295 

Boston Housing Authority. 

296 Mixes 5/1 with ferric chloride to produce 'A + B Blood,' an F/X staple of low-budget 
splatter-films. 

297 The cartridge's repetitive emphasis on the Mother Superior's desire to silence the 
novitiate leads B. Boone — a lazy student but very bright girl — to opine that the silent 
brown-cowled Trappists who've been hanging superfluously around the film's edges like 
some mute Greek chorus have been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative function, 
which strikes Hal as perceptive. 

298 It's also a sly Schtitt-directed a-clef, of course, amounting to something like We Are 
What We Revile or We Are What We Scurry Around As Fast As Possible With Our Eyes 
Averted, though when Schtitt mentions the motto he never attaches any moral 
connotation to it, or for that matter ever translates it, allowing prorectors and Big 
Buddies to adjust their translations to suit the needs of the pedagogical moment. 

299 © the Commonwealth of MA's Lottery Authority. 

300 Easily found when pawning a cordless M. Cafe® Cafe-au-Lait Maker at a Brookline 
shop of pawning, for Fortier and Marathe and the A.F.R. knew well M. DuPlessis's pas¬ 
sion of breakfast cafe au lait. 

301 Having in her M.B.A. program absorbed the litigatory lessons of music producers v. 
cassette-tape manufacturers and film-production companies v. videotape-rental chains, 
Noreen Lace-Forche protected InterLace's golden goose's copyrights by specifying that 
all consumer-TP-compatible laser cartridges be engineered as Read-Only — copyable 
Master cartridges require special OS-codes and special hardware to run, 3 and you need 
licenses for both the codes and the hardware, which keeps most consumers out of the 
bootleg-cartridge business but is not a hard hurdle to clear if you've got financial 
resources and political incentive (i.e., to dupe off a Master). 

a . N.L.-F. had even rigged it so that Masters have to be run at 585 r.p.m. instead of a 
consumer-TP's cartridge-drive's 450 r.p.m. 

302 Thanks to the betrayal of Marathe, this pure-malice agenda is known to the Office 
of Unspecified Services, though it is not impossible that Fortier deliberately allowed 
Marathe to pass along this datum, Marathe knows, for the hope of instilling even 
deeper chills of fear in Sans-Chrlste Gentle and his O.N.A.N. chiens-courants. Suspected 
but unknown by Marathe, Fortier plans to have Marathe view the Entertainment by 
force before plans for the dissemination of copies from a Master are firm in execution. 
This not because Fortier for a moment suspects Marathe's love of his wife's health of 



prompting his betrayal of Leur Rai Pays — Fortier had overseen both jeux du prochain 
train 0 at which Marathe's elder brothers had been struck and killed, and Fortier has long 
nursed a suspicion that Marathe nurses dreams of redress for this. 

a . Q.v. Note 304 sub. 

303 Though hope springs eternal in the breasts, this news had been expected by 
BroullTme and Fortier the moment they witnessed the shop's brothers active and alert. 
For they believed no Master cartridge would have lain unshelved in a bag or damp box: 
even the dim brothers Antitoi, seeing the unique case and slightly larger size of a 
Master, would have put this to the special side, and arranged for the special 585-r.p.m. 
hardware to view it to check for special value, and been already lost. 

304 Q.v. @ 2030h. on 11 November Year of the D.A.U., 308 Subdorm B, Enfield Tennis 
Academy, where James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. sits slumped, chin in hands, forehead 
slathered in (C 2 Fl5C0)202 a , elbows on tiny cleared spots on desktop, TP compactly hum¬ 
ming, word-processing converter plugged into its green-lit dock, FID screen set atop the 
cartridge-viewer chassis on its fold-out support like a loved one's photo, keyboard 
hauled out of McGee-like chaos of closet and set on Fleavy Touch, cursor throbbing 
softly at screen's upper left before Struck, hunched blearily over what's starting to 
emerge as like unabsorbable amounts of research material for his post-Midterm 
termpaper for Ms. Pout-rincourt's History of Canadian Unpleasantness course thing. 
Struck always refers mentally to his classes as 'things.' Original hopes for at least 
originality of topic have long since gone over the side of the boat, emotionally. It turns 
out the more luridly absorbing the angle of topic you choose, the more people have 
already been there before you with their footprints to fill and their obscurely academic- 
type-journal articles to try and absorb and, like, synthesize. Struck's been at this over an 
hour, and his original sights have lowered considerably. He's been feeling a bit punk all 
day, sinuses with that infallible storm's-on-the-way feeling of weight and clot and a 
goalie-mask headache that throbs with his heart, and he's now trying to find some new 
resource in the piles that's obscure and amateurish enough for him to transpose and 
semi-plagiarize without worrying about Poutrincourt having read it or smelling a rat in 
the woodpile. 

'Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known about the infamous 
Separatist "Wheelchair Assassins" (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents or A.F.R.s) of 
southwestern Quebec as is accepted as axiomatic about the herds of oversized "Feral 
Infants" allegedly reputed to inhabit the periodically overinhabitable forested sections 
of the eastern Reconfiguration.' 

A B.P.L. ArchFax database search off the conjunctive key terms A.F.R., wheelchair, 
fauteuil rollent, Quebec, Quebec, Separatism, terrorist, Experialism, history, and cult, 
which you'd think would narrow things down nicely, yielded over 400 items, articles, 
essays, and papers, in everything from The Continent to Us, from Foreign Affairs to 
something called Wild Conceits, a woebegone little marginal archaic desktop-pub.- 
looking thing put out by someplace called Bayside Community College up 1-93 in Med¬ 
ford, nowhere near any bays, and edited by the same-named guy whose Wild Conceits 
wheelchair-killers essay Struck, after having to read the first sentence a bunch of times 



to even make sense of it, gauges he's pretty safe in ripping off, since no way 
Poutrincourt'd have spent the time to E.S.L. her way through U.S. Academese this 
insufferable: 

'...that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, 
grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the 
overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and pre¬ 
sumably do crawl thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated retention 
lines and into populated areas of New New England.' In a twist on the usual plagiarism- 
situation, the hardest work for Struck here is going to be sanitizing the prose in this Wild 
Conceits guy's thing, or at least bringing the verbs and modifiers down out of the like 
total ozone, which the Academese here on the whole sounds to Struck like the kind of 
foam-flecked megalograndiosity he associates with Quaaludes and red wine and then 
the odd Preludin to pull out of the grandiose nosedive of the Quaaludes and red wine. 
Plus let's not even mention repair-work on the freewheeling transitions; Poutrincourt 
has a fetishy thing about transitions. 

'The massive, feral infants, formed by toxicity and sustained by annulation, however, 
are, from the vulgate perspective of this Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, 
essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt. Would that the infamous Assassins 
des Fauteuils Rollents were, as well.' Struck can almost see Poutrincourt putting a big 
red triple-underlined QUOI? under a transition this tortured and freewheeling. Struck 
pictures the Wild Conceits guy totally strafed as he goes, weaving over his foam-flecked 
desktop, almost. Tor the infamous Quebecker Separatist A.F.R. cell's claims to irreduce- 
ably active status include the following. The legless Quebecker Wheelchair Assassins, 
although legless and confined to wheelchairs, nevertheless contrive to have situated 
large reflective devices across odd-numbered United States highways for the purpose of 
disorienting and endangering northbound Americans, to have disrupted pipelines 
between processing points in the eastern Reconfiguration's annular fusion grid, have 
been linked to attempts at systemic damage of the federally contracted Empire Waste 
Displacement's launch and reception facilities on both sides of the Reconfigured 
intracontinental border, and, perhaps most infamously, derive their cell's own sobriquet 
in the vox populi — 

"Wheelchair Assassins" — from the active practice of assassinating prominent Cana¬ 
dian officials who support or even tolerate what they — the A.F.R.s, in infrequent public 
communiques — regard as both Quebec and Canada in toto's "Sudetenlandization" by 
the — as the A.F.R. characterize it — same American-dominated Organization of North 
American Nations which forced ecologically distorted and possibly mutagenic territory 
into their - the nation of Canada, and most specifically and intensively the province of 
Quebec — aegis in the newly subsidized Year of the Whopper...' — Struck, canted 
slightly in his desk-chair from the overdevelopment of his body's right side, is also trying 
to carve up each of this diarrheatic G. T. Day, M.S. guy's clauses into less-long self- 
contained sentences that sound more earnest and pubescent, like somebody earnestly 
struggling toward truth instead of flecking your forehead with spittle as he ranted 
grandiosely — '...the Wheelchair Assassins at these all too publicly familiar assassina- 



tions materializing, quote "as if from nowhere" unquote, masters of stealth, striking ter¬ 
ror into prominent, Canadian hearts, affording no warning excepting the ominous 
squeak of slow wheels, striking swiftly and without warning, assassinating prominent 
Canadians and then dissolving back into the dark night' — as opposed to a light night? 
Struck forces sudden air through his full nose, producing a low and horn-like derisive 
sound — 'striking always at night, a type of performative signature, to strike at night 
only, leaving behind only sinuous networks of thin, double tracks in snow, dew, leaves, 
or earth, as performative signatures, such that a double sinuous S shaped line across the 
traditional fleur-de-lis motif of Quebecois Separatism is the A.F.R. cell's standard, its 
escutcheon or "symbol," if you will, in their infrequent and always hostile communiques 
to the administrations of Canada and O.N.A.N. Such that, quote, "To hear the squeak," 
unquote, is now an understood euphemismic locution among officials highly placed in 
Quebecois, Canadian, and O.N.A.N.ite power structures for instant, terrifying, and 
violent death. And for the media, as well. As in, quote, "Before many thousands of 
shocked subscribers, newly elected Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe and an aide, 
guarded by no fewer than a dozen units of the Domestic Detail's elite mounted 
Cuirassiers, nevertheless heard the squeak last night during a spontaneously 
disseminated address at the lakeside resort of Pointe Clare." 4 

4 CBC/PATHE 1200h.-0000h. Summary Cartridge #911-24-04, 4 May Y.P.Wc., © Y.P. 
We., PATHE Nouvelle Toujours, Ltd. 

Struck, clutching his head with one hand, is trying to find euphemismic in the TP's Lex- 
Base. 

'...Affiliations, sometimes purported, between the Root Cult core of Les Assassins on 
one hand and the more extreme and violently subversive of Quebec's Separatisteur 
organizations — the Fronte de la Liberation de la Quebec, the Fils de Montcalm, the ultra 
right anti-Reconfigurative vishnu of the Bloc Quebecois — tend, however, to be 
contradicted by both stated agendas — the conventional Separatist phalances demand¬ 
ing only the independent secession of provincial Quebec and the elimination of Anglo- 
American cognates from public discourse, while the A.F.R.s' stated aims being nothing 
less total than the total return of all Reconfigured territories to American 
administration, the cessation of all E.W.D. airborne waste displacement and ATHSCME 
rotary air mass displacement activity within 175 kilometers of Canadian soil, the 
removal of all fission/ waste/fusion annulars north of the 42°-N. Parallel, and the 
secession of Canada in toto from the Organization of North American Nations — and by 
the fact that all too many prominent figures in the recent sociohistory of the Separatist 
movement — for e.g., Schnede, Charest, Remillard, both Sr. and Jr. Bouchards — have, 
in the last 24 months — particularly, in the violent and bloody autumn of the Year of the 
Trial-Size Dove Bar — "heard the squeak."' 

Struck's little TP's internal Lex files confirm vishnu, at least. Plus there's a kind of 
almost savage edge to the article's incoherence that Struck's getting almost to like, a 
little: he keeps imagining the little hyphen of wrinkle Poutrincourt gets between her 
eyebrows when she doesn't follow something and can't quite tell if it's your English's 
fault or her English's fault. 'Prior to Y.P.W.C.'s Freedom of Speculation Act, credible 



sociohistorical data on the origins and evolution of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents 
from obscure, adolescent, nihilistic Root Cult to one of the most feared cells in the 
annals of Canadian extremism was regrettably patchy and dependent on the hearsay of 
sources whose scholarly veracity was of an integrity somewhat less than 
unimpeachable.' Struck here pictures Thierry Poutrincourt, who tends to get that little 
annoyed-confusion wrinkle sometimes even with the lucidest of term papers, lowering 
her tall head and charging into a wall. One sinus feels noticeably bigger than the other 
sinus, and there's something not quite right with his neck from sitting hunched all this 
time, and he'd kill relatives for a quick DuBois. 

'Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents of Quebec are essentially cultists, locating both 
their political raison d'etre and their philosophical dasein within the North American 
sociohistorical interval of intensive special interest diffraction that preceded — nay, one 
might daresay stood in integral causal relation with respect to — the nearly simul¬ 
taneous inaugurations of O.N.A.N.ite governance, continental Interdependence, and the 
commercial subsidization of a lunar O.N.A.N. calendar. Like most Canadian cult exten¬ 
sions, however, the Wheelchair Assassins and their cultic derivations have proven sub¬ 
stantially more fanatical, less benign, less reasonable, and substantially more malignant 
— in sum, more difficult for responsible authorities to anticipate, control, interdict, or 
reason with than even the most passionate U.S. kabals. This scholarly essay concurs in 
many essential respects with the thesis that Canadian and other non American Root 
Cults, in contrast to all but what Phelps and Phelps argue are isolated pockets of 
antihistorical American stelliformism, persist so queerly in directing their reverent fealty 
toward principles, quote, "often not only isomorphic with but activally opposed to the 
cultists' own individual pleasure, comfort, cui bono, or entertainment as to be all but 
outside the ken of both the sophisticated predictive models of psychosocial science and 
the rudimentary comprehension of human reason." 5 ' 

5 in Phelps and Phelps, The Cults of the Unwavering I: A Field Guide to Cults of Currency 
Speculation, Melanin, Fitness, Bioflavinoids, Spectation, Assassination, Stasis, Property, 
Agoraphobia, Repute, Celebrity, Acrophobia, Performance, Am way. Fame, Infamy, 
Deformity, Scopophobia, Syntax, Consumer Technology, Scopophilia, Presleyism, 
Flunterism, Inner Children, Eros, Xenophobia, Surgical Enhancement, Motivational 
Rhetoric, Chronic Pain, Solipsism, Survivalism, Preterition, Anti-Abortionism, 
Kevorkianism, Allergy, Albinism, Sport, Chiliasm, and Telentertainment in pre- O.N.A.N. 
North America, © Y.P.W. 

This all takes serious labor for Struck to decoct the gist out of and then recast in rather 
less uptown and more basic studential prose. Twice in the hall outside his and Shaw's 
and Pemberton's room, Rader and Wagenknecht and some other 16's-sounding males 
go down the hall, all of them together going 'Er, ah, ee, oo, ah, er, ah, ee...,' and so on. 'It 
is an accepted fact that Les Assassins' Root Cult, in a fashion typical of those whose 
objects are divorced from the rational advancement of individual interest, takes, for its 
rites and personality, rituals intimately bound up with "Les jeux pour-memes" formal 
competitive games whose end is less any sort of "prize" than it is a manner of basic 



identity: i.e., that is, "game" as metaphysical environment and psychohistorical locus 
and geatalt.' Struck's own historical dad, during Jim's own childhood in Rancho Mirage, 
was an inveterate red-wine-with-heavy-tranqs-on-the-side drinker, who used to make 
late-night phone calls to people he didn't know very well and make statements he later 
had to retract at great length, until finally one autumn night the Dad had staggered out 
and attempted a one-and-a-half tuck into the Struck family's backyard pool that he 
hadn't recalled had been drained, resulting in a neck brace for life that ended his career 
as a low-80s golfer, resulting in incredible bitterness and family trauma, before little 
J.A.L.S. Jr. was shipped off to the Rolling Hills Academy. 

'It is, for example, largely conceded that Les Assassins' confinement to their epithetic 
wheelchairs can be traced to rural southwestern pre-Experialist Quebec's infamous "Le 
Jeu du Prochain Train,” and that the A.F.R.'s Root Cult itself was comprised largely or 
perhaps even entirely of veteran devotees and practitioners of this savage, nihilistic, and 
mettle testing jeu pour-meme. 

' "La Culte du Prochain Train," often translated as "The Cult of the Next Train," is 
known to have originated at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration among the male 
offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners in the desolate Papineau region of what 
was then extreme southwest Quebec. The chilling game's competition and its 
upspringing cult soon spread throughout the network of non-ionized and pre- 
Interdependent railroad lines which carried raw minerals south to Ottawa and the 
United States' Great Lake Ports.' Over Struck's little desk hangs a model airplane made 
entirely from different parts of beer cans. While Inc was keen on the whole lurid mirror- 
across-highway terrorism thing of early O.N.A.N., and Schacht's paper's focus was the 
violent French-Catholic protests against municipal fluoridation under Mulroney, Struck 
had picked the A.F.R.-and-Russian-Roulettish-train-jumping-cult-thing connection, and 
was sticking to it with the same tenacity that kept him on the 18's A-squad despite a 
serve that deLint described as resembling a debutante's curtsy. The plane's got flattened 
cans for wings, smunched-flat cans for wheels, part of a tallboy for fuselage and snout. 

'As with many games, Le Jeu du Prochain Train was itself substantially simpler than the 
organization of the competition.' A cool smile from Struck. 'It was played after sunset at 
specified sites, specifically les passages a niveau de vote ferree that marked every rural 
Quebecker road's intersection with a railroad track. In the Year of the Whopper, there 
were over two thousand (2,000) such intersections in the Papineau region alone, though 
not all saw heavy enough flow to accommodate the complexities of true competition. 

'Six boys, miners' sons, ages ten to roughly sixteen, Quebecois French speaking boys, 
line up on six railroad ties' juts just outside the track. Two hundred sixteen (216) boys — 
never either more nor less — are involved in a night's opening rounds, organized into 
sixes, each group of six taking its turn with a different train, standing on consecutive juts 
just outside one track, waiting, doubtless tense, awaiting the procession of a fearsome 
bride, indeed. The night's heavily travelled crossing's schedule of trains is known to 
Lejeu du Prochain Train's episcopate of les directeurs de jeu — older, post-adolescent 
boys, veterans of previous les jeux, many of them legless and in wheelchairs or — for 
the sons of asbestos miners, many orphaned and desperately poor — on crude rolling 



boards. 

No timepieces are permitted the players, who are under the absolute discretion of the 
game's directeurs, whose decisions are final and often brutally enforced. They all are 
silent, listening for the sound of the engine's whistle, a sound which is sad and cruel at 
the same time, as the sound approaches and begins to subtly undergo Doppler Effects. 
They tense palely muscled legs beneath hand me down corduroys as the next train's one 
white eye rounds the track's curve and bears down on the game's waiting boys.' 

Struck keeps bogging down in these parts where it seems like the guy just totally 
abandons a scholarly tone, and even probably starts making up or hallucinating details 
which there's no way Jim Struck could represent himself as having been there to see, 
and he's blue-delete-looping all over the place, plus grinding his eye and picking at his 
forehead, his two more or less constant responses to creative stress. 

'Le Jeu du Prochain Train itself is simplicity in motion. The object: Be the last of your 
round's six to jump from one side of the tracks to the other — that is, across the tracks 
— before the train passes. Your only real opponents are your six's other five. 

Never is the train itself regarded as an opponent. The speeding, screaming train is re¬ 
garded rather as le jeu's boundary, arena, and reason. Its size, its speed down the ex¬ 
tremely gradual north-to-south grade of what was then southwestern Quebec, and the 
precise mechanical specifications of each scheduled train — these are known to the 
directeurs , they comprise the constants in a game the variables of which are the 
respective wills of the six ranged along the track, and their estimates of one another's 
will to risk all to win.' 

Struck transposes clearly nonadolescent uptown material like this into: 'The variable of 
the game isn't so much a matter of the train, but the player's courage and will.' 

'The last few instants, vanishingly small, when the player may hurl himself athwart the 
expanse of track, across timber ties, creosote stench, gravel and scarred iron, amid the 
ear splitting scream of the whistle almost overhead, able to feel the huge push of 
terrible air from the transport's cow catcher or express train's rounded nose, to go 
sprawling in the gravel past the tracks' other side and roll to see wheels and flanges, 
couplings and driving rods, the furious back and forth of transverse axles, feeling the 
whistle's steam condense to drizzle all around — these few seconds are known, familiar 
as their own pulse, to the boys who assemble and play.' Struck's now progressed to 
grinding the whole heel of his hand into his eyesocket, producing a kind of ectoplasmic 
pinwheel of red in there. Did like even pre-bullet railroad engines have flanges and 
cowcatchers and whistles that steamed? 

In a disastrous lapse. Struck copies hurl himself athwart, a decidedly un-Struckish- 
sounding verb phrase, verbatim into his text. 

'...that the true variable which renders le Jeu du Prochain Train a contest and not 
merely a game involves the nerve and heart and willingness to risk all of any or all of the 
five waiting beside you at the track. How long can they wait? When will they choose? 
Their lives and limb worth how much Queen-headed coin this night? More radical by far 
than the American youth automobile game of "Chicken" to which its principle is fre¬ 
quently compared (five, not one, different wills to comparatively gauge, in addition to 



your own will's resolve, and no motion or action to distract you from the tension of 
waiting motionlessly to move, waiting as one by one the other five quail and save them¬ 
selves, leap to beat the train...,' and then the sentence just ends, without even a close to 
the parenthesis, though Struck, with a canny sense for this sort of thing, knows the anal¬ 
ogy to Chicken'll ring just the right bell, term-paper-wise. 

'Le Jeu's historic best, reportedly, however, ignore their five competitors completely, 
concentrating their entire attention on determining the last viable instant in which to 
leap, regarding the last, final, and only true opponent in the game to be their own will, 
mettle, and intuition about the last viable instant in which to leap. These nerveless few, 
le Jeu's finest — many of whom will go on to directeur future jeux (if not, often, to 
membership in Les Assassins or its stelliform offshoots) — these nerveless and self- 
contained virtuosi never see their opponents' flinches or tics or the darkenings at 
corduroys' crotches, none of the normal signs of will faltering which lesser players scan 
for — for the game's finest players frequently close their eyes entirely as they wait, 
trusting the railroad ties' vibration and the whistle's pitch, as well as intuition, and fate, 
and whatever numinous influences lie just beyond fate.' Struck at certain points 
imagines himself gathering this Wild Conceits guy's lapels together with one hand and 
savagely and repeatedly slapping him with the other — forehand, backhand, forehand. 

'The cult's game's principle is simple. The last of the six to jump before the train and 
land intact wins the round. The fifth through the second to leap have lost, but acquitted 
themselves. 

'The first in a round to quail and jump walks home from there, alone under the moon, 
disgraced and ashamed. 

'But even the first to quail and jump has jumped. Far beyond prohibited, not to jump 
at all is regarded as impossible. To "perdre son coeur" and not jump at all is outside le 
Jeu's limit. The possibility simply does not exist. It is unthinkable. Only once, in le Jeu du 
Prochain Train's extensive oral history, has a miner's son not jumped, lost his heart and 
frozen, remaining on his jut as the round's train passed. This player later drowned. "Per¬ 
dre son coeur" when it is mentioned at all, is known also as "Faire un Bernard Wayne," in 
dubious honor of this lone unjumping asbestos miner's son, about whom little beyond 
his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known, his name denoting a 
figure of ridicule and disgust among speakers of the Papineau Region vulgate.' 
Disastrously, Struck blithely transposes this stuff too, with not even a miniature 
appliance-size bulb flickering anywhere over his head. 

'The game's object is to jump last and land still fully limbed upon the opposite em¬ 
bankment. 

'Expresses are 30 k.p.h. faster than conventional transports, but a transport's cow 
catcher mangles. A boy struck head on by a moving train is shot as from a cannon, 
knocked out of his shoes, describes a towering, flailing arc, and is transported home in a 
burlap sack. A player caught beneath a wheel and run over is frequently spread out 
along a hundred red meters or more of reddened track, and is transported home in a 
number of ceremonial asbestos and nickel mining shovels provided by the Jeu's older 
and frequently dismembered directeurs. 



'As happens more often, purportedly, a boy who has dived more than half way across 
the tracks when he is struck and hit, loses one or more legs — either there on the spot, 
if lucky, or later, under surgical gas and orthopedic saws applied to what are customarily 
violently angled masses of unrecognizably contuded meat.' The paradox here for Struck 
as plagiarist, who needs something with sufficient detail to be able to basically just 
rehash, is that this thing here has almost too much detail, much of it purple; it doesn't 
even seem all that scholarly; it seems more like the Wild Conceits Bayside C.C. guy 
seemed to get more and more tipsy as the thing went on until he felt free to make a lot 
of it up, like e.g. the contuded-meat bits, etc. What's interesting to Hal Incandenza 
about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital 
plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take 
just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists 
aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating 
without a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them. 
About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism — whether 
it's dishonesty or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what — Hal hasn't developed 
much of any sort of take. 

'It is frightfully simple and straightforward. Sometimes the last of the six to jump is 
struck; then the second to last leaper becomes the last and victor, and advances, each 
winner literally "surviving" into the game's next round, a sort of sextupled semi final, six 
rounds of six Canadian boys each: the, quote, "Les Trente-Six” for the evening, the initial 
rounds' boys — those who have been neither the last nor the disgraceful first to leap — 
are permitted to stay at the le passage a niveau de vote ferree, assembled to become 
the semi finals' silent audience. The entire Le Jeu du Prochain Train is customarily 
conducted in silence.' In a disastrous and maybe unconsciously self-destructive set of 
lapses. Struck rehabilitates the prose but keeps a lot of the hallucinatory specific 
descriptive stuff in, unfootnoted, though there's obviously no way he could pretend to 
have been there. 

'The surviving losers from among the Les Trente-Six then swell the ranks of the silent 
gallery as the six nerveless winners — the finalists, this night's " attendants longtemps 
ses tours” — some bleeding or gray with shock, survivors already of two separate long 
delayed leaps and hairbreadth escapes, eyes blank or closed, mouths working in savored 
distaste, await the nightly 2359 Express, the ultra ionized "Le Train de la Foudre" from 
Mont Tremblant to Ottawa. They will jump athwart the tracks in front of its high speed 
nose at the final moment, each trying to be the last to leap and live. It is not rare for 
several of the le Jeu's finalists to be struck.' Struck tries to decide whether it'd be 
unrealistic or unself-consciously realistic to keep using his own name as a verb — would 
a man with anything to camouflage use his own name as a verb? 

'...that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train's survivors and organizational 
directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents is 
beyond sociohistorical dispute, though the precise ideological relation between the B.S. 
era's simultaneously chivalric and nihilistic Cult of the Train's savage tournaments and 
the present's limbless cell of anti-O.N.A.N. extremists remains the subject of the same 



scholarly debate that surrounds the evolution of northern Quebec's La Culte de Baiser 
Sans Fin into the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de Montcalm cell credited 
with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled, pie shell onto the 
rostrum of U.S. President Gentle's second Inaugural. 

'As with the La Culte du Prochain Train, the Cult of the Endless Kiss of the iron mining 
regions surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coalesced around a periodic, tournament 
style competition, this one comprised of 64 adolescent Canadian participants, of whom 
one half were female. 6 

6 Except in certain very esoteric variations on the game. 

Thus, the first round pitted 32 couples, each of which consisted of one male and one 
female Quebecker.' Struck is trying to phone Hal, but gets only his room's wearisome 
phone-machine-message; can you ever say pitted without some kind of against in there 
someplace later in the sentence? Struck envisions the Wild Conceit scholar utterly 
strafed by this time, the guy's eyes crossed and his head lolling and having to cover one 
eye with a hand just to see a single screen, and typing with his nose. But with the 
apparent self-destructive credulity that characterizes many plagiarists, no matter how 
gifted. Struck goes ahead and puts in the complementless pitted, imagining forehand 
and backhand slaps all the while. 'Of each pair, one half, designated by lot, filled his or 
her lungs to capacity with inhaled air, while the other exhaled maximally to empty his or 
hers. Their mouths were then fitted together and quickly sealed by an organizing cultist 
with occlusive tape, who then expertly employed the thumb and forefinger of both 
hands to seal the combatants' nostrils. Thus, the battle of the Endless Kiss had been 
joined. The entire lung contents of the designatedly inhaled player was then exhaled 
orally into the emptied lungs of his or her opponent, who in turn exhaled the inhalation 
back to its original owner, and so forth, back and forth, the same air being traded back 
and forth, with oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios becoming progressively more Spartan, 
until the organizer holding their nostrils closed officially declared one combatant or the 
other to be "evanoui" or, "swooned," either fallen to the ground or out on his or her 
feet. The theoretics of the contest lends itself to an appreciation of the patient, attritive, 
grinding down tactics of traditional Quebecois Separatisteurs such as Les Fils de 
Montcalm and the Fronte de la Liberation du Quebec, as opposed to the viciousness and 
brinksmanship of "Le Prochain Train'"s Root Cult's disabled heirs. The figurative object 
of the "Baiser" competition appears — according to Phelps and Phelps — to involve 
using what one is given with maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance 
before excreting it back whence it came, a stoic stance toward waste utilization that the 
Phelps somewhat cavalierly employ to illuminate the Montcalmistes' relative 
indifference to a continental Reconfiguration that constitutes Les Assassins des Fauteuils 
Rodents' whole "raison de la guerre outrance" ,b 

a . Pimple cream. 

b . 'Reason for all-out war,' which Struck inserts without bothering even to check for 
the definition Day'd been too befogged to give, which is in and of itself almost 
suicidal, given that Poutrincourt knows exactly how much French facility Struck's got, 
or rather hasn't. 



305 (she thought then) 

306 Some of her and Jim's best arguments had been over the connotations of 'Every¬ 
body's a critic,' which Jim had liked to repeat with all different shades and pitches of 
ironic double-edge. 

307 Joelle van Dyne and Orin Incandenza each remember themselves as the original 
approachee. It's unclear which if cither's memory is accurate, though it's noteworthy 
that this is one of only two total times Orin has perceived himself as the approachee, 
the other being the 'Swiss hand-model' on whose nude flank he's been furiously tracing 
infinity signs all during the Moment Subject's absence. 

= point of view. 

309 In the Chestnut Hills Shopping Center on Boylston/Rte. 9, which the E.T.A. A-squad 
staggers past several times a week, on runs — a chain, but a very top-shelf and fine one, 
and the Brookline Legal puts on a particularly fine marine spread, and the boniface 
seemed to know Dr. Incandenza and called him by name, and brought him a double 
bonded without being asked. 

310 Jargon: Film/Cartridge Studies. 

311 Trilateral North American immigration bureaucracy. 

312 Boston AA jargon. Y.E.T. is 'You're Eligible Too,' a denial-buster for those who 
compare others' ghastly consequences to their own so far, the point being to get you to 
see the street-guy with socks for gloves drinking Listerine at 0700h. as just slightly 
farther down the same road you're on, when you Come In. Or something close to that. 

313 The bureaucracy of Quebecois pensions, which had ruled against buying anything 
more than a used Kenbeck pacemaker for Marathe's father, now deceased. 

314 See Note 304 supra. 

315 Marathe's malentendu of live-in 

316 Like e.g. the times C.T. and the Moms would come out to Logan to pick Mario and 
Himself up from a filming trip, Mario lugging gear. Himself damp and pasty from the 
cabin pressure and not enough leg-room and his sportcoat pockets always clicking with 
little plastic bottles with unopenable caps, and in the car up to Enfield Mario's uncle 
would keep up an Opheliac mad monologue of chatter that would get Himself's poor 
teeth grinding so bad that when they pulled over to the breakdown lane and Mario 
came around to open the door and let Himself lean out and be ill there'd be grit in the 
throw-up that came out, white dental visible grit, from all the grinding. 

317 © B.S. 1981, Routledge & Kegan Paul Pic, London UK, wildly expensive hardcover; not 
on disk. 

318 Maine having been lost altogether, recall. 

319 Incandenza family idiom for leftovers. 

520 Main library, M.I.T., East Cambridge. 

32i Q.v. for a confirming example 1930h. Thurs., 12 November Y.D.A.U., Rm. 204 Sub¬ 
dorm B: 

'No, look, it's still Rise Over Run. The derivative's the slope of the tangent at some 
point along the function. It doesn't matter what point until they give you the point on 
the test.' 



'Will this even be on the Boards? Do they go past trig?' 

'This is fucking trig. They'll give you word problems that may involve changing 
quantities — something accelerating, a voltage, inflation of O.N.A.N. currency over U.S. 
currency. Differentiation'll save you half the time, all those triangles inside triangles to 
figure change with trig. Trig's a Unit-bender on rate-changes. Derivatives're just trig with 
some imagination. You imagine the points moving inexorably toward each other until 
for all practical purposes they're the same point. The slope of a defined line becomes 
the slope of a tangent to one point.' 

'One point that's in fact actually two points?' 

'You use your goddamn imagination, Inc, plus a couple prescribed limits. Which they 
won't fuck with you on limits on the general test, trust me. This is a big pink titty com¬ 
pared to an Eschaton calculation. You move the two points you're doing Rise-over-Run 
on infitesimally close together, you end up with a plug-in formula.' 

'Can I tell you about my dream now and then we'll use the momentum from that to 
plow through this?' 

'Just write this on your wrist or something. Function x, exponent n, the derivative's 
going to be nx + x n l for any kind of first-order rate-of-increase thing they're going to ask 
you. This assumes a definable limit, of course, which no way they're going to fuck with 
you on limits on the fucking Boards.' 

'It was a DMZ-dream.' 

'Do you see how you're going to apply this to a rate-of-increase-type little story they'll 
pose?' 

'It involved your experimental soldier, the massive dose.' 

'Let me just close this door, here.' 

'It was the Leavenworth convict. The one you said had left the planet. The one belting 
out Ethel Merman. It was horrific, Mikey. In the dream I was the soldier.' 

'So you're now going to assume a real you-know-what experience will be similar to the 
experience of a nightmare.' 

'Aha. Why nightmare? Why do you assume it was a nightmare? Did I use the word 
nightmare?' 

'You used the word horrific. I assume it wasn't a romp through the heather.' 

'In the dream the horror was that I wasn't really singing "There's No Business Like 
Show Business." I was really screaming for help. I was screaming like "Help! I'm scream¬ 
ing for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers! It's me! It's 
me, screaming for help!"' 

'A Rusk-level dream, Inc. A standard nobody-understands-me dream. The DMZ and 
Mermanization were incidental.' 

'There was a quality of loneliness to it, though. Unlike anything. To be screaming that 
I'm screaming for help instead of singing a show-tune and to have the wardens and doc¬ 
tors gathered around snapping their fingers and tapping their feet.' 

'Have I mentioned DMZ doesn't show up on a G.C./M.S.? Struck tracked this down off 
an obscure Digestive-Flora footnote. It's the fitviavi-mold base. If the stuff shows up at 
all it shows as a slight case of unbalanced yeast.' 



'I thought only girls got yeast.' 

'Inc, don't be so fucking naive. Data number two is Struck is halfway toward nailing 
down that this stuff's original intent was to induce what they called quote transcendent 
experiences in get this chronic alcoholics in the like 1960s at Verdun Protestant Hospital 
in Montreal.' 

'How come everywhere I turn this fall now everybody's suddenly mentioning Quebec 
in all kinds of radically different contexts? Orin's calling with some protracted obsession 
about anti-O.N.A.N. Quebecers.' 

'...Tavis up and announces Quebec are the lambs in this year's fundraiser. Your Mum's 
from Quebec.' 

'And then this term of all terms I take Poutrincourt's insurgency class, which is ba¬ 
sically a Quebecathon.' . 

'Oh I definitely I'd suspect some kind of conspiracy or trap. It's obvious everything's 
pointing toward getting you in a cell belting out Mermanalia. Inc, I think your hinges are 
starting to squeak. I think this is what plateaux-hopping up to the top does to 
somebody. I think a meaningful transcendent DMZ-type non-uremic-fallout interlude 
before Tucson is just what the carpenter ordered, for the old hinges. Keep you from 
going back to just smoking that Bob Hope day in day out when the test's up. Shit'll kill 
your lungs. Shit'll make you fat, soft, moist and pale, Inc. Seen it happen. You need 
something more than a 30-day cleanout. The tu-sais-que could be just the 
reconfiguration you need to start branching out, leave the Bob Hope alone, find 
something you can take to college or the Show and not get paralyzed. Shit'll paralyze 
you over time, Incblob. Saw it happen time and over, back in the neighborhood. Once- 
promising stand-up guys spending their lives in front of the TP, eating Nutter Butters 
and whacking off into an old sock. The shit-fairy moves in with luggage for an extended 
stay, Inc. Plus indecisive? You haven't seen indecisive til you've seen a guy with little fat- 
titties slumped in a chair in his tenth year of nonstop Bob Hope. It's not pretty. Incster 
my friend it's not pretty at all. A transcendent experience with me and the Axhandle 
could be just what the hinges are squeaking for. Be around some other people for a 
change. Don't make me sit there with just Axhandle babbling about Yale. Leave the 
Visine at home.' 

'Was it transcendent? The term in Struck's literature? Or was it transcendental?' 

''s the difference for Christ's sake?' 

'Mike, what if I said I've been moving toward more than just a month off.' 

'Abandon All Hope. 3 This what I was talking.' 

'I mean maybe make a decision. Forever. What if it was that I was doing it more and 
more and it was getting less fun but I was still doing it more and more, and the only way 
to moderate would be to like wave a hankie at it altogether.' 

'I applaud. Some low-risk transcendentalism with me and the Human Hatchet could be 
just the impotence for this kind of like major re—' 

'But it'd be everything. Blue Flames, the odd 'drine. If I do anything I know I'd go back 
to the Bob. I'd drop Madame Psychosis with you guys and all my firmest resolve would 
melt and I'd have the one-hitter out and be sniveling at you to spring some eternal Hope 



on me.' 

'You're so naive, Inc. You're so sharp in one way and such a little bald little fat-legged 
baby in the woods in others. You think you're just going to go Here I go, deciding, and 
reverse total thrust and quit everything?' 

'What I said was what if.' 

'Hal, you are my friend, and I've been friends to you in ways you don't even have a 
clue. So brace yourself for a growth-spurt. You want to quit because you're starting to 
see you need it, and —' 

'That's exactly it. Peems, think how horrible that'd be, if somebody needed it. Not just 
liked it a great great great deal. Needing it becomes a whole separate order of... It 
seems horrific. It seems like the difference between really loving something and being 

_i 

'Say the word, Inc.' 

'Because you know why? What if it's true? The word. What if you are? So the answer's 
just walk away? If you're addicted you need it, Hallie, and if you need it what do you 
imagine happens if you just hoist the white flag and try to go on without it, without 
anything?' 

'You lose your mind, Inc. You die inside. What happens if you try and go without 
something the machine needs? Food, moisture, sleep, 0 2 ? What happens to the 
machine? Think about it.' 

'You were just now applauding the idea of Abandoning All Hope. You were just 
invoking an image of me with breasts, masturbating into laundry, with cobwebs 
between my ass and a chair.' 

'That's the Bob. I didn't hear me say everything. If you need the Bob, Inc, you can only 
quit the Bob if you move onward and up to something else.' 

'Harder drugs. Just like those old filmstrips about pot opening the door to larger drugs, 
where Jiminy Cricket —' 

'Oh fuck you. It doesn't have to be harder. It just has to be something. I know guys quit 
heroin, coke. How? They make the strategic move to a case a day of Coors. Or to 
methadone, whatever. I know hard-drinking guys Inc that got off the booze by switching 
to the Bob Hope. Me myself, you've seen, I switch all the time. The trick is the right 
switch for a man's wiring. I'm saying a real cobweb-blaster with me and Axford after the 
Fundraiser could help you get some serious perspective, cut the babytalk and sweeping 
bullshit decisions there's no way you can do and start getting a real handle on how 
you're going to branch out away from this Bob thing, which I applaud the getting away 
from the Bob for you, Inc, it's not your thing, you were starting to get that look of a guy 
that'll end up with tits.' 

'So you're in a very subtle way lobbying for a DMZ-drop by saying you don't believe I 
could simply quit everything. Since you sure don't plan to quit. With your left eye wob¬ 
bling all over the place. You haven't even quit the Tenuate. "Winners don't ever have to 
quit" and all deLint's little —' 

'I didn't hear me say none of that. And I think you probably could quit it all. For a 
while. You're not a pussy. You've got balls, I know. I bet you could gut it out.' 



'For a while, you're saying.' 

'And but what do you think would happen after a while, though? Without something 
you need? 

'What, you're saying I'd grab my chest and keel over? Clutch my head in the middle of 
a Tap & Whack and die of an aneurism like that girl last year at Atwood?' 

'No. But you'd die inside. Maybe outside too. But what I've seen, if you're the real 
thing and need it and just cut yourself off of it altogether, you die inside. You lose your 
mind. I've seen it happen. Cold Turkey they call it, the Bird. White-knuckling. Guys that'd 
just quit everything because they were in too deep and quit it all and just died.' 

'A Clipperton, you mean? You're saying Himself killed himself because he got sober? 
Because he didn't get sober. There was a thing of Wild Turkey right there on the counter 
by the oven he blew his fucking head up with. So don't try to kertwang me with him, 
Mike.' 

'Inc, what I know about your Da could be inscribed with a blunt crayon along the rim 
of a shot glass. I'm talking guys I know. Wolf Spiders. Allston guys, that quit. Some did a 
Clipperton, yes. Some ended up in the Mental Marriott. Some got through by they 
joined NA or a cult or some bug-eyed church and went around with ties talking about 
Jesus or Surrendering, but that shit's not going to work for you because you're too sharp 
to ever buy the God-Squad shit. Most nothing big happened, that needed it and quit. 
They got up and went to work and came home and ate and went to sleep and got up, 
day after day. But dead. Like machines; you could almost see the keys in their backs. You 
looked into their maps and something was gone. The walking dead. They loved it so 
much they needed it and gave it up and now they were waiting to die. Something was 
all over, inside.' 

'Their joie de vivre. The fire in the belly.' 

'Hal, it's been what, now, for you, two-and-a-half days without? three days? How you 
feeling in there already, brother?' 

'I'm all right.' 

'Uh-huh. Incpuddle, all I know's I'm your friend. I am. You don't want to communate 
with the Madame, you can hold me and Ax's purses for us. You do what you want and 
point me toward whoever tells you different. I'm just giving you the advice to look a 
little further past that second of deciding something I know you won't let yourself take 
back.' 

'Some vital part of my like personhood would die without something to ingest. This is 
your view.' 

'Sometimes you don't listen real well, Hallie. That's all right. Spend some time figuring 
out this needing. Like what part of you's come to need it, do you think.' 

'You're alleging that's the part that'll die.' 

'Just whatever part you feel has come to need what you're planning to take away from 
it.' 

'The part that's dependent or incomplete, you mean. The addict.' 

'That's just a word.' 

a . q.v. Note 334 sub. 



322 Johnette F., whose very first stepmother had been a Chelsea MA police officer, was 
conditioned in early childhood to refer to police as 'police' or 'the Law,' since most 
B.P.D. personnel find the street term the Finest sardonic. 

323 People outside the Boston AA community always use The and say The Ennet House; 
this is one way to always tell somebody new or from outside the community. 

324 17 NOVEMBER - YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT Sometimes at 
odd little times of day the E.T.A. males' locker room downstairs in Comm.-Ad. is empty, 
and you can go in there and sort of moon around and listen to the showers drip and the 
drains gurgle. You can feel the odd stunned quality customarily crowded places have at 
empty times. You can take your time dressing, flex in front of the big plate mirror over 
the sink; the mirror has projecting side-mirrors so you can check out the old biceps from 
either side, see the jawline in profile, practice expressions, try to look all natural and 
uncomposed so you can try to see what you really might normally look like to other 
people. The air in the locker room hangs heavy with the smells of underarms, 
deodorant, benzoin, camphonated powder, serious feet, old steam. Also Lemon Pledge 
and a slight smell of electrical burn from overused blow-dryers. Traces of powder and 
fuller's earth 3 on the blue carpeting, down in too deep to get out without a steamer. You 
can take a comb out of the big jar of Barbicide on the shelf by the sink, and like a .38- 
caliber blow-dryer, and experiment boldly. It's the best mirror in the Academy, 
intricately lit from all perspectives. Dr. J. 0. Incandenza knew his adolescents. At slack 
times, sometimes head custodian Dave ('F.D.V.') Harde can be found in here, taking a 
tiny nap on one of the benches that run in front of the lockers, which he claims the 
benches do something palliative for his spinal funiculi. More often there's one of Dave's 
incredibly old and interchangeable menial-task janitors in here running a carpet 
sweeper or spraying industrial disinfectant in the urinals. You can go into the shower 
area and not turn the water on and sing, really let go. Michael Pemulis's own vocals 
sound pro-quality good to him, but only when he's surrounded by shower-tile. 
Sometimes when it's empty in here you can catch snatches of voices and intriguing 
feminine-hygienic noises from the females' locker room on the other side of the lockers' 
wall. 

At most other times of day, your certain type of more delicately constituted E.T.A. jr. 
uses the primitive subdorm hall showers and sinks and avoids the packed locker room at 
almost all costs. No way Western man ever should have conceived of commodes and 
hot showers in the same crowded air-space. T. Schacht can clear out most of a steamy 
locker room just by lumbering into a commode-stall and driving the latch home with a 
certain purposeful force. 

The prorectors have their own showers in a kind of lounge near their rooms in the 
secondary tunnel, with a Viewer and recliners and a little fridgelet and a dicky-proof 
door. 

When M. M. Pemulis came down to dress for P.M.S at about 1420h., b the only people 
in the locker room were 14-A lobber nonpareil Todd Possalthwaite, hunched and weep¬ 
ing, and Keith Freer, whom Pemulis was to play and who looked in no hurry to get 
dressed and out there to play, and could very possibly have been the thing that was 



making Postal Weight weep. The so-called 'Viking' was shirtless and had a towel around 
his neck and was at the mirror ministering to his skin. He had high hard white-blond hair 
and an extremely muscular neck and lower jaw, with a certain type of protrusive 
gonions that made his upper face look tapered and sly. His hair always reminded Hal 
Incandenza of frozen surf, Hal said. Todd Possalthwaite was near-nude and hunched on 
the bench under his locker, his face in his hands, with its nose's white bandages visible 
through spread fingers, weeping softly, shoulders trembling. 

Pemulis, who's Postal Weight's Big Buddy and sort of lob-and-Eschaton-mentor and 
genuinely likes the kid, dropped his gear and gave him a sort of male-affectionate fake 
one-two punch like Think Fast. ''s the nose, Todder?' Like all of them, Pemulis could do 
his locker's combination by feel, from months and years of constant combination-doing. 
He was looking all around himself and the room. Freer made a slight noise when Pemulis 
asked the Postman if there was anything he could do. 

Nothing's true,' Postal Weight sobbed, his voice palm-muffled, rocking slightly on the 
bench. His locker was open and little-boy cluttered. He was wearing only an an unbut¬ 
toned little flannel shirt and a Johnson & Johnson jr. jock strap, and had tiny white feet c 
and delicate little shell-like toes. He was supposed to be in Donni Stott's Valley-Map 
laugher right now, Pemulis knew. 

'What, metaphysical angst at thirteen?' Pemulis directs the question to the quote- 
Viking's reflection's eye in the mirror. Freer's back is tapered and uncolloped and for a 
tennis player's back has superb latissimal definition but is mottled slightly from repeated 
applications and defoliations of Pledge, Freer being a profligate Pledge-user because he 
is complexion-obsessed and has the sort of Nordicular skin that peels instead of tanning. 
He still has his jeans and loafers on, Pemulis sees. Pemulis keeps waiting for the 
distinctive attitudinal upswing of two pre-match Tenuate spansules. d Pemulis's locker is 
both full and very precisely ordered, practically alphabetized, like the trunk of an 
experienced seaman. Disassemblable scale and armamentarium and mood-altering 
substances used to be concealed in several factory-concealed niches in the special 
system of niche-riddled portable shelving Pemulis had installed at age 15. Plus small 
cloth packets of ground cayenne pepper, to foil the always-remotely-possible sniffer- 
dog, when he was a callow youth. This was before the discovery of the ultimate 
entrepot above the false ceiling in Subdorm B's male hallway. 

'Just a disappointed dinkle.' Freer's chuckle tends to be mirthless. 'What I could get 
out of him before the waterworks. Postal Weight's old man promised him so-and-so if 
the kid accomplishes thus-and-such.' His speech was distorted because he was 
ballooning his cheek with his tongue and applying flesh-tinted cream to a possible 
pimple there. 'And the Postmaster here feels like he's held up his side of the 
accomplishment, and now I get the drift Daddy's backing out.' 

Possalthwaite's shoulders continued to tremble as he cried into his hands. 

'In other words welching you're saying the Dad is,' Pemulis said to Freer. 

'I gather now the Dad's trying to restructure the original deal all of a sudden.' 

Pemulis undid his belt. 'The dangled carrot's snatched away, the brass ring plays hard 
to get, to coin a maxim.' 



'Something about Disney World, before the wa-wa started.' 

Pemulis removed his nonplay sneakers by scraping downward at one heel with the 
other sneaker's toe, looking down into the tender little whorl in the center of Possalth- 
waite's hair. He'd never be so ephebic as to verbally ask Freer if he had plans to suit up 
so they could get out there; he'd never let Freer think he was renting Freer space in his 
head before the match started. 'Postman, is this because of the Eschaton incident? Is it 
because of the nose? Because I can get on the horn and tell old Postal Weight Sr. they're 
blaming nobody under 17, it turns out, you should tell him, Todder. There's whole land- 
barges of shit, but none of it's spraying in you guys's direction, you should take comfort.' 

'Nothing's true,” Possalthwaite keened, not looking up, muffled, ilat-nippled, fatless in 
the young gut, feet spectral below his legs' brown, rocking, shaking his head, looking 
terribly young and innocently vulnerable, sort of pre-moral. Little white strips of 
bandage protuded from his palms' outer edges, from I.-Day's apocalypse. 

'Well, not much is fair, anyway,' Pemulis conceded. The Viking made a noise at him¬ 
self. 

Pemulis calls Postal Weight's father up on-screen. Minneapolis-area developer. Malls, 
corporate parks, bustling places at the edges of roaring beltways. Late forties, slim, an 
overmanaged tan, a little oversharp in the dress dept., with a motivational-seminar-type 
hard-sell charm. A dagger of a Dad, with a pencil mustache and blinding shoe-leather. 
He tried to conjure an image of this paternal figure hitting Keith Freer on the noggin 
with a rolling pin and a bald cartoon lump rising from Freer's skull. (Pemulis calculates a 
win or even three-setter w/ Freer would mean a place on the WhataBurger plane, is 
why he's willing to violate a kind of personal honor-code and take pre-match Tenuate, 
which even with the 36-hour-elimination curve is kind of cavalier, given that he and 
Inc'd escaped on-spot urinalysis only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that 
he'd tell the Incster about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John 
Wayne, and Avril is kind of a coldly-biding-her-time-not-to-be-fucked-with 
administrative figure, and along with C. ['Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Cow'] Tavis isn't 
exactly a fan of Pemulis anyway, certainly since the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and- 
litigation incident. The 'drines didn't seem to be kicking in. Instead of the surge of 
stomachless competitive verve, all Pemulis felt was a slight unpleasant spaciness and a 
kind of enforced-fee ling dryness in his eyes and mouth, like he's facing into a warm 
wind.) Pemulis had never once seen his own Da in anything other than a white Hanes T- 
shirt gone permanent yellow under the arms. 

'Nothing's fair because nothing's true,' Possalthwaite wept into his palms. His little 
flannel shoulders shook. 

Something old in one of the shower drains sighed and gurgled, a nauseous sound. 

'Buck up.' Pemulis was removing all necessary match-articles and refolding them and 
placing them in his noncomplimentary Dunlop gear-bag with military precision. He put a 
foot on the bench and looked briefly to either side. 'Because if that's your burr then rest 
in my assurance, Postalcode: certain things are rock-solid, high-grade true.' 

Freer had made a pincer of his fingers and was at the other cheek. 'Let him cry. Let 
baby have his dinkle. Piss and moan. Thirteen for Christ's sake. A kid thirteen hasn't 



even been in the same room with real disappointment yet. Hasn't even locked eyes 
across a room with real disillusion and and frustration and pain. Thirteen: pain's a 
rumor. What's the word. Angst. Baby wouldn't know genuine-article angst if it walked 
up and got him in a headlock.' 

'Not like real true real possible-little-cheek-pimple angst, Vike, hey?' 

'Flip it over and squat, Pemulis,' without bothering to look. Both Pemulis and Freer 
had pronounced a hard g in angst, Hal would have observed. The Viking contorted his 
mouth and raised his big chin to check the flesh of his jaw, turning slightly to use the 
side-mirrors as well. 

Pemulis smiled broadly, trying to envision Keith Freer sitting in a canvas restraint-wrap 
in full lotus, staring blankly, hitting all the high notes in 'No Business Like Show Business' 
as orderlies in boiled whites and prim nurses in bent hats stand around snapping their 
fingers, clean white cheap institutional-care sneakers tapping noiselessly through all 
eternity. He was down to chinos and bare light-brown feet. He considered a blue T-shirt 
with a black wolf-spider on it v. a coincidentally red-on-gray T-shirt that had 'Vodka is 
the Enemy of Production' in presumably Russian. His good four Dunlop sticks were 
stacked on the bench to Possalthwaite's left. He picked up two and tested the strings' 
tension by hitting the side of one stick's head against the the strung face of the other 
and listening to the strings and then switching sticks and repeating the process. The 
exact right tension has a certain pitch. Midsized Dunlop Enqvist TL Composites. $304.95 
U.S. retail. Real catgut strings have a kind of a dentalish sweet stink. The dot-and- 
circumflex logo. He didn't much look at Possalthwaite. He chose the Cyrillic shirt with 
the bottle-glyph. He rolled it up and put his head through the head-hole first, his late 
great Da's old-fashioned way. The upscaler kids here all did the arm-holes first. Then 
they did the head. You can also tell the scholarship kids because for some reason they 
put on a sock and a shoe and then a sock and a shoe. See for instance Wayne, who'd 
been in their room right after lunch when Pemulis had made the decision to come up for 
some pre-match Tenuate. Wayne's room was right nearby and he was standing there 
over Troeltsch's pharmacopic bedside table with no shirt and wet hair, rheumy-eyed 
and shiny-nostriled from moisturizer on his Kleenex-chafed nostrils. The Viking was 
squeezing a damp tennis ball with his left hand while he scanned his forehead by mostly 
feel. Pemulis's psychic counter-strategy was not to appear in any hurry to dress and 
stretch and get out there either. Pemulis — who feared and hated unauthorized people 
being in his room, and who was constantly on Schacht's back about forgetting to lock up 
when he left, and who wasn't intimidated by Wayne's talent and success and affectless 
reserve, but was cautious around him, John Wayne, sort of the way a formidable 
predator will be unintimidated but cautious around another formidable predator, 
particularly since the virtuosic but tense performance in a certain administrative office a 
week ago, which had been mentioned by neither man — had coolly asked Wayne if he 
could help him, and Wayne had just as coolly not looked up from rattling through sickly 
Jim Troeltsch's bedside table's stuff and said he'd come in for some of Troeltsch's 
Seldane 6 , which Pemulis had indeed heard Troeltsch at breakfast describing to a nose¬ 
blowing Wayne as the battlefield-nuke of anti-histamines that didn't make you too 



drowsy to function at an incredibly high level of function. Pemulis adjusted his jock's 
rear straps, trying to remember this Wayne-memory's point. Wayne had wanted a clear 
head and high pulmonary function because he was down to play the Syrian Satelliter in 
an informal exhibition at I5l5h. Wayne hadn't offered this explanation; Pemulis got it off 
the e-board. One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about Wayne's 
unauthorized presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident 
it wasn't impossible Wayne might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis's hand in the Olde- 
English-fonted leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TPs' communal e- 
board for 11/14 announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic 
presentation to the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56 way 
more than 3.294 times. The point was that the half-dressed Wayne had been standing 
there with one foot bare and one in a sock and shoe. Pemulis shook his head slightly and 
looked down at Possalthwaite and tried to gather spit. 

The speaker out up by the clock in the cement hall by the sauna crackled to life for the 
start of weekly WETA, with its glass-shattering Joan Sutherland theme. Pemulis put his 
street-sneakers on his street-shoe shelf. 'Buck up, T.P. It's just an angst-spasm. You're 
just reeling from a temporary paternal kertwang. Philosophical truth's jutting out all 
over the place. Disney World or no. Nose or no. Eschaton lives on, believe me. 
Underground or no. You have a calling, a talent. A missileman of your caliber. Reach 
down and rally, me little button.' 

Possalthwaite had taken his face from his hands and was staring stonily up 
somewhere past Pemulis, lips moving in the habitual sucking reflex for which he took so 
much guff. His face had the pink scrubbed look of a crying child all right. His hands had 
left brown spiders of tincture of benzoin on his cheeks. He had two little smudges of 
bruise under the eyes. He sniffed meatily through a nose still covered in horizontal strips 
of surgical tape. 'I ab dot a little button.' 

'That's what all the little buttons say, kid,' the Viking said levelly, removing something 
from a nostril with tweezers. Pemulis's sinuses felt like four-laners and his sense of smell 
was a lot keener than a man in a locker room might wish. Freer's locker next to 
Gloeckner's next to good old Inc's was agape, the bolted colposcope gleaming in the 
overhead lights and his Fox large-head sticks a nauseous West-Coast fluorescent orange 
with the trademark fox-glyph painted on the strings. 

Possalthwaite scratched at one foot with the nails of the other foot. 'If you can't trust 
your folks...' 

'Let me both validate and remind you that the kertwang you're reeling under is 
emotion-based and not fact-based.' 

Possalthwaite opened his mouth. 

'You're getting ready to say if you can't trust the ostensively loving patriarchal bosom 
you can't trust anyone at all, and if you can't trust people what can you trust, in terms of 
unvarying dependability. Postal Weight, am I right?' 

'Oh Jesus H. Christmastree here it comes,' the Viking said to his forehead's reflection. 

Pemulis was putting on a sock and a shoe, his mouth right down by Postal Weight's 
ear. 'This is not a bullshit problem. This is a like serious emotiono-philosophical deal 



you're confronting. I think it's a good sign you're coming to me instead of holding it all 
impactedly inside.' 

'Who's coming to you?' Freer turned the big face this way and that. 'He was already in 
here having his little wa-wa-dinkle.' 

Pemulis tried envisioning Keith Freer being bent over the net by Bedouins in purple 
turbans and roundly buggered, making the sort of sounds Leith's historical b/w J. 
Gleason made when in pain. To Possalthwaite he was saying 'Cause I can remember 
staring down the exact same-type thing, though from a more like philosophicalized 
kertwangthan emotions.' 

Freer said 'Do not ask him what he means, kid.' 

Then a couple of 16s came in, G. ('Yardguard') Rader and a marginal Slavic kid whose 
first name was Zoltan and whose last name nobody could pronounce, and ignored 
Freer's advice to run for their lives because the good Dr. Pemulis had been prescribing 
for himself again and was going to begin to rant, and threw down their gear and 
proceeded immediately to get fresh towels from the dispenser over by the showers and 
to snap them at each other. 

'What do you mean?' said Possalthwaite. 

'The snare closes, the trap closes, here it comes.' 

Rader rolled his wrists and spiraled the towel for what he called maximum painage. 
The Viking turned and said if he felt so much as a terrycloth breeze on this personal ass 
right here they were toast, the two. Pemulis was taking racquets out. E.T.A.'s male 16s 
were as a group inbent, conspiratorial, glandular, cliqueish. They excluded anyone not in 
their set. They had techniques and strategems of exclusion way more advanced than the 
18s or 14s. (They tended to exclude Stice, mostly because he roomed with Coyle and 
drilled a lot of the time up with the 18s, and mixed with them, and more recently 
Kornspan, excluded, basically because he was cretinous and cruel and now consensually 
suspected of having tortured and killed the two collarless cats whose burnt corpses had 
been found on the hillside during pre-drill sprints a couple weeks back.) They had their 
own dialect and codes, in-jokes inside in-jokes. f And at E.T.A. only 16s snapped towels, 
and only for a year or two, but they went at it with a vengeance, towel-snapping, a brief 
flared genuflection to jock-stereotype, a stage where there's this primate-like passion 
for red-assed bonding in steamy rooms. They were the age staring down the barrel not 
of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made 
them strange. 

Then 18's-B/C fence-sitter Duncan van Slack, the kid who carried a guitar around with 
himself everyplace but never played it, and refused all late-night-sitting-around- 
someone's-room requests to play, and who was suspected of not being able to play the 
thing at all, and whose own Da was supposedly a redoubted gene-sequencer in 
Savannah, poked his head and guitar's neck in the door and said to come quick and then 
withdrew his head before anybody could ask what was up. 

'If you didn't have such a way with a launch-vector I wouldn't be sure you're ready to 
hear this, Postalscale.' 

'It occurs to me this is your boring man's true talent: the talent for ensnaring,' says the 



Viking. 'Flee while you can, kid.' 

Possalthwaite blew his nose in the crook of his elbow and left it there. 

Pemulis, who still used genuine catgut strings, zipped the two sticks he'd chosen into 
their Dunlop covers. He put an arch-support shoe up on the bench by Postalweight's 
bottom, looking quickly right and left: 

'Todder, you can trust math.' 

Freer said 'You heard it here first.' 

Pemulis compulsively zipped and unzipped one of the covers. 'Take a breather, Keith. 
Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you. Quan¬ 
tities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When 
all else fails. When the boulder's slid all the way back to the bottom. When the headless 
are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and regroup 
around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality. 
The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity. Heaven's theme song. The 
nightlight on life's dark wall, late at night. Heaven's recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. 
The methane, ammonia, H 2 0. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. 
Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it's true.' 

'This from a man on academic probation for who knows the length.' 

Something involving Freer and a saline-moistened cattle-prod refused to quite men¬ 
tally gel. There was still none of Tenuate's stomachless verve or well-being, just a 
glittered hum in his head and sinuses that felt like wind-tunnels. Pemulis tended to be a 
mouth-breather. The Viking raised one leg to fart toward Pemulis in a vaudevillian way, 
getting a laugh from Csikszentmihalyi and Rader, who'd mostly undressed and taken 
seats on the bench opposite Pemulis and Postal Weight, towels hung unwinding in their 
hands, watching, and were only every once in a while and in a halfhearted way 
pretending to look like they were getting ready to snap each other. 

'I'm not a math person. Dad says,' said Postal Weight. Again the nose made the words 
come out dot and bath and persod. Csikszentmihalyi feinted a lunge and then really 
lunged and there was brief flurry of terrycloth. 

Pemulis unzipped the cover. 'The axiom. The lemma. Listen: "If two different sets of 
parametric equations represent the same curve J, but the curve is traced in opposite 
directions in the two cases, then the two sets of equations produce values for a line 
integral over J that are negatives of each other." Not "// thus-and-such." Not "unless a 
gladhand-ing commercial realtor from Boardman MN in $400 Banfi loafers changes his 
mind." Always and ever. As in puts the o in o priori. An honest lamp in the inkiest black, 
Toddleposter.' 

There were voices and running feet like some sort of ruckus. McKenna stuck his head 
in and looked wildly around and withdrew without saying anything. Csikszentmihalyi 
went out after him. Freer and Rader both said What the fuck. Pemulis had only one 
button of his fly buttoned and was pointing at the ceiling with a finger: 

'...Only that at times like this, when you're directionless in a dark wood, trust to the 
abstract deductive. When driven to your knees, kneel and revere the double S. Leap like 
a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hubert, L'Hopital. You will be lifted up. 



Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace, Rickey. Borne up. Never let fall. Wiener, Reimann, Frege, 
Green.' 

Csikszentmihalyi came back in with Ortho Stice, their color high. 

Pemulis compulsively zips and unzips zippers, is the reason why he wears only button- 
fly pants and tennis shorts. 

Cs/yi said 'There is expression. You must immediately come.' 

Freer turned from the mirror, both hands on a comb. 'What the fuck's going on?' 

'John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears.' 

'Never trust the father you can see,' Pemulis told Possalthwaite. 

Stice was already on his way back out and said over his shoulder, 'Troeltsch's got 
Wayne on the air and Wayne's lost his mind.' 

a . Like dry loamy clay, highly absorbent, used by some for traction on their grips, 
eschewed by others because it has a lot of aluminum silicates and the Y.T.M.P.'s 
'aluminum-causes-impotence' panic still weighs hard on some pubescent players' 
minds. 

b . A good many seniors' schedules have no last-period classes, or have Independent- 
Study stuff slated for last period, and when two of these seniors — e.g. Pemulis <£ 
Freer — are scheduled for a P.M. challenge-match, they get to start at 1430h. instead 
of 1515h., and usually then finish up early, which is a great perk, given that they'll get 
to hit both the weight room and the locker room at slack and empty times. 

c . An advantage of competitive mediocrity is you get to sit in the stands and get lots 
of sun on your feet and chest, because you're knocked out of competition by like the 
second round. Hence grotesquely pale feet are sort of a perverse mark of competitive 
status, maybe like toothlessness in hockey or something. 

d . Specially engineered to react very fast with the hydrolytic enzyme esterase and 
thus to be completely out of the tissues within 36 hrs. 

e . Q.v. Note 22 supra. 

f . For example, during the first month of last summer's Euroclay junket, at some 
prearranged signal the male 16s would all hunch and hop around brachiatishly with 
their knuckles just off the ground in a circle, hitting their chests and going 'Er ah ee 
oo ah, 1 over and over, until prorector N. Hartigan finally lost his patience as they did 
it again in the line for Customs at L'Aeroport Orly and had hysterics so gruesome in 
someone that tall that the practice stopped as mysteriously as it'd started. 

325 (whose theories of detection and interview are strongly informed by the b/w noir 
films Tine so enjoyed as a boy late at night on local broadcast television, and misses) 

526 (and then some) 

327 Bolex H64, -32 and -16 models come with a turret that accepts three C-mount lenses, 
which gives the models a kind of multi-eyed, alien-facial look. 

328 (though never unveiled) 

329 (which is actually complete horseshit, but goes unchallenged by the O.U.S. opera¬ 
tives, who are pretty savvy at choosing their heuristic battles) 

330 (given the guy's track record with ingestion) 

331 Picaresque pretty obviously referring to the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area 



avant-gardeists like Peterson & Broughton, since Peterson's Potted Psalm's mother-and- 
Death stuff and The Cage's cranial-imprisonment and disconnected-eyeball stuff are 
pretty obvious touchstones in a lot of Himself's more parodic-slapstick productions. 

332 17 NOV. Y.D.A.U. 

'Gracious me and mine,' Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he'd crossed to 
keep the foot from joggling. 

'Rusk and Charles and Mrs. Incandenza are with him now. Schtitt's been up to see him. 
Loach has done a thorough reflex-check. John Wayne's going to be OK.' 

'Well thank heavens for that load off everyone's mind,' Pemulis said. 

It was Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson in the Dean of Academic Affairs' Office. 
Mrs. Inc's ventilator hissed and something up in there whirred a little. DeLint was behind 
the high desk, looking like a mean little boy. Nobody'd said if anybody higher up than 
deLint was going to show. Pemulis didn't know if this was good or bad. 

'Let's make perfectly sure we got this in order and in your words.' Nwangi and Watson 
were window-dressing. This was A. deLint's show. His face kind of came apart when he 
smiled. 'With no prior knowledge of anything untoward, you're pulled from the locker 
room and stand out in the hall with several other students, which is your first knowledge 
anything's untoward with Wayne.' 

Pemulis figured none of the administrators had heard the thing; they always shut their 
soundproof doors at 1435h.; Pemulis had no idea what Wayne's said about anything, or 
Jim Troeltsch, who very prudently hasn't shown facial-feature one in their room since 
the apocalyptic broadcast. It'd taken Pemulis about half the salivaless sprint up to B-204 
to figure out what had happened and to find his pilfered Tenuates in the little pecker's 
Sel-dane bottle. Pemulis sort of shuddered to imagine the impact of the 'drine on 
Wayne's cherry-red and virgin bloodstream. The slight whir of his cortex working at full 
speed was masked by the hiss of the ventilator and the sound of whistles and play and 
Schtitt's megaphone outside. 

'I'm in there suiting up waiting for Freer and doing a little B.B.-intervention on Pos- 
salthwaite who was in crisis and Zoltan and The Darkness come like spasming in saying 
Troeltsch'd jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast.' 

'They said what, that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into speaking candidly without 
awareness it's going out over WETA into all the rooms?' 

Pemulis realized the limpness of this, in like that anybody'd see that Wayne'd have to 
have been sitting right there with Troeltsch by the little old-time gunmetal handheld 
mike at Lateral Alice Moore's curved desk. He'd already heard from Lateral Alice that it 
was more like Wayne had come rattling in and shoved Troeltsch aside and grabbed the 
mike and started ranting while Troeltsch and Lateral Alice Moore had looked on 
aghastly; and that Dave Harde, down doing some maintainance to L.A.M.'s deactivated 
third rail, had been so aghasted he'd pitched forward narcoleptically and stayed like that 
with his face in the blue carpet and ass in the air for nearly an hour, and that Lateral 
Alice's own stress had brought on an aggravation of her chronic cyanosis to the point 
where her whole face was still blue-tinged and between her knees when Pemulis had 
got to her. 



'This was more like a general sort of impression which I feel like I might have 
misbegotten from the agitation of the guys. Plus how completely un-Wayneish Wayne 
sounded, like how could anybody ever have said that shit if they thought it wasn't just 
them and Troeltsch alone, much less Wayne, who as we all know is pretty much reserve 
in motion.' 

DeLint's nostrils got that pale flare they got, Pemulis knew, when he smelled horseshit 
and knew you knew it. Pemulis knows deLint's been laying for him ever since the 
incident with the P.W.T.A. guy who started to wobble and then rant down at P.W.T.A., 
which was a totally different type of deal. The irony was that the Wayne-dosing had 
been a total accident and in no way Pemulis's deal, if anybody's Troeltsch's, but the 
cortex couldn't nail down any way to get this across without admitting to possession of 
a 'drine, which given the shaky pharmaceutical ground since the Eschaton and 
O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist would be tantamount to Clippertonizing himself. Nwangi showed 
almost blinding 3rd-World teeth but was saying nothing. Watson's eyes had almost this 
nictitater of stupidity-film on them, less a dullness than a deadness, the dead porch light 
of nobody home at chez Tex Watson. Pemulis saw the leaflet about Wayne and Mrs. I. 
and deviant division in the papers deLint held. 

'Which is in your words your first knowledge of untowardness with Wayne.' 

'My first is I get out there still trying to counsel the Postheimer and here on the 
speaker's Wayne doing what Keith observed may have been a sort of imitation of Dr. 
Tavis.' 

It had been uncanny. It had made Stice look like a rank amateur. Wayne had told 
Troeltsch to pretend he was some adolescent girl: this was adolescent Tavis asking her 
for a date; Pemulis shuddered; he couldn't exactly remember all the little mannerisms, 
which Wayne'd clearly gotten locked down from Tavis always sitting next to him on the 
bus back from victories going at him nonstop, but in outline it was Chuckie Tavis coming 
up to some Canadian cheerleader or something and telling her he was going to be 
completely open with her: he had a terrible fear of rejection; he was telling her up-front 
now that tomorrow he was going to ask her out for a date and was begging her not 
openly to reject him if she didn't want to go, to think up some plausible excuse — 
though of course he said he realized that what he was saying would make that excuse 
hard to believe, now that he's openly asked her to make up an excuse. 

'Whereupon the whole Academy hears Mr. Troeltsch prompt Wayne into making 
public castigations of his various peers and instructors.' 

'I've got to say it did seem like Troeltsch had kind of orchestrated things somehow, sir, 
was my impression.' 

'Referring to Corbett Thorp as a —' pretending to riffle through the papers so 
Pemulis'd have to see the 17-into-56 leaflet several times as it came up in the riffle. 

'I believe the expression was "a palsied twit," ' Nwangi said to deLint. 

'Yes "palsied twit." And Francis Unwin quote "has the on-court look of a cornered 
rodent." And Disney R. Leith: the quote "sort of man you always end up sitting next to at 
civic functions." Ms. Richardson-Levy-o'Byrne-Chawaf as chair of some sort of commit¬ 
tee dealing with the topic of the quote "Itty Bitty Titty." On Coach Schtitt, quote. 



seeming as if he'd been "denied some kind of vitally important moisture from birth 
henceforward." Our own Mr. Nwangi here being in rough quote if I've got it quote "the 
sort of fellow who'll be in a Chinese restaurant with you and won't even share food or 
trade food."' 

'Meaning mean-spirited.' Nwangi threw his head back and beamed like he was blind. 
What was chilling was that in Wayne's scenario Tavis does succeed, Wayne projects, in 
seducing the Canadian cheerleader or whatever, even when he's totally open on the 
date about the fact that he'd deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection in the first 
place only as a strategy to make him seem to her different from other boys, more 
honest and open, so that the scenario was that the honesty was so exhausting she'd 
basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him up. Except — 
chillingly — he hadn't shut up. 

'— including some sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis carrying on a monologue during the 
act of sexual intercourse,' deLint said, trying to find it in the sheaf. 'On Bernadette 
Longley: "Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way 
around." On Mary Esther Thode: "a face like a pancake." On the Academy's own late 
Founder and husband of the Dean of Ac.-Aff.: "so full of himself he could have shit 
limbs." Unquote. On his own doubles partner Hal Incandenza: "by all appearances 
addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the 
mouth."' 

'I'm remembering the word as insertable.' Pemulis kicked himself, mentally. The 
pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen seconds as Wayne had sketched M. E. 
Thode's face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered, doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on. 
Plus somehow even more chilling was that Pemulis knew from Inc that Wayne's pseudo- 
Tavis 'l-live-in-fear-of-rejection' ploy was actually in the top five or ten of the troubling 
'Strategies' that Inc's brother Orin the punter called up to Hal about employing to X 
young married women. 

'Donni Stott has we're informed "skin like an attache case and is a compelling adver¬ 
tisement for sunscreen." I myself am, here I quote, quote "a man who would not lend 
his own mother a quarter for a rubber tip for her crutch."' 

'Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the 
WhataBurger trip?' 

Nwangi crumpled and slapped his knee. His face literally looked like a very dark 
hatchet. Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was slumped in his chair by 
and brought out Pemulis's special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a 
dog to jump for. From someplace under Nwangi's chair were brought out two 
pharmaceutical scales, several jeweller's loupes, the tow truck's supply of empty sterile 
Visine bottles, and plus every bottle from Troeltsch's bedside table, which clearly 
Troeltsch had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese. 

Pemulis tasted the metallic taste of a seriously anxious stomach. 'I request to see the 
Dean of Ac.-Aff. before any of this goes further.' 

'We have again Ms. Heath, apparently on someone's mind very much today, now said 
to be the sort of person who quote "cries at card tricks." We have a Rik Dunkel who 



"could not find his own bottom with both hands and a nautical compass of exacting 
precision." We have a return engagement with Ms. Heath, described as "dwelling always 
at the edge of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria." We have our own beloved 
Tex, sitting right here, described as having "a tiny liquid-filled nubbin at the top of the 
spine" in lieu of higher cortex function.' 

'Aubs, no kidding: something pressing I have to interface about with Mrs. Inc. Tell her 
it concerns U.S.-Canadian relations.' 

Nwangi's laugh was high and had the slight teakettle-wheeze to it of the laughs of 
large black men the world over. 'She sends you her regards , the Dean said to tell you.' 
He slapped his knee three times. 

DeLint looked a little less happy because he clearly didn't know what any of it was 
about and didn't like playing coded messenger, but he still looked pretty happy: 
'Michael Mathew Pemulis, the Academy's Dean of Academic Affairs said to tell you the 
administration's too naturally concerned about the state of one of our two very finest 
current talents, who it's clear he's been unwittily dosed with an artificial stimulant 
prohibited by federal statute, O.N.A.N.T.A. regulations, and the Enfield Tennis Academy 
Honor-Code Specs on Artificial Substances, to permit itself the satisfaction of giving you 
the Dean's very best regards and her wish that quote "may the road rise up to meet you 
whitherever your future travels lie." ' DeLint probed his ear. 'I think that was it in a 
nutshell.' 

Pemulis got very cool and brass-mask-faced. He was breathing very clearly through his 
nose, and the office air seemed mentholated. Everything got very cool and formal inside 
and glycerine-clear. 'Aubs, before anything gets nailed in stone that we'll all I promise 
you and Mrs. Inc we'll all of us regret —' 

DeLint said 'I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or 
you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a bandanna 
to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they'll take a senior without any kind of 
positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any 
kind of reference.' 

Tex Watson said something about urine. 

Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi: 

'I believe the kid is speechless.' 

'I believe he has nothing to say.' 

'I don't believe it.' 

'And something about you're invited to shout whatever you threatened the 
administration to shout about from the highest hill you can find, which pretty soon 
won't be this one.' 

Nwangi got out through laughter: 'And that the administrative office doorknobs have 
been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, 
everyone's room's mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell 
you.' 

The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions 
as a kind of violet incubus with the Da's saggy frown. Pemulis scratched very coolly next 



to his ear. 'And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?' 

DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face 
and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee, and Pemulis, close-mouthed 
and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious. 

333 Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most 
lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all up and down both 
Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket. 

334 Hal's Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started 
as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become the way Hal characterizes 
abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn't a very promising way to 
think about it at all, in terms of self-pity. 

335 Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex- 
addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships. 


336 


337 


(according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain) 


Latin blunder for self-defense's se defendendo is sic , either a befogged muddling of a 
professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle 
jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet — namely V.i. 
9. 

338 Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with 
ambition — ®Syntex Labs. 


339 


International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. 


340 Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic — ®Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals. 

341 Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C-lll narcotic oral analgesic 
— ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. 

342 Or possibly Babel. 

343 Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working 
any kind of Recovery Program. 

344 E.T.S.V Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza's 
signed up to take in English and (Parisian) French. 

a. Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ. 

345 The College of Basic Studies Bldg, on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks 
east-southeast of E.T.A. 

346 Montreal International Airport-D'Orval, Cartierville Airport being now restricted to 
intra-Quebec flights only. 

347 (Which in fact she doesn't, but she had had perfume on the last time she wore the 
hulpil.) 


348 


349 


350 


An R. Catholic church just off Brighton Center. 
Sic. 


Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.'s own armlessness and hook, 
maybe. 

351 As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: 'My Life Is 
Unmanageable and I'd Like to Share It With You.' 

352 Reference to January-February Y.D.A.U., when person or persons unknown went 



around coating selected toothbrushes of the Boys and Girls 16's with what was finally 
pinpointed as betel-nut extract, causing panic and internecine finger-pointing and 
resulting in serial oxidation-treatment visits to Dr. E. Zegarelli, D.D.S., by half a dozen 
E.T.A.s until the brush-tamperings ceased as suddenly as they'd begun; and now nine 
months later no one still has the slightest idea re perpetrator or point. 

353 Which runs not to Enfield-Brighton but to Roxbury and Mattapan, places where it is 
very bad nighttime joss indeed to be both white and incapacitated. 

354 Q.v. note a to Note 12. 

355 Anexsia — ®SmithKline Beecham Laboratories. 

356 Levo-Dromoran— ®Roche Laboratories. 

357 Numorphan, kind of a watered-down Dilaudid — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. 

358 Perwin NX — ® Boswell Medications Ltd., Canada — which accounts for the C-lll, 
because the Canadians are notoriously insane when it comes to forecasting abuse- 
potential. 

359 A.k.a. Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride — ®Roche, Inc. — a low-grade Valiumish 
tranq. 

360 A C-lll and sort of entry-level oral narcotic, the side-effects and inconsistent buzz of 
which often send abusers up the ladder to C-ll compounds. 

361 A.k.a. hyoscyamine sulfate — ®Schwarz Pharma Kremers Urban, Inc. — an anti- 
spasmodic for anything from colitis to Irritable Bowel Syndrome. 

362 A.k.a. methaqualone, now manufactured outside O.N.A.N. jurisdiction under the 
trade name Parestol. 

363 Later one-third of the rent-and-strip-luxury-apts. crew, and even later Gately's 
trusted colleague on some of his most disastrous and bottom-hastening home- 
invasions, including that of one G. DuPlessis, which Kite ended up regretting 
exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R. got through with him. 

364 MDA, MDMA ('X 1 ), MM DA-2 ('Love Boat 1 ), MMDA- 3 a ('Eve'), DMMDA-2 ('Starry 
Night'), etc. 

365 Long-Term Institution. 

366 Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic 
influenza — though it's unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any 
connection to S. Peterson's low-budget classic The Cage , which is mostly about a peri¬ 
patetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J. 0. Incandenza loved this film 
and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe 
the 'disjunction' or 'disconnection' between the screen's film and Ph.D.'s scholastic 
discussion of art is part of the point. 3 

a . (Which of course assumes there's a point.) 

367 Though they did, just as in depictions of organized crime in popular entertainment, 
often change the cell-phones they used, to avoid potential taps or Pen Registers — 
Sorkin buying new units and #s, Gately more often borrowing student R.N.s' cellulars 
and then returning them after a few days. One of Gately's biggest challenges in this 
career was remembering all the different fucking phone numbers and addresses of 
luxury-apts.-of-the-week when he was strafed on Bam-Bams just about all the time. 



368 Cimetidine — ®SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals — 800-mg. spansules for gen¬ 
eralized cranio-vascular woe (derived, kind of interestingly, from the same ergot rye- 
mold as LSD). 

369 For the two maps Sorkin had to have eliminated altogether during this period, it's 
maybe worth observing that he eschewed both Towers and instead used the thuggish 
ex-Quebecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgrave, who had no real loyalties or 
membership in any community and hired themselves out as enforcers for books and 
high-interest lenders all up and down both Shores. Gately did, as a coercive collector, 
demap one person, but it was essentially an accident — the debtor had been blond, and 
drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he'd squirted Gately in the face 
with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately's sight, and when he'd 
come back to himself the debtor's head was turned 180° around on his neck and had the 
little Mace can all the way up one nostril, and it was the most professionally horrified 
Gately had ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which 
anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone. 

370 Purified pork insulin in a zinc suspension — ®Lilly Pharmaceuticals. 

371 An elite private high school up near the Methuen salient. 

372 Surely skeet and vig , meaning debt and bookmaker's automatic percentage (usually 
10% subtracted from winnings or added to skeet) are not just metro Boston terms. 

373 A.k.a. Acetylcysteine-20 — ®Bristol Laboratories — a nebulizable prophylaxis against 
the post-traumatic buildup of abnormal, viscid, or inspissated mucus. 

374 With the hard-ch sound distinctive of North Shore pronun. of words like Chicago and 
champagne. 

375 Known less sensitively among neurourology residents as 'Dizzy Dick Disorder' or 
sometimes just '3-D.' 

376 Knoll Laboratories' good old Dilaudid — $666.00/g. wholesale and $5/mg. street at 
Y.W.-Q.M.D. valuations. 

377 A 'Phillips Screwdriver,' vodka and Milk of Magnesia, which Gately finds nauseous 
and privately refers to as a 'lowball.' 

378 (As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.) 

379 See Note 144 supra. 

380 The 1.3:l-aspect-ratio rectangle scanned by electron beams in video imaging, now 
replaced by multi-interlace 3 solid-field HD digital imaging. 

a . Why Noreen Lace-Forche's seminal corporation's name was a kind of wry pun: 
2:1 interlace was pre-HD television's term for breaking the picture frame into 
two 262.5-line fields for standard 525-line raster-scanning. A very in-type joke 
designed to appeal to the same Big Four that Noreen L.-F. was then wooing. 

381 More like B.S. 1926, according to the Still Photo Archive at NNY City's Museum of 
Modern Art. Plus n.b. the print — which Hal correctly remembers Avril always loathing 3 
— long pre-dated J.O.I.'s ever picking up a camera. 

a . Hence the relative queerness of its still being up on the HmH living room wall 
four years after Incandenza's felo de se — it's not like anybody asked her to keep 
the thing up. 



382 


Whether in singles against him or doubles alongside, when Hal is on-court with 
Wayne he always gets the creepy feeling that Wayne has control out there not just of 
his voluntary CNS but also of his heartrate and blood pressure, the diameter of his 
pupils, etc., which feeling is not only creepy but distracting, adding to the tension of 
playing with Wayne. 

383 Winter Park FL facility for enmeshment-, codependency-, and compulsivity-related 
Issues. 

384 A.k.a. Lorazepam — ®Wyeth-Aherst Labs — a venerable anti-anxiety tranq, of which 
25 mg./day is enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale. 

385 Probably meaning Doryx, Parke-Davis's doxycycline hyclate, the Cruise missile of 
gram-negative antibiotics. 

386 Nalaxone hydrochloride, the Exocet missile of narcotic antagonists — ®DuPont 
Pharm. — 2 ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes. 

387 Metro Boston's third-hardest thing to street-cop after raw Vietnamese opium and 
the incredibly potent DMZ, Sunshine is pentazocine hydrochloride and mefenamic acid 3 
— ®Sanofi Winthrop, Canada, Inc. — w/ trade-name Talwin-PX — Day-Glo-yellow 
serum, 7ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes. 

a . A non-narc analgesic marketed in the U.S. as Ponstel — ®Parke-Davis — mostly 
(oddly enough) for dysmenorrhea, sort of like nuclear-grade Mydol. 

3SS Talwin-NX - ®Sanofi Winthrop U.S.